The head of the State Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children Elena Mizulina said recently that surrogate motherhood threatens the extinction not only of Russia, but also of humanity as a whole. After that, the media began to actively discuss the topic of banning surrogacy as a mass practice.
I must say that Mizulina's opinion is not shared by doctors, who say: for many women this is the only chance to give birth. Yet 20% of our fellow citizens believe that the use of surrogacy is unacceptable. This is an essential part of society that requires a ban on this way of gaining parental happiness. Millions of people consider this the enslavement of women from poor social strata - "incubator slavery" in which the child is turned into a commodity.
The Committee on Family, Women and Children is currently preparing a bill on the rules of surrogacy. He should help couples who cannot have children to use the services of a surrogate mother. But at the same time, the rights of all participants in this difficult process must be protected.
Recently, more and more controversies have flared up about the admissibility of the use of advanced technologies in childbirth. Sperm banks, artificial insemination, surrogacy - society is suspicious of such innovations, and the church explicitly prohibits interfering with the sacrament of new life. However, scientists are confident that someday prejudices will be overcome and "test tube babies" will become commonplace.
Modern medicine has made significant progress in the fight against diseases that • until recently were considered incurable. And yet there is a whole spectrum of problems that even the most sophisticated medical techniques fail. Many of them are associated with childbirth: miscarriages, genetic defects and pathologies, birth trauma, sudden infant death syndrome. Every year they claim hundreds of thousands of young lives, and tens of thousands of children are born crippled. Families fall apart, innocent people suffer …
There is only one way to defeat diseases associated with childbirth - by making a scientific breakthrough. The difficulty is that in doing so we are entering an area that is directly related to moral and ethical taboos.
For example, the problems of infertility, miscarriages and birth trauma can be completely neutralized by creating an artificial uterus that ensures the full maturation of the fetus. Various projects for its creation have been fought since the early 1970s, but success came only recently: in January of this year, Japanese gynecologist Yoshinori Kuwabara showed a kid raised in an artificial uterus from a fertilized embryo. The milestone has been overcome, and, most likely, in the near future we will see new achievements in the cultivation of animals "from a test tube", and then it will be the turn of humans.
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And here questions arise. Can such "homunculi" be considered human in the full sense of the word? How will peers born in the usual way treat them? Who will be considered the parents? How will public institutions react to artificial childbirth, which already today aggressively criticize surrogacy?
An artificial uterus, combined with genetic engineering, provides another opportunity - the production of people with predetermined properties. If, by manipulating genes, scientists manage to improve human nature, achieving special qualities (increased intelligence, ideal memory, stable immunity, regeneration of body parts, superhuman strength and endurance) even at the embryonic level, then, most likely, a little superman will have to be raised in artificial conditions that ensure that the process of consolidation of abilities is not disrupted by the mother's lifestyle, and the fetus is not rejected.
And again the question is: is civilization ready to accept such children as full-fledged ones - or will they be considered geeks?
Modern genetic engineering promises not only the improvement of human nature, but also the prospect of a complete rejection of the traditional way of reproduction. In particular, scientists can now obtain sperm and eggs from stem cells.
The experimental mouse, on which specialists from the University of Kyoto worked, became both the father and mother of their children. Accordingly, if desired, it will be possible to combine parents, achieving completely healthy offspring from same-sex couples without the participation of natural donors. And it seems that here scientists have crossed the last border, after which the traditions of the family are finally destroyed.
A future in which there will be no parents in the conventional sense, and children with given qualities will be produced in laboratories, looks daunting. And, most likely, it will inevitably come if adherents of traditional values cannot defend their beliefs and offer humanity a more attractive path of development.
However, futurists say that this technology has more advantages than disadvantages. In addition to the victory over pathologies and birth trauma, we will get generations of people who, in their capabilities, will far surpass their ancestors. They will be more skillful, healthier, more adaptable. It is such people, according to scientists, who will be able to improve the planet and fly to the stars.
And in order to avoid negative social consequences, it is necessary to adopt a set of international laws that would restrict the development of promising technologies for childbirth, preventing inhuman experiments from being carried out. There is no need for haste in this matter.
Anton PERVUSHIN
