Will artificial wombs replace natural gestation? Until very recently, that notion was a far-fetched conjuring out of futuristic novels such as “Brave New World.” But research that could make this dystopian prospect a reality is fast advancing. Scientists have already gestated premature lambs in artificial wombs and brought mouse fetuses halfway through gestation in such devices—meaning that gestational vats for humans could be operational within the next few decades.
What might such a development mean for human society? A science communicator named Hashem Al-Ghaili just produced a fictional video that illustrates the disturbing potential. The video depicts the product advertisement of an artificial womb company called EctoLife that engages in the mass artificial gestation of human babies created by IVF, infants genetically engineered for eugenics purposes such as high intelligence, physical strength, and hair color.
The faux promotional for the industrialized baby farm coos, “Say goodbye to the pain of childbirth and birth-related muscle contractions. EctoLife provides a safe, pain-free alternative that helps you deliver your baby without stress. The delivery process is smooth, convenient, and can be done with just a push of a button.”
How interested are people in this dehumanizing potential? Very, it seems. Al-Ghaili’s video has already been viewed more than 1.6 million times on YouTube.
We don’t yet have artificial wombs available for human use. But the kind of experiments needed to allow industrialized baby farming are advancing at a breakneck pace. A researcher in China already genetically engineered babies for eugenics purposes. The International Society for Stem Cell Research—which establishes the voluntary ethical guidelines for experimenting on human embryos—in 2021 discarded its “14-Day Rule” that set a two-week time limit on such research, meaning that experiments on more-developed embryos and fetuses that would be required to perfect an artificial womb can proceed apace.
As to the ethics of the matter, many bioethicists swoon at the idea of bringing forth babies without the need for natural gestation.
How should we think about such a development? That’s a profound question. For now, let’s focus on how artificial wombs would denigrate the importance of natural motherhood.
Why? Gestation isn’t simply a matter of having a uterus. The gestational process itself is crucial to a baby’s healthy development and bonding with her mother. For example, a gestating baby can hear her mother’s voice and may begin the process of language development while still in the womb, which is why many experts recommend that pregnant women talk and sing to their baby. Beyond that, maternal bonding pre-birth can make for healthier post-natal development. As one recent research paper reported, “higher maternal bonding contributing to infant developmental outcomes, including higher attachment quality … lower colic rating, easier temperament, and positive infant mood.”
Little of that would happen in a “growth pod.”
“Mothers and babies don’t bond and develop attachments after birth but during the entire pregnancy,” Jennifer Lahl, president and founder of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, told me. “It cannot be outsourced to an unnatural environment without significant short and long-term consequences to mother and baby.”
Baby Farming Is Already Here
Many might object to EctoLife. But why? We are already desensitized to the moral values that would enable the commercial development of a mass birthing industry. Indeed, such a multibillion-dollar trade already exists. Commercial fertility companies charge want-to-be parents who cannot—or refuse to—become pregnant huge fees to grow and harvest a baby. This is often done by performing IVF and then implanting genetically tested embryos—as in the video—into the uterus of a surrogate mother who’s paid to gestate and give birth.
Surrogates receive little respect for their trouble. They aren’t even called “mothers” but are known in dehumanizing industry parlance as “gestational carriers.” These women are commonly denied any right to participate in the life of the child they carried and may have bonded with for nine months, and the baby loses contact with the mother with whom he or she bonded during the pregnancy. Surrogates may even be denied the right to simply hold the baby after birth.
Moreover, surrogacy contracts may require abortion if the baby has a perceived defect or is otherwise no longer wanted, a requirement that has led to bitter litigation. Nor is there necessarily a requirement that the baby-buying parents accept their special order. For example, a few years ago, an Australian couple paid a Thai woman to gestate two children but refused to take one home because he had Down syndrome.
A Washington Post story from a few years ago details how these technologies are commoditizing childbirth in the very ways that the fictional EctoLife commercial depicts:
“The multibillion-dollar fertility industry is booming and experimenting with business models that are changing the American family in new and unpredictable ways. Would-be parents seeking donor eggs and sperm can pick and choose from long checklists of physical and intellectual characteristics. Clinics now offer volume discounts.”
One California fertility center “is pioneering what some refer to as the ‘Costco mode of babymaking,’ creating batches of embryos using donor eggs and sperm that can be shared among several different families.”
Other than the artificial womb part and mass scale of the enterprise, how’s the commercial surrogacy industry materially different in morals and outcomes than the still-fictional high-tech baby farms?
Industrialized artificial womb baby manufacturing would undermine the essence and meaning of motherhood, which heretofore has been considered a special, and indeed, almost sacred calling. But our existing commercialized fertility business model is already transforming birthing babies into a crass gestational service industry complete with quality control and, even, the right to refuse delivery.
No wonder so many people have watched Al-Ghaili’s video. We are already inured to the dehumanized values for childbirth presented in the film. All that remains to go from inefficient surrogates to mass-producing infants is the perfection of the artificial technology.
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Stop the sliding advertising. It’s distracting and annoying.
I’ll be waiting to hear how God addresses the issue.
The problem is that whatever God says about this matter will be either ignored, suppressed or defamed by our corrupt marxist baby killing misleadia.
Psalm 2
1 Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing?
2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his anointed, saying,
3 Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us.
4 He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision.
My comment is too obvious, so I’ll keep quiet. Don’t want to be called a rascist or something like that.
I am opposed of course, but I have to point out that the existence of such technology means viability outside the mother’s womb now begins at the moment of conception. You can’t cogently argue that a baby inside one of these things is part of its mother’s body. Abortion is murder.
An artificial womb will save lives. But of course it can also be used for evil. That’s true of every technology. We need not let that stop the good. Just do right yourself.