[HN Gopher] First live birth using Fertilo procedure that mature...
___________________________________________________________________
First live birth using Fertilo procedure that matures eggs outside
the body
Author : apsec112
Score : 112 points
Date : 2025-01-04 20:17 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.businesswire.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.businesswire.com)
| gnfargbl wrote:
| There aren't many future societal changes that I'd bet on, but
| the acceptance of Brave-New-World-style artificial uterine
| environments is one of them. Even for a healthy woman at an
| optimal age, the process of pregnancy is incredibly physically
| strenuous, yet our culture continues to encourage motherhood at a
| later age and fails to effectively support those who do make the
| choice to have children. A technological solution would be an
| easy out here, and if it were available then people would very
| likely take it, for better or worse.
| hooli_gan wrote:
| I don't believe healthy, social children can be born in this
| way within our lifetime. Babies start learning their mother
| tongue in the stomach while being out and about with their
| mother. There may also be hundreds of other things happening in
| the stomach that we don't know about, which are needed for
| healthy children
| seydor wrote:
| hopefully, the babies are not in the stomach :)
|
| There are already prototypes of artificial wombs imitating
| natural womb environment (which might potentially be in the
| mother's home)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ai8X3Tc-jN8
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Putting a speaker in the incubation room is probably the
| easiest tweak in all this.
| jollyllama wrote:
| The voice actors from that loop will be quite effective in
| subsequent advertisements!
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| Baby's first words will be "This is Audible".
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm fairly certain some baby's first words have already
| been "don't forget to like and subscribe!"
| alistairSH wrote:
| Source? I've never heard of babies learning English or French
| or whatever in utero. Or do you mean they get used to their
| mother's voice?
| nkrisc wrote:
| As I recall there's some evidence they begin learning to
| recognize the phonemes commonly used in the mother's
| language.
| krisoft wrote:
| > Source?
|
| https://pressbooks.pub/psycholinguisticsfall2017section2/ch
| a...
|
| > I've never heard of babies learning English or French or
| whatever in utero.
|
| Don't expect a baby jumping out and saying "a lovely day to
| all. What are your further plans for the rest of the
| evening Mother?"
|
| It is more like that structures in the baby's brain get
| subtly influenced to better pay attention to certain sounds
| while paying less attention to others. This is the theory
| at least. There is some experimental evidence mentioned in
| the link, but i haven't reviewed all of it.
| throwuxiytayq wrote:
| Yes, but is it necessary? Does it make any difference?
| This isn't an interactive learning process anyway, just
| put an audiobook player next to your BabyVat9000 for an
| equivalent result.
| pelagicAustral wrote:
| well, I guess time will tell.
| krisoft wrote:
| I think we just don't know.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Thanks! That's more "learning" that I had realized. Neat
| stuff.
| JofArnold wrote:
| I suspect you're right. But I've just last night finished Brave
| New World and what strikes me is production of children in that
| book almost entirely for the purpose of labour.
|
| So, I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the
| future once robots are capable of doing all the work and humans
| live for a very long time. I don't have children nor intend to
| - so likely this is a very cold take that doesn't apply to most
| - but the cynic in me says we've so far focussed on
| reproduction as individuals and at a country level to maintain
| productivity and extend the health and wealth of their elders.
| Without that pressure, would people choose to have fewer
| children on a scale we've never seen before?
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the
| future
|
| Leaving behind and continuing your legacy and heritage.
|
| Personally I have no interest in pushing _my_ blood,
| interests, and achievements and their endurement upon my
| hypothetical children, among many other reasons I have no
| interest in having children, but if someone wants to be that
| person then more power to them since it 's none of my
| business.
| ZiiS wrote:
| Once society has accepted robot labour without rights and
| children without parents, the question quickly becomes is
| flesh or steel cheaper.
| trhway wrote:
| >what the driver for reproduction will be
|
| the people without such driver are naturally weeded out, so
| due to such weeding out the majority of the population always
| naturally consist of the people who have such a driver, it
| may be some crazy one in any given particular case, yet it is
| there.
|
| >in the future once robots are capable of doing all the work
| and humans live for a very long time.
