The artificial womb has been developed in Tokyo!
Researchers have developed a new technique called "Extrauterine Fetal Incubation" or EUFI for short. So far they have started testing the new procedure on goat fetuses. What they do is thread catheters through the large vessels in the fetuses umbilical cord and supply them with oxygenated blood. Oxygenated blood is basically oxygen that is added to the molecules within the red blood cells. This of course is all happening while they are suspended in incubators that contain artifical amniotic fluid which is heated to body temperature.
The goat fetuses have been sustained in the suspended state for 3 weeks. But the doctor's started running into some complications along the way such as circulatory failure and other technical difficulties.
Yoshinori Kuwabara, chairman of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Juntendo University in Tokyo, predicts that it should be possible to extend the lengths of the fetuses and later on can be applied to human beings.
So with this new artificial womb being created what does this mean for the future of natural births? Could it become obsolete to have your child born naturally?
Ultimately if you feel that you don't want to carry the fetus to term for 9 months and go through the experience of child birth, you could just have the fetus extracted from your Uterus weeks after first conception and have it placed in the artificial womb instead.
As a women what would you do? Would you still carry the fetus to term or would you have the fetus placed in the artificial womb?
