.
Doctor Henri Atlan, biophysicist, philosopher and ex-member of the national committee of ethics for the life sciences,
offers, in his last publication the Artificial Uterus (2005), his reflexions on progress of the embryology and the genetics as regards of medically procreation assisted.
With simple words, he is not too distant from future shows how the science fiction of yesterday will become, the science of tomorrow, how the upheavals pulled by the appearance of hormonal contraception and the in vitro fertilizations will seem to us pain-killers beside those resulting from the setting at the point from ectogenesis (or artificial uterus), of the reproductive cloning, the
propagation by cutting and the parthenogenesis.
Atlan ensures that today the therapeutic aimings justify the financing of this research: to save large the premature or the foetuses resulting from miscarriages and nondesired by transfer in an Artificial Uterus. But Henri Atlan prevents that when these
technical is at the point, of the extra-medical requests will be added with the therapeutic treatments. The women will be able, and some
will want, to dissociate procreation and pregnancy. To be mother without pregnancy would be with range of hand, just like is today the blooming of a sexuality without child.
These upheavals will involve consequences social, cultural, economic, political, religious and even metaphysics not very foreseeable on the whole of the company.
The sex will be finally with equality vis-a-vis procreation, of the
new family structures rather genetic and social that biological
will appear, the maternal feeling will change. Only point
of interrogation in the absence of experimentation: what will it be of
the child, soncorps, his feelings and mental capacities without the symbiosis which the pregnancy offers?
In a speculative spirit, Henri Atlan measures these changes with the ell of mythology, philosophy, literature and history, sails between totalitarianism eugenic and individualistic liberalism to make us become aware of the stakes subjacent with these
innovations.
Published: October 13, 2006
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