|
| and with artificial uterine it would mean that some people,
| the wealthy ones, would be able to have a hundred, or a
| thousand of children. Just look at for example Elon Musk and
| imagine if there were no need for physical pregnancy which i
| think is the major limiting factor here.
|
| >would people choose to have fewer children on a scale we've
| never seen before?
|
| the people who wouldn't be able to afford it as having
| children would be less beneficial for society as you
| correctly noted and it will be more like a personal
| luxury/indulgence and thus would be treated accordingly -
| taxed, no child support help from government, etc
| gnfargbl wrote:
| _> Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there
| were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the
| major limiting factor here._
|
| I agree that is a _very_ likely outcome. We 've seen that
| behaviour before in history, e.g. the Ottoman Imperial
| Harem contained a minimum of several hundred women at its
| peak. We would almost certainly see it again. Remember,
| though, that those children still need to be cared for
| after birth, and that requires humans.
| trhway wrote:
| >Remember, though, that those children still need to be
| cared for after birth, and that requires humans.
|
| I think AI and robots would make human involvement
| minimally necessary, be it basic physical care or
| education.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The main driver for that sort of thing was a system where
| production of heirs was seen as socially essential; this
| is now largely obsolete.
|
| (Even then, the really extreme examples of polygamy were
| more about social status than practical concerns around
| succession; again, this is now largely obsolete in most
| societies.)
| FORGIVENHEROs wrote:
| OT, and maybe, my words ain't effective, but talking to a
| young woman, i thought i'd talked to "supermom". She told
| me what she'd "left and quit just to be a good mommy for
| her daughter." I looked at her, "wearing glasses -too
| big, to 'be modern'", a warm pullover - knitted, masking
| upper arms and (her) middle. But than i saw her grabbing
| a cell-phone (daughter call incomming...), she became
| 'supermom'.
|
| So if any, could remember that there were 'telephone
| boxes' ...changing clothes...
|
| [Reports:Humor]
|
| HINT: Action Comics #1 (published April 18, 1938).[1]
| Superman has been adapted to several other media...
|
| (-;
|
| [1] quoting: wikipedia
| teeray wrote:
| > Just look at for example Elon Musk and imagine if there
| were no need for physical pregnancy which i think is the
| major limiting factor here.
|
| Time could be the great equalizer here. Spending time with
| your children is pretty universally accepted as beneficial,
| so we could make it mandatory for extrauterine births over
| some threshold. It could be structured such that the more
| extrauterine children you have, the more of your 24 hours
| per day must be spent with them. I'm intentionally hand-
| waving over specifics of what that would look like and
| enforcement, but I'm sure you can come up with ideas. The
| goal is: if you want to artificially have hundreds of
| extrauterine children, society will take from you all the
| time you could have spent building rockets and running
| companies.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Time isn't a sufficient measure to serve as a proxy for
| quality parenting.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I don't think much of the other proposed societal changes in
| BNW. They're a backdrop which Huxley uses to illustrate some
| aspects of human nature and to tell the rest of his story,
| but that's about it. We've had plenty of opportunity to move
| to the transient sexual model he outlines, for instance, and
| yet long-term relationships are still overwhelmingly the most
| popular choice.
|
| I also don't believe people generally have children to fulfil
| a wider societal responsibility. As a parent myself, we had
| children mostly because we thought it would be nice to have
| children around. It has been much more than "nice," in a way
| that I could never really put into words. However, I can
| honestly say that the maintenance of my own health and wealth
| into old age has never been remotely a concern; if anything,
| I spend my time trying to find ways to insulate them from the
| consequences of an ageing society. I don't see those aspects
| of parenthood changing.
| squigz wrote:
| Societal pressures/responsibilities don't need to be
| consciously acknowledged by an individual for them to have
| an effect on that individuals' decision-making.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| True. My anecdata is that I don't see even the echoes of
| these pressures/responsibilities in my own historical
| choices, and as a result I doubt their effect on others.
| squigz wrote:
| In my experience, social pressure to have children is
| such a ubiquitous experience that it's difficult for me
| to think it _doesn 't_ have an effect. I wonder how this
| might vary between men & women
| foobarian wrote:
| You have to keep in mind the millions of years of
| evolution that surely managed to leave some instinct-
| level mechanisms to encourage having children.
