The end of pregnancy and the inevitable rise of the artificial womb

Even as single-parent and two-breadwinner families grow more common, 60 percent of Americans believe that children are better off when a parent stays at home, according to a Pew survey from earlier this year. In 2012, Pew found that while 37 percent of working mothers with children under 18 report that full-time work would be ideal for them and their families, 50 percent favored part-time work, and 11 percent would choose to stay at home full time if possible. Working fathers, meanwhile, placed a higher value on compensation than working mothers (40 percent versus 30 percent said that a high-paying job was extremely important to them), and they value flexibility far less (48 percent versus 70 percent). This helps explain why men are more likely than women to stick with 24/7, on-call, all-the-time positions that happen to pay particularly well and why the women who succeed in these jobs are so often childless. The share of American women ages 40 to 44 who’ve never had children now stands at 19 percent, one of the highest rates in the world.

And if we want to achieve gender equality by changing attitudes, it can’t just be male attitudes that change. Men will have to become more interested in spending time with their children, but women will also have to become less interested. If the miracle of childbirth is a central component of what bonds women to their offspring, and pregnancy envy is a force that drives men to accumulate wealth, outsourcing pregnancy might be the best solution. 

In August, Zoltan Istvan, author of The Transhumanist Wager, touted the potential benefits of artificial wombs for women, from the most obvious (“females would no longer have to solely bear responsibility for childbirth”) to the less obvious (“ectogenesis could unchain women from the home”). Even some of the criticisms of ectogenesis—that it will reduce the intimacy between mother and child—could be a good thing if your concern is that when it comes to raising children, the attitudes of women and men are too different.