Heart disease.
Cancer.
COPD.
Accidents.
Don’t smoke. Don’t overeat. Be careful.
Don’t get old.
We can’t cure death. Although some people, who generally do reject the Almighty, have ambitions to do so.
Who knows where people might take this technology in the future? Right now, it is proposed as a rescue for premature babies. I would gladly have transferred over the baby I lost at 20 weeks, and thanked God, as I thank God that we have developed clean drinking water and antibiotics.
I suspect that initially the artificial womb wouldn’t even be used to push back the survival window of prematurity, but to increase survival and prevent morbidity among the earliest preemies now cared for in the NICU.
It would probably be far gentler on the babies - the only connection would be the umbilicus. No intubation or ventilators, no feeding tubes, no intravenous access, nothing touching tissue-thin skin. Maybe no strokes, no blindness, no necrotic bowel, no stiff and undergrown lungs, no sudden fatal sepsis.
I remember an interview with Barbara Bush, who lost a daughter, Pauline, to leukemia in the fifties. She was only three years old. The family pediatrician advised them that the kindest thing to do would be to take the child home and love her, but how could they do that? They had to fight for her, and her death was prolonged and painful, and Mrs. Bush said she wished they’d taken the doctor’s advice. But now the survival rate for childhood leukemia is over 90%, and that advance was purchased on the cutting edge, in the suffering of little children like Pauline.