| sebmellen wrote:
| Do you have kids? I find that my desire for children, and
| the ways in which I enjoy mine, are very "primitive"
| pleasures in the same way as my desires to eat or sleep
| are.
|
| Maybe we eat because of social pressure, but obviously
| there is something deeper too.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| >social pressure to have children is such a ubiquitous
| experience
|
| One aspect of growing older that I eagerly can't wait for
| (unlike most others) is getting old enough that people
| will stop fucking pestering me about marriage and kids.
|
| All those people can sincerely fuck off into their own
| bedrooms, pun intended.
|
| Just about 20 years more of this noise...
| astral_drama wrote:
| Yes and it can be quite absurd and right on the nose.
|
| While Putin feeds humans to the dogs of war, he will at
| the same time chide his countryfolk that they are not
| having enough children.
|
| There is a softer version in the west where elders and
| the wealthy are 'concerned about birthrates' while at the
| same time squeezing their young on living
| costs(shelter+food).
| dbspin wrote:
| I suspect it's enormously different between men and
| women, and of course inter-culturally. As a straight man
| living in Ireland, despite having extremely traditional
| catholic parents, I've faced literally zero pressure from
| family to have kids. My siblings (male and female) have
| both chosen to have kids (very closely together in time),
| and I enjoy being an uncle a great deal. But I don't have
| any interest whatsoever in parenting. I have some friends
| with kids - although they tend to fall off the radar if
| I'm honest, but haven't felt any pressure from them
| either.
| graemep wrote:
| There are also societal pressures the other way. A lot of
| people do not have children because of the cost.
|
| In the UK there has also been a cultural shift to
| regarding children as a lot of work - parents are under
| more pressure to do more and be perfect. That also deters
| people from having children.
|
| Then there are those who argue that there are too many
| children so people should not have children.
|
| There are pressures to have kids, of course, but its not
| clear to me that there is a net societal pressure towards
| having kids.
|
| I had kids because I like having kids. Its fulfilling in
| a way nothing else is in most parents lives.
| nico wrote:
| > I'm curious what the driver for reproduction will be in the
| future once robots are capable of doing all the work
|
| If robots are doing all the work, my bet is humans won't be
| dominating for too long
|
| Then if robots take over, and they spare us, the driver for
| human reproduction (for them to reproduce us) might just be
| to have pets
| horrible-hilde wrote:
| yes, and we'll love it.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| If you think humanity is a good thing, and you want it to
| continue indefinitely into the future, then reproduction is
| essential. If you do not think this, then you want Earth to
| be a dull rock, with no civilization and no intelligent
| species. It really is just that binary.
|
| >Without that pressure, would people choose to have fewer
| children on a scale we've never seen before?
|
| They already made that choice, decades ago, and there's no
| evidence anyone is rethinking it. Fertility levels are sub-
| replacement.
| coldtea wrote:
| Such practices is why the Brave New World is a dystopia
| emidln wrote:
| Not the universal usage of a euphoria-inducing, pacifying
| drug covering large-scale psychological manipulation and
| inudstrialist domination of society? Brave New World is a
| dystopia because it shows a fully satiated and socially
| occupied doesn't care that it is being manipulated and
| repressed. You don't care about your caste,or the atrocities
| committed to others, or learning to better yourself because
| you take another hit of Soma and join an orgy.
|
| Did we read the same book?
| aaomidi wrote:
| > You don't care about your caste,or the atrocities
| committed to others
|
| Totally not our society!
|
| But yeah this invention is a good thing
| kanzure wrote:
| Generally speaking, when it comes to _Brave New World_, the
| answer is no - people did not read the same book:
| https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/crispr.2019.0046
| trey-jones wrote:
| Well it's definitely possible to have different takeaways
| from the same book. I can't remember what I took away as
| a high school student, but when I read it again in my
| late 30s (I think) it blew my mind a little bit because I
| had adopted a sort of libertarian view that anything that
| doesn't directly impede the happiness of someone else
| should be legal. Coming down to the idea that personal
| happiness is ultimately what I want (not just for myself;
| for everybody). Brave New World (which is almost 100
| years old at this point) says, "OK, here is a world where
| everyone can be happy all the time. What do you think?"
