Like a Virgin by Prasad, Aarathi (recommended reading txt) 📕

even fathers. In fact, being able to watch, in plain sight, the fragile, doll-like foetus as it develops and grows may encourage a new and special bond. Over the past thirty years, sonograms and other scans have become a regular part of prenatal care, and this ability to view the foetus, as an independent being, is thought to contribute to a maternal–foetal relationship forming much earlier in development – weeks earlier than a mother is usually able to feel kicks and other movements. If it is also the case that bonding is proportionate to the degree to which a child is wanted, parents who have put themselves through any of the gruelling aspects of assisted reproduction – including the artificial womb of the future – may see their great desire to bring their child into the world translate into a great bond with their child, no matter the womb it developed in.

Not all babies are wanted, of course, which means that an artificial womb or a transplant into a ‘willing womb’ raises other thorny issues. Such as, if a baby could be made viable from day one using some newfangled contraption, where would that leave the abortion debate?

When a woman has an abortion, she is exercising her right to remove an unwanted pregnancy from her body, and quite a number of women exercise this right every year. In 2009, there were 189,100 abortions in England and Wales; in 2005, 820,151 were reported in the US. Around forty percent of terminated pregnancies are aborted for medical reasons related to the developing foetus, including the risk of potentially serious disabilities, for example, of damage to the nervous system or Down syndrome. (An estimated ninety-two percent of all women who receive a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome choose to terminate the pregnancy.) The remaining sixty percent of abortions are chosen for reasons related to the mother – her own physical or emotional health or her relationship to the father, among many other factors. It should be stated that a woman’s right to an abortion does not give her the right to kill a child; rather, the aim is to end a pregnancy. This is why, under the law, we consider the foetus to be a collection of cells, not a baby, until some demarcated point when the cells could live on their own outside the womb.

Before birth, the rights of babies – that is, foetuses – are not protected; under current UK, Canadian, and US law, foetuses have no rights at all. In a handful of cases, however, American mothers have been charged with child abuse for behaving in ways that allegedly harmed the foetus they were carrying. If an artificial womb were created in which a healthy foetus scheduled for abortion could survive to term, the issue of whether it should be nurtured there would become a matter for politicians and public policy to decide. Ninety-one percent of the abortions performed in the UK in 2009 were conducted when the foetuses were at thirteen or fewer weeks gestation – too early for today’s incubators. If they could conceivably be kept alive, would medical staff have an obligation to resuscitate them and place them in an artificial womb? Would it be better for society if these pregnancies were not aborted, if the embryos survived to become people with inalienable human rights?

Already, the relatively antiquated incubators in modern hospitals have proved to be an ethical minefield when conflicts arise between the desires of premature babies’ parents and the obligations of medical staff. One such battle began on 21 October 2003, when a baby who had only been in the womb for twenty-six weeks was born in Portsmouth, England. Tiny Charlotte Wyatt was only 12.7 centimetres (five inches) long at birth and weighed 458 grams (sixteen ounces), instead of the average 3.5 to four kilos (approximately 7.5 pounds) for a full-term baby. Charlotte was fragile; her organs – especially her lungs, heart, and brain – were extremely underdeveloped. She nearly died after delivery. After being resuscitated, Charlotte suffered severe brain damage and several of her organs failed; she was left blind and deaf, her kidneys were compromised, and her lungs were so severely injured that she required a constant supply of oxygen. The extreme immaturity of her body also meant that her immune system was unprepared for the world outside the womb, and any small infection could be lethal. There was little hope of her living beyond childhood.

Charlotte’s team of doctors contended that, however long she lived, she would not only need continual medical attention, but would also likely be in constant pain and experience a life of extremely poor quality. Medical opinion was weighted in favour of no longer resuscitating the child when she next suffered cardiopulmonary failure – as she had on three occasions – and instead allowing her to die with some measure of comfort. The medical staff argued that with every resuscitation they performed, Charlotte’s lungs became increasingly delicate, and aggressive treatment was not in the child’s best interests. Prolonging her life, in fact, appeared to constitute an assault of ‘inhumane and degrading treatment’ under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, as the potential long-lasting harms to the person would ultimately exceed the benefits. The doctors argued in favour of palliative care alone.

Charlotte’s parents disagreed. As committed Christians, the Wyatts believed that their daughter’s life should be preserved at all costs. So when doctors refused to resuscitate Charlotte for a fourth time, her case was brought to court. The doctors won the legal right to let her die, should her body shut down again. Yet, Charlotte did not die, as expected, and the ‘do not resuscitate’ order was eventually lifted, in 2005, when her parents showed that Charlotte was no longer in constant pain or unable to respond