Artificial Womb Brings Tough Choices, But Who Tests It?

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi. I'm Art Caplan. I'm at the Division of Medical Ethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.

Some of you may have heard that not too long ago, there was a hearing convened by the FDA on an amazing technology: the artificial womb. The FDA convened a hearing to listen to what scientists thought about whether it is time to try the artificial womb to save the life of an extremely premature infant. It's something that I think we all need to be thinking about because whether it gets approved this year or next year, it's a technology that is on the way.

Doctors and scientists have been working hard to try and develop some sort of system where you could take a premature infant and allow it to live even though it doesn't have lungs. The current limit on prematurity is that fetuses born before, let's say, 20-23 weeks simply don't have lungs. Remember, we all began birth as little mermaids and mermen swimming around in amniotic fluid inside a mom's womb.

Fetuses need to have chemicals that could support their breathing. If you could come up with an artificial solution and get it into the right delivery system, say some sort of a bag that could contain the fetus, much like the womb does, then you'd be able to extend efforts to save the lives of preemies beyond, let's say, 23 or 24 weeks.