First live birth using Fertilo procedure that matures eggs outside the body

Apparently, the anomaly was also noted back in ancient Israel. The story of Adam and Eve is expressly presented as an explanation for why childbirth seems more like a punishment.

From Genesis 3:16, “To the woman he said, ‘I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children.’”

On the other side, I honestly dont understand how anyone who believes in the accidental theory of evolution would persist in their opinion after witnessing a live birth. The emotions that flood the mind are not “evolutionary”. seeing the struggle a mother puts in to give birth is incredible. And part of the reason why civilizations have had goddesses in their mythology.

The number of things that can go wrong are significant. And yet despite all that, a birth happens. That is a miracle in itself. It goes against probability.

We can put a man in the moon yet technology has been unable to create even a single baby. Something that even two of the dumbest high schoolers you can find can easily do.

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

Hail science, but I find the idea that intelligent design = someone thought it out to be a naive misunderstanding.

I think a lot about proton pumps. I know it has to have evolved naturally, but it looks so engineered. I am certain there's a lot more to the process of evolution than we currently know.

To be fair most versions of intelligent design arguments I know are also quite naive.

Interesting because it seems like a miracle to me

> I honestly don’t understand how anyone who has been proximate to childbirth can believe in intelligent design.

One way to believe in intelligent design despite how awful human childbirth is compared to those for other animals -- is found in Genesis:

Humans decided they knew better than God about what is best for themselves so they didn't listen to His one and only (at the time) command. So He imposed some consequences, including "I will make your pains in childbearing very severe; with painful labor you will give birth to children." Genesis 3:16.

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.

Once society has accepted robot labour without rights and children without parents, the question quickly becomes is flesh or steel cheaper.

>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.

It's already happened to a degree. People used to need to birth their own personal/family workforce (to work their land, for example). That was the main purpose of children. The idea that children are for some kind of top-of-the-pyramid self-actualization experience is really, really recent.

> 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

People still make a lot of clothes even though huge percentage of the ends up in landfills after barely any use.

Future purpose of childbirth is fashion.

>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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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".

> children born via C-section are put at a measurable disadvantage due to micro biome stuff.

[citation needed]

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.

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?

Growing children in a vat, and the personhood of those children, are two separate things. It's been entirely possible in recent history for naturally born children to be born to be bought and sold; whereas things like IVF have no effect on the personhood of the children so concieved.

The surrogacy industry exists with the added bonus of exploiting women to be those vats.

If you look at the other "personal goals" comment in this subthread, which lists "buy house and get married" before children, I think you can see what the real barrier is.

Subjective well-being is a fascinating metric to chase because it always changes.