| And as a reader, of course I'm on the side of John
| Savage. The Soma holiday and ignorance (bliss) is not
| what I'm after. And of course, without contrast against
| strife and unhappiness, how can there be happiness at
| all?
| coldtea wrote:
| > _Did we read the same book?_
|
| Yes, and the engineered factory humans is part of the
| dystopian point it makes. The dehumanization begins at
| that, it's not just the soma.
|
| Which is also why the normally born people (in the wildling
| "reservation"), the regular aging, the regular pregancy,
| are also in the book as a antithesis to the dystopian
| society (but one which they can not belong as outsiders,
| like we can't be "natives", only LARP it).
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| I don't think we have to take a nearly century-old work
| of fiction's viewpoints seriously unless we want to. The
| book can argue that IVF or artificial gestation is
| horrific and we can in turn argue "well, I don't think
| that's true."
| inglor_cz wrote:
| People were similarly apprehensive about IVF. Some
| contemporary takes about "test tube babies" were positively
| hysterical.
|
| Fear of the unknown is strong in us, especially when it comes
| to our bodies. See also, anti-vaxxerism.
| api wrote:
| I think humans will eventually self-improve with genetic
| engineering -- e.g. shifting the median IQ up by 30 points,
| life extension, disease resistance, eliminating heritable
| conditions -- but the ethical and societal issues will take
| much longer to address than the technology. We could
| already do some of this.
|
| I think some of the concern is reasonable and some isn't.
| coldtea wrote:
| > _People were similarly apprehensive about IVF_
|
| And rightly so. It's used as a patch for many social issues
| (like declining fertility and careerism).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Isn't the entire civilization about "patching issues"?
|
| Outside rural Sahel or Afghanistan, the world has moved
| on to an industrial or post-industrial society, where it
| is no longer desirable to keep women illiterate and start
| having babies at 17, when the natural fertility is at its
| peak, then immediately employing small kids as goatherds.
|
| IVF is a partial patch for increasing educational levels
| of the general population. I am fine with a more educated
| population.
| timcobb wrote:
| Have you ever had kids?
|
| If you are not a birthing person, have you ever been with a
| birthing person for the duration of their pregnancy?
| coldtea wrote:
| As in "it can be difficult"?
|
| That's more "Brave New World" style shortcuts to hapiness
| and convenience...
| myko wrote:
| It can be lethal
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| I will be amazed if a technology solution in biology can
| compete with 100 million years of evolution. Even children born
| via C-section are put at a measurable disadvantage due to micro
| biome stuff.
| ben_w wrote:
| You may be amazed, but that doesn't make it implausible.
|
| We already did beat evolution first with wheels, later with
| steam, then with jet engines, nuclear reactors, heart
| transplants, vaccines, exogenous steroids, etc.
|
| Evolution hit a constraint with us, our increased brain size
| making childbirth unusually difficult for humans compared to
| other species; all of us are born premature by the standard
| of our nearest wild relatives, and have to be premature just
| so the mother doesn't die all the time, merely unusually
| often.
| MandieD wrote:
| But that's possibly outweighed by the advantages implied by
| their mothers having the resources (personal or societal) to
| get their babies out safely for both themselves and said
| babies at later ages (mother and/or father have more advanced
| careers and financial stability) and despite their physical
| condition.
|
| My kid (born when I, his mother, was 40) is a second
| generation C-section baby who, had my own mother (who had me
| at 35) been born in the 60s instead of the 40s, likely would
| have been a 3rd generation C-section baby. My mother was 10.5
| lbs at birth and left my grandmother unable to have another
| child in her early 20s. Perhaps I can't eat crustaceans and
| have a stuffed nose for several weeks in the spring because I
| didn't get my mother's microbiome. I'll take that trade; my
| mother was then able and willing to go on to have my little
| brother.
|
| I'll also wager that as a Western middle-class middle-aged
| professional who had my kid about a decade after I "should
| have" (can't plan everything!), my child's material
| circumstances and opportunities would be the envy 90-95% of
| his agemates worldwide. I'm definitely providing a better
| education than a semi-literate 17-year-old Afghani woman who
| could only have hers "the old fashioned way".
