Headlines recently announced a groundbreaking—but deeply troubling—development: scientists in Guangzhou, China, are developing the world’s first pregnancy-simulating humanoid robot, outfitted with an artificial womb capable of carrying a fetus from conception through to delivery.[1] This prototype, expected to be ready by 2026 and priced under ¥100,000 (approximately US $14,000), is described by its creators as a response to population decline and a way to bypass the physical burdens of pregnancy.[2]

The technology involves a womb filled with synthetic amniotic fluid and nutrient delivery through tubing—essentially replicating a biological connection within a machine. While proponents tout its potential to aid those who cannot—or prefer not to—bear children, critics voice deep ethical concerns about displacing the fundamental human experience of pregnancy.

This is not mere science fiction, but a stark reality edging closer each day. This new mechanized pregnancy technology echoes earlier, more human-centered technologies like surrogacy—technologies that are already fraught with ethical peril.

From Surrogacy to Simulation: A Warning Echoing Across Time

The Center for Bioethics and Culture, for the last two decades, has been exposing how women are treated as commodities in surrogacy, describing surrogacy contracts as reducing women to property and controlling nearly every aspect of their lives—from diet and travel to medical decisions and even the decision about abortion[3].

We have long argued that surrogacy should be prohibited, not merely regulated, because contracts simply cannot guard against fundamental violations of privacy, bodily integrity, and maternal–child bonding.

More recently, in The Battle to Keep Commercial Surrogacy Out of Michigan, I—alongside Jennifer Lahl—critiqued the adult-centered narrative of surrogacy, which too often disregards the rights and voices of children, especially those born of such arrangements. As we stated: “Until we hear from the children, surrogacy will continue to be… an adult or parent-centered view, with the basic human rights of newborn babies ignored.”[4]

Our coalition’s Stop Surrogacy Now initiative has long contended that commercial surrogacy is indistinguishable from the buying and selling of children, relying on the most vulnerable women who face coercion, health risks, and poverty—while the powerful profit from their bodies.

Certainly, it’s one thing to commodify pregnancy through contractual surrogacy, but to mechanize it—to replace the embodied experience of a pregnant woman with a robot—is, in many ways, a deeper erosion of our humanity.

Just as surrogacy contracts eroded the surrogate’s agency and dignity, this robotic alternative isolates the human connection even further. The child develops in a machine, devoid of maternal touch. The woman—already harmed in surrogacy by loss of privacy, loss of maternal connection, and loss of control—would be absent altogether. If we treat reproductive functions as commodities, is it any surprise that technology would make those functions replaceable? This raises urgent ethical questions: What is lost when gestation shifts from bodies to machines? When reproduction becomes an assembly line rather than an encounter?

In my work as a perinatal nurse, I see every day how vital the bond between mother and baby is—even before birth. Fetal development is profoundly intertwined with the mother’s own body—shaped by the steady rhythm of her heartbeat, the sounds of her voice, and even the emotions she experiences and conveys. At the same time, pregnancy is not simply a biological process; it is a human relationship in which touch, sound, and presence shape both the mother and the child. No machine, however advanced, can replicate the embodied experience of carrying a child—the rhythms of heartbeat and breath, the shared vulnerability, the reciprocity of human life knit together in the womb. To strip away that relational reality is to risk severing one of the most essential threads of our humanity.

Just this June, I shared Erika’s harrowing story, “I Don’t Belong to You, I’m a Human,” in which a surrogate mother described being reduced to a vessel, stripped of autonomy, and discarded once her biological duty concluded.[5] Her experience exposes the real human cost of commodifying reproduction—an industry clothed in altruism yet underpinned by contracts, power imbalances, and emotional harm.

Now, as science inches toward mechanized gestation, the same unsettling questions demand our full attention. Will children born of artificial wombs—even those within humanoid robots—be deprived of the relational, emotional, and developmental connection that begins in the womb? Is the technological erasure of pregnancy’s embodied realities a step forward—or a move into dystopia?

Ethics Must Lead Technology

From Erika’s suffering to the development of pregnancy robots, one truth remains constant: children are not products, and women are not vessels to be rented or replaced. Whether it’s a human surrogate or a sophisticated robot, the impulse to detach gestation from personhood risks undermining the dignity of both women and the unborn.

Artificial wombs and pregnancy robots may transform fertility landscapes—but they threaten to erode what it means to be human.

At the CBC, we believe that every technological advancement in reproduction must be rooted in preserving human connection, recognizing maternal embodiment, and protecting individual dignity. Forced consent, medical detachment, and the drive for efficiency must not outweigh the moral imperative to care for both women and children as persons, not as functions.

Ethics as Our Anchor

Technology may advance, but our ethical obligations must remain grounded in humanity. We must insist:

  • Every child deserves embodied love—a womb is more than a container; it’s the beginning of physical and emotional connection.
  • Women’s reproductive bodies are not for rent or replacement—whether through legal contracts or mechanical substitutes.
  • True innovation respects dignity, not convenience. Progress that sacrifices human connection in the name of efficiency is a step toward dehumanization.

Let the stories of surrogate mothers—their silenced voices, their health risks, their emotional trauma—stand as warnings. Let our coalition’s longstanding ethics-centric stance anchor this moment before robotics takes reproductive technology entirely off the human scale.

This is not inevitable progress—it is a fork in the road. And at CBC, we choose conscience over convenience.

[1] https://www.republicworld.com/tech/worlds-first-pregnancy-robot-china-working-on-humanoid-capable-of-full-term-baby-delivery

[2] https://e.vnexpress.net/news/tech/tech-news/china-to-debut-world-s-first-pregnancy-humanoid-robot-in-2026-4926202.html

[3] https://cbc-network.org/2017/11/contract-pregnancies-exposed-part-2/

[4] https://cbc-network.org/2024/03/the-battle-to-keep-commercial-surrogacy-out-of-michigan

[5] https://cbc-network.org/2025/06/i-dont-belong-to-you-im-a-human-erikas-story-that-should-make-us-all-rethink-surrogacy

 

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