How painful and dangerous is it for a woman to have a baby? After having children, how can men protect themselves? There's a lot of learning in this! In fact, after having children, men will also face many challenges. A lot of men with kids probably know – if you're involved all the time, instead of patting your ass and leaving.
In addition to enduring the inconvenience of a few months of bowel movements, you also have to endure many of the discomforts caused by the pregnancy process. What physical changes will you experience during this time? How do these changes affect pregnancy? And how to deal with it? Anxiety and complications occur during pregnancy, including nausea, anemia, back pain, edema, constipation, and even bleeding, and in severe cases, placental abruption, preeclampsia, chronic hypertension, diabetes, uterine infection, severe fetal injury, maternal cancer, or fetal growth restriction.
October is the time of difficult childbirth, and even in developed countries, between 50 and 80 percent of women are injured during childbirth, including muscle tears, lifelong incontinence, tracheal perforation, and pelvic fractures. For women, the delivery process is not only subject to great physical stress, but also to psychological torture, and due to the large amount and duration of vaginal bleeding, women also have to face risk factors for puerperal infection and increased risk of postpartum bleeding. The pain at this time is something that many men have not experienced in their lifetime, the medical classification of pain is 10, the pain during childbirth is the most serious, after the baby is born, you will get new life, and after you, the world is no longer you, let alone you. Worldwide, about 300 000 women die in childbirth each year, or about 2 deaths per 1,000 pregnant women.
Even if you're the 99.8 percent lucky person, you're at risk for a variety of postpartum complications, including but not limited to heart disease, kidney failure and aneurysms, or depression, psychosis, and in the worst cases, even the most horrific behaviors, such as suicide or infanticide.
All of this, all of this, comes down to one thing, because you have a womb in heaven that is responsible for bearing offspring. In modern society, our bodies are already surrounded by a variety of diseases: dysmenorrhea, menstrual irregularities, infertility, and so on. In the face of such a situation, many people will choose to give up, or even fend for themselves. And the way for women to get rid of these troubles and pains is very simple, that is, to outsource the function of the uterus!
Modern medicine may be about to do just that.
What many people may not notice is that some countries in Asia are working on gene editing technology to create a new breed of elephant. The birth of this new species may be a boon to mankind. But is this idea really feasible? The answer is yes! Just last week, George Church, a geneticist at Harvard University and MIT, and a startup announced that his team had received $115 million in investment to use gene-editing technology to edit Asian mammoths for mammoths and get a perfect mammoth within a decade.
How to edit this gene is not my focus today. I'm going to tell a gene-editing story. The protagonist of the story is a fierce ecctor, whose name is Church, and it is also called "the machine of gene editing". What exactly do genes do? My point is that how mammoths are conceived is not how you imagine the edited embryos being placed in the wombs of Asian or African elephants and then surrogateed by elephants, Church's team says they will create an artificial uterus for mammoths lined with stem cells, where the mammoth embryos will develop and eventually grow into a healthy little mammoth.
Do you remember anything? By the way, isn't it science fiction that gave birth to the avatar device in the movie Avatar, or the artificial womb in the baby factory in The Dark Empire? But does it really exist in the real world?" Avatar is a magical technology product. Can it really make us see the truth? Is it possible? Is it really possible to build such a machine? Is it too early to say it's true?
It's getting late! Since mankind entered the 21st century, human science and technology have developed with each passing day, and various advanced technologies have emerged in an endless stream. However, the standard of living of mankind has not been correspondingly improved and improved. So, how do we solve this problem? The artificial womb dates back to 1932, when Aldous Huxley published the famous dystopian novel Brave New World, in which factories were already producing babies on demand in a "communal, unified, stable" society, and their future social status was determined during the embryonic period.
Then in 1955, New York physician and inventor Emmanuel Greenberg filed a patent for an artificial uterus.
In 1996, The University of Tokyo's Shuntendo University brought an artificial womb into the real world for the first time, allowing 14 goat fetuses to survive in artificial amniotic fluid for 3 weeks.
In 2002, Will Cornell Medical School used donor endometrial cells to create an artificial uterus and implanted human embryos to begin development, and the experiment ended six days later because the study of human embryos was restricted by law and could only be completed within 14 days after fertilization.
In 2016, the University of Cambridge ended the 13-day development of human embryos in an artificial womb.
In 2017, the artificial womb of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in the United States allowed the fetuses of 8 goats to develop normally for 1 month, and the longest month ended on the 28th, when the lambs had grown wool and could open their eyes and breathe air in their lungs.
The First Affiliated Hospital of Zhengzhou University announced in December 2020 that it had successfully conducted an in vitro breeding experiment in artificial womb fetal sheep.
In March, a paper published in the journal Nature by the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel showed that more than 1,000 mouse embryos successfully developed in an artificial uterus for 6 days, equivalent to half of the normal gestational period.
Given the history of the above studies, the study of artificial wombs may be largely limited by laws and ethics, or may progress faster because no one wants to conduct research without a "money" pathway. However, if Harvard scientists succeed in creating an artificial uterus the same size as a human, it could provide a new way for humans to reproduce. Of course, this will take time. But now it seems that it is just around the corner. If Harvard scientists did recreate the artificial wombs of mammoths, that would greatly speed up the process.
The artificial womb undoubtedly brings great relief to women, and all reproductive-related worries, pain and risk of death will disappear, which is undoubtedly the most significant revolution in the history of human life, the evolution of the entire history of life on earth, heralding the advent of the era of true gender equality for human beings.
Women will no longer have to endure unfair treatment in terms of social competition, career development, remuneration, etc. because of their gender, which will be a great thing for women and men who are unable to have children for some reason and can become fathers without their other half. At present, more than 100 drugs have been developed in the world for the prevention and treatment of infertility and other gynecological diseases, including artificial uterus, artificial vagina and other technologies. Artificial uterus has many advantages that traditional artificial insemination firms do not have. Artificial uterus can also extend the gestation period of a newborn to 12 months, greatly avoiding the risk of death, making parenting easier, and even treating defects and diseases of the artificial uterus. The artificial womb will also put an end to the controversial practice of surrogacy once and for all.
But artificial wombs also run the risk of marginalizing women, and when a person's most important organs are replaced and disappear altogether, does the meaning of existence need to be redefined? So how do you define it? That's the topic of this article: Can an artificial uterus be one of the women's survival options? How was the artificial womb born? Can an artificial uterus really solve a woman's reproductive problem? And so on. Of course, even if the artificial womb is successful, I am afraid that it will cause great controversy in law and ethics, and may completely change the structure and development of human society, and irreversibly change the entire history of life evolution and our world and our planet.
So, are you for or against an artificial womb?