| triyambakam wrote:
| Sure, just trivialize the constraints of systemic barriers,
| political instability, and gender-based oppression that
| limit educational and reproductive choices for many Afghan
| women.
| MandieD wrote:
| I agree that what's happened to Afghan women is a horror,
| and one I do what I can to prevent being implemented in
| any measure by the "but falling birthrates! Why won't
| young women have more baaaaabies?! Why do they wait so
| long?" crowd - including reminding folks why Caesarean
| sections aren't horrible, even ones like the one I didn't
| _have_ to have, strictly speaking, but had a good chance
| of sparing me an injury I would have had a very hard time
| dealing with while caring for a newborn. I 'm thankful
| that I live in a well-resourced country with near gender-
| equality in which I've always had a lot of choices,
| including the one that saved my life about a decade
| before I had my child - a choice that is being eroded in
| my home state.
|
| (I've read about what life in urban Afghanistan was like
| for women in the 1960s and 1970s, so I'm well aware of
| how far we can fall, given the right religious nutjobs in
| charge. Franco's Spain freaks me out, too.)
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| It's fascinating that there are now babies that require
| c-sections for reasons you allude to.
|
| It's definitely possible to facilitate this type of genetic
| line in the context of wealth and abundances, but if it
| became the more than the norm, any war or famine would be
| devastating.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| > There aren't many future societal changes that I'd bet on,
| but the acceptance of Brave-New-World-style artificial uterine
| environments is one of them.
|
| It will be a huuuge time until extrauterine reproduction is
| viable even for mammals as small as mice. We barely understand
| pregnancy and its effects in humans as it is - IMHO it's barely
| ethical to research around pregnancy on mice, even less on
| "higher" levels of intelligence such as great apes. It's only a
| relatively recent discovery for example that fetal cells
| transfer via the placenta into the mother's organism [1], but
| it's only extremely recent that further discoveries into the
| mother-fetus interactions were studied [2].
|
| Hell we're not yet sure if _cloning_ humans actually works - it
| took a great deal of effort for sheep, and to this date we
| haven 't even managed to work out the ethics for humans in
| gene-editing, just look at the controversy around He Jiankui
| [3].
|
| Not saying it isn't worth the effort to hold a debate around
| human germ line research... but I think the time is premature,
| we should have it once we have proven it possible and safe in
| primates.
|
| [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2633676/
|
| [2] https://scienceblog.cincinnatichildrens.org/moms-ability-
| to-...
|
| [3]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He_Jiankui_genome_editing_inci...
| xattt wrote:
| After ex-utero pregnancy is achieved, the next step would be
| some form of recombinant human analogue breast milk synthesis.
| Beyond that, breast milk tailored to mom-babe pairs.
|
| Yes, formula exists and has created billions of healthy
| children. However, breastfeeding is a signifiant commitment of
| blood, sweat and tears for many moms that want to do best by
| their babes.
| Teever wrote:
| At that point we can produce dairy milk for human consumption
| too.
|
| I've been thinkingg about this for a while, that the way
| we're approaching growing artificial meat from stem cells is
| the wrong way to use this kind of technology.
|
| Is anyone using this technology to grow chicken eggs and
| dairy milk in the lab for human consumption?
|
| It will remain tricky to get subtle things like colour,
| taste, and the texture profile right for lab grown meat but
| will that hold the same for the output of a rtificially grown
| tissue like milk or eggs?
| derektank wrote:
| The company Perfect Day has a bio-reactor service that
| produces whey protein without the need for dairy cows.
| They've partnered with a couple of different companies to
| bring different vegan milk/ice cream products to market. It
| doesn't use stem cells though, I believe they bio-
| engineered fungal microbiota to create the process.
|
| https://perfectday.com/made-with-perfect-day/
| pnutjam wrote:
| Imagine a world where anybody can gestate a baby in a tank. It
| would be a boon to older couples, same sex couples, and many
| others.
|
| What happens to the inevitable baby who's parent's die before
| they can be decanted? They will stack up over time since who
| wants someone else's baby when you can get your own so easily.
