A Second EVE?

CAN MECHANICAL WOMBS REPLACE MOTHERS? The continuing development of reproductive biotechnology has brought us to a precipice in moral understanding. What began with attempts to treat infertility, provide neonatal therapeutics, and predict diseases via genetic screening has burgeoned into a global industry of commercial surrogacy complete with the impending reality of complete ectogenesis -the gestation of human babies entirely outside a human womb – a human baby developed from conception to “birth” in a laboratory. In a moment of unnerving coincidental irony, or a shocking level of hubris, researchers have named this artificial womb technology “ex vivo uterine environment” or EVE.

Synthetic EVE is a system of pumps, tubes, and biobags, and has already been tested on the development of lambs. The secular world has met this mechanical replacement with much uncritical applause. Touted as a breakthrough for gender equality, it is called a liberation from the constraints placed upon human relationships by our biological differences, as any combination of humans, or even a single human with no partner or other genetic input, can “parent” a child borne by EVE. The tech certainly has potential benefits in treating human babies whose lives are at risk. Yet, for the Church, we must look beyond the sheen of technological progression and see the looming crisis. We have a front-row seat to the rewriting of creation order and the industrialization of human life.

Proper discernment of the issue must begin with a distinction between the life-saving use of technology to heal a broken process and attempting to use it as a replacement for the natural order. As a neonatal incubator, EVE has great therapeutic potential for micro-premature infants. Providing these babies with the necessary environment to thrive outside the natural womb at twenty weeks or earlier is a triumph of medicine. Christians should rejoice at this preservation of life and protection of the vulnerable.

​Nonetheless, there remains a chasm between supporting a failed natural system and supplanting the procreative process from conception to birth. Snatching a dying baby from the jaws of death is an entirely different matter than deliberately conceiving, engineering, and completing the gestation of a human being from start to finish within a laboratory, intentionally removing maternal flesh from the process. A society that crosses that divide, separating the creation of human life from the union of a husband and wife -not to mention a human male and female- is executing an assault on creation order.

​The human Eve was so named because she was to be “mother of all living.” God instituted a process by which every person, created in His Image, would enter the world through the intimate act of being carried and birthed by a loving mother within a covenantal family. Attempting to replace the living Eve with mechanical EVE -substituting the maternal womb for a rental agreement in commercial surrogacy or a biopolymer bag- is an attempt to displace procreation with the manufacture of humans as products.

​Children are a gift from God (Psalm 127:3), not a custom-ordered household commodity. Christians must reject the idea of babies being commissioned by a customer, assembled by lab technicians, and obtained via purchase agreements. Human dignity demands that children remain gifts of providence, not products of consumer will. Manufactured products can be priced, trafficked, and discarded if deemed defective or unwanted. Natural order calls for parents to humanly submit to the miraculous mystery of God gifting them a child and entering into the sanctifying course of loving an autonomous person. In the potential scientific order, mystery and submission are replaced by the tyranny of quality control and restricted by financial status.

​By using the name EVE, the scientists have pointed us back to the Garden where we are reminded of the serpent’s whisper, “You will be like God.” The temptation to manufacture life outside of natural order is a modern attempt to be God, taking full authority of screening, modifying, gestating, and utterly controlling human life. In doing so, we are in danger of creating generations that are not our equals, but are somehow artifacts of humanity.

​The church will inevitably be accused of irrational resistance to progress, but we must not be intimidated by these dismissals of our reservations. We must reject the technocratic doctrine that declares “We are morally obligated to do what we have the technology to allow.” It is quite tenable to hold a position that applauds the use of medical technology to save infants’ lives while also refusing to compromise on the commercialization of human beings. Children are gifts knit together by the Maker of All Things, not products to be manufactured. The womb is not an inconvenience to be replaced or a rental property to be exploited. Motherhood cannot be replaced; we refuse to trade Eve for EVE.

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