Complete male reproductive independence would also hinge on artificial womb technology, which also made headlines in 2014. Ectogenesis—the technical term for the artificial womb—has been in development for over 10 years and futurist Zoltan Istvan predicts that it will be available and used widely within 30 years.
In an e-mail to the Daily Beast, Istvan added that “it’s very possible that natural birthing will start disappearing over the next 25 to 50 years because of advancing technology.”
So far, goat embryos have been carried to term in these artificial wombs but human embryos have only been grown for 10 days due to current restrictions on human cloning. If it turns out that viable sperm and eggs can be produced from male skin tissue, the existence of artificial wombs could hypothetically allow two men to create both kinds of sex cells from their skin, fertilize the egg with the sperm in vitro, and grow the the resulting embryo outside of a human womb. No women would have to be involved at any point. For the first time in human history, reproduction could become a boy’s club. But while we can dream of this possibility, Surani cautions that it’s far too early to imagine it happening anytime soon.
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