|
| This will also be abused by some jacka## like Musk who wants to
| build a labor force for something distasteful. Imagine a Mars
| colonization effort with exclusively young people who were
| raised in a sealed environment and don't know anything that was
| not fed to them.
| teeray wrote:
| > What happens to the inevitable baby who's parent's die
| before they can be decanted?
|
| This is already a problem for children of single mothers who
| die during childbirth. I'm not saying we have a solution to
| that problem (we are far from one), but it's at least not a
| _new_ problem.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| >Imagine a world where anybody can gestate a baby in a tank.
| It would be a boon to older couples, same sex couples, and
| many others.
|
| It would be a world where the Ghadafis and the Putins could
| breed armies of 100,000, a million, all raised in barracks
| and surveilled from birth. The critics would have no say,
| none of these children are theirs. The political enemies
| would become allies, just so they might have influence in
| where those armies are pointed. Entire crops of insect-
| people, superficially human, but psychologically tortured
| into compliance, outnumbering anyone who might want to put a
| stop to it. And don't get me wrong, I think the United States
| would do it too, even if it might need to hide it for awhile.
|
| >Imagine a Mars colonization effort with
|
| Imagine a Californian colonization effort with hundreds of
| thousands of psychopath soldiers exactly 15 yrs old, hopped
| up on roids, raised by a few hundred drill sargeants since
| they could hold their heads up, slowly marching through and
| getting rid of anyone who wasn't flagged as an elite.
|
| The reason you don't have stormtroopers doing this now is
| because there are only a few hundred of them who would be
| willing to do that at any given point at time. But when you
| can literally multiple humans with machines, then their
| numbers could grow quickly and to absurd degree.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _a world where the Ghadafis and the Putins could breed
| armies of 100,000, a million, all raised in barracks and
| surveilled from birth. The critics would have no say, none
| of these children are theirs_
|
| You're describing peasant armies since time immemorial.
|
| > _reason you don 't have stormtroopers doing this now is
| because there are only a few hundred of them who would be
| willing to do that at any given point at time_
|
| The reason is it's expensive to train and equip them. Human
| beings, particularly the ones used for cannon fodder, have
| historically been cheap.
| dctoedt wrote:
| > _Imagine a world where anybody can gestate a baby in a
| tank._
|
| Heinlein also explored that possibility a bit in one of his
| juveniles -- in the novel, the tank farms were called
| "creches."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Podkayne_of_Mars
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the process of pregnancy is incredibly physically strenuous_
|
| Friend just gave birth. I honestly don't understand how anyone
| who has been proximate to childbirth can believe in intelligent
| design.
|
| Everything about human birthing is a hack. The placenta. The
| rotation and cord and length of the process. The ridiculous
| frequency of stupid fuck-ups which often result in the death of
| a baby or the mother or both. Pregnancy strikes me as one of
| those processes proximate technology could absolutely do better
| than nature in 9/10 cases.
| Terr_ wrote:
| In the Vorkosigan Saga, the "uterine replicator" appears as a
| minor but persistent future-technology, where the main
| selling point is Not Dying To Your Stupid Biology, followed
| by convenience.
|
| > "[The] debate that will fundamentally alter Barrayar's
| future is being carried on right now among their wives and
| daughters. To use it, or not to use it? Too late to keep it
| out, it's already here. The middle classes are picking it up
| in droves. Every mother who loves her daughter is pressing
| for it, to spare her the physical dangers of biological
| childbearing. They're fighting not the old men, who haven't
| got a clue, but an old guard of their sisters who say to
| their daughters, in effect, _We had to suffer, so must you!_
| Look around tonight, Mark. You 're witnessing the last
| generation of men and women on Barrayar who will dance this
| dance in the old way."
