The original note, as written at the time
EXTRA WOMBS OUTSIDE THE BODY. What if we could create extra wombs for women outside their bodies in a bid to free them from the burden of being reproductive vessels? This way a woman can go ahead to pursue her other endeavours while her womb does the reproductive functions at home.
Ongoing development
Extra wombs outside the body, so that a woman is freed from being a reproductive vessel and can pursue her other endeavours while gestation continues.
I wrote about the leased version of this elsewhere and the emphasis there was different. This one is about liberation, and the liberation case is the one that must be answered first, because it is strong.
Pregnancy costs women careers, health, and years. It is the single largest involuntary interruption in professional life, and it falls on one sex. A technology that removes the interruption without removing the child is not a gadget; it is the largest change in the terms of that bargain since reliable contraception.
But the liberation is only real if the alternative is a choice. A technology that lets a woman continue working becomes, in a competitive labour market, a technology that requires her to. The same device that frees her from biology can free her employer from accommodating it — and the second effect arrives quietly, a decade later, in a hiring decision.
So the design condition is not technical. It is that the external womb must be available to everyone, funded socially, and never a condition of employment.
There is also the question the technology cannot answer: what gestation outside a body does to the child. That is unknown, it is not a small unknown, and anyone proposing this owes the first generation an honest account of the risk they are carrying.
Free the woman. Do not make the machine the new expectation.