Artificial wombs could bring sci-fi nightmares to life.

Is “EctoLife” a Peek at a Dystopian Future?

Have you seen the viral film “EctoLife” that showcases a CGI tour of a baby-growing facility? While it’s not yet a reality, scientists have been making progress on the technology of growing designer babies outside a mother’s womb. However, the vision of “EctoLife” is a tangle of concepts foreseen in famous dystopian science fiction stories like Brave New World and “Gattaca,” made to seem like a positive revolution in care and convenience.

The Playbook of Reckless Amoral Revolutionaries

The video’s creator, Hashem Al-Ghaili, is a self-described “science communicator” with a background in microbiology. Al-Ghaili created multiple positive videos on the topic of artificial wombs and designer babies before releasing “EctoLife,” which differs from his other videos in that its realism and detail position it between vision and hoax. The video could be used to attract potential investors to the horrific project.

Consider “EctoLife” a peek at the playbook of reckless amoral revolutionaries. Synthetic wombs and genetic engineering will soon become serious matters of public policy. Use it to prepare.

The Dangers of Designer Babies

The pitch begins by promising to solve an issue everyone agrees is a problem. EctoLife, a sleek facility with rows and rows of artificial womb pods gestating “lab-grown” babies, is a way to make premature births and C-sections “a thing of the past” and “a perfect solution for women who’ve had their uteruses removed due to cancer or other complications.” Everyone wants to solve that, right? And it is powered completely by renewable energy!

Then suddenly, the narrative jumps from ectogenesis facilities solving personal medical issues to being national assets. “EctoLife is designed to help countries that are suffering from severe population decline, including Japan, Bulgaria, South Korea, and many others,” the narrator states. Each facility could grow up to 30,000 babies per year, the voiceover says.

Finally, the voiceover reveals the crown jewel of the EctoLife experience: designer babies. All EctoLife embryos are carefully selected to avoid genetic abnormalities (and the unselected destroyed, of course), but with the “Elite Package,” commissioners of the new human will be offered “the opportunity to genetically engineer the embryo.”

Eliminating predispositions for disease through gene editing might be ethically permissible, but it is not hard to see how a rise in designer children will open a whole new era of classism and discrimination.

The Inevitability of Genetic Manipulation

We have entered an era where genetic manipulation is no longer a science fiction novelty. It is a reality of the present. Gene editing is here to stay, and it is only going to get more sophisticated. This is the most powerful argument for such innovations, of course: their inevitability. We will work out the kinks as we go, say the tech visionaries coasting into the future on the sheer momentum of overcoming previous ethical concerns (such as in vitro fertilization).

The Hardest Part of Having Children

By now, many people have woken up to the crisis of population decline. But the solution is not to make having babies “faster, easier, cheaper” and name synthetic wombs as the solution. The hardest part of having children is not usually the first nine months of gestation, or even getting pregnant. It is everything that comes after that because parenting is hard.

Artificial wombs will not help you find a spouse or raise your kids. In fact, their existence might even cause couples to push off kids further into the future—when they can afford to use the technology.

Like many technologies, artificial wombs can be used ethically or unethically. Saving premature babies is unequivocally a moral good, but using the technology to gestate thousands of potentially parentless designer babies should be reserved for the premise of another science fiction story, not our future.

• Artificial wombs and genetic engineering will soon become serious matters of public policy.
• Eliminating predispositions for disease through gene editing might be ethically permissible, but it is not hard to see how a rise in designer children will open a whole new era of classism and discrimination.
• The hardest part of having children is not usually the first nine months of gestation, or even getting pregnant. It is everything that comes after that because parenting is hard.

Let’s be cautious and thoughtful about the future of genetic manipulation and artificial wombs.