|
| -- _Mirror Dance_ by Lois McMaster Bujold
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga
| int_19h wrote:
| Bujold also made an explicit point on several occasions in
| this book cycle that without this kind of tech, there's no
| true gender equality, because the burden of childbearing is
| just too much of a penalty.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > without this kind of tech, there's no true gender
| equality
|
| Right, and partly to forestall any appeal-to-nature
| responses, I'll borrow from another top-favorite author,
| with emphasis added:
|
| > The Patrician took a sip of his beer. "I have told this
| to few people, gentlemen, and I suspect I never will
| again, but one day when I was a young boy on holiday in
| Uberwald I was walking along the bank of a stream when I
| saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight,
| I'm sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the
| mother otter dived into the water and came up with a
| plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-
| submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was
| still alive, the body split and I remember to this day
| the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much
| to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over
| themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature's
| wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon
| mother and children. _And that's when I first learned
| about evil. It is built into the very nature of the
| universe. Every world spins in pain. If there is any kind
| of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to
| become his moral superior._ "
|
| > The two wizards exchanged a glance. Vetinari was
| staring into the depths of his beer mug and they were
| glad that they did not know what he saw in there.
|
| -- _Unseen Academicals_ by Terry Pratchett
| dinkblam wrote:
| > Gameto is rapidly expanding the availability of Fertilo [...]
| in key markets such as Australia, Japan, Argentina, Paraguay,
| Mexico, and Peru.
|
| so, are those the key markets for expensive fertility treatments?
| bdcravens wrote:
| Or markets with lower burdens of entry (ie, regulations or
| religion-political opposition)
| pgryko wrote:
| 'With nearly half of the women in the US never reaching their
| maternity goals, there is an urgent need for innovation' - did
| they just describe having children like a KPI?
| sebmellen wrote:
| It is! If ~50% of the population feels unfulfilled because they
| haven't been able to have the children they wanted, we should
| fix that. But clearly it would be better to look at the root
| cause than to rely on this specious invention.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Subjective well-being is a fascinating metric to chase
| because it always changes.
| Pigalowda wrote:
| I agree. I think happiness and "well-being" are not actual
| realities. There is only the pursuit of happiness. And that
| pursuit can be manipulated for financial gain. I think the
| very best you can achieve is being a child or failing that
| contentedness and absence of suffering. Otherwise loss and
| grief will strip away any possibility of happiness. The
| only fleeting happiness/joy I often see in myself or other
| adults is in nostalgia - and that's pure manipulation.
| squigz wrote:
| Might this just be you and the people you know, rather
| than some law of reality?
| Pigalowda wrote:
| It certainly could be. There's the old Greek myth of
| Pandora's box - the last entity to emerge is 'hope'. Is
| that the worst monster or greatest gift to humanity? I
| feel like I fall in the former camp. But that's OK - I
| still move forward in life and engage in the pursuit of
| happiness.
| bdcravens wrote:
| Many of our "heroes" speaking about having children the same
| way. Steve Jobs said having children was far more important
| than the work he did at Apple. While he's going in a different
| direction with it, Elon Musk has focused on a lot on declining
| birthrates and what that means.
| bpodgursky wrote:
| When you talk to people who are successful in their personal
| lives, that's how they treat life goals. Sounds over-formal but
| that's life.
|
| 1. Get married
|
| 2. Buy house (by 30)
|
| 3. Have kid 1 by 32, to allow 2 year birth spacing for X
| children
|
| etc.
|
| People like to be wishy-washy and romantic about finding
| partners, settling down, having kids... but the people who end
| up where they want to be are usually far more intentional about
| it.
| nashashmi wrote:
| The headline inspires SCiFi stories of creating humans outside of
| the woman. But that is not at all what this story is about: eggs
| were brought to maturity level outside of the woman.
|
| Currently eggs would be matured inside the mother with artificial
| hormones.
|
| Now they can be removed before maturing and inflated after in a
| dish. Then fertilized. Then be injected back into the mother.
| Hormones are still used in the next step.
| chiyc wrote:
| The article claims an 80% reduction in injections, but they
| must only be counting the injections prior to egg retrieval.
| After the 2 weeks of injections before the egg retrieval,
| there's another 8-10 weeks of intramuscular injections after
| the embryo transfer.
|
| Still, this is a great development to lessen the entire ordeal
| for women undergoing IVF.
| s1mon wrote:
| I first read that very very differently with a word which is
| almost an anagram of Fertilo, which begins with 'fe' and ends
| with 'o'. I was very confused how what has been euphemistically
| described as "swallowing kids" would produce viable eggs.
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