The age of "motherless birth" is approaching. What does this mean for women?

What if technology could free you from the discomfort of pregnancy and the pain of child birth?

What if your womb becomes obsolete?

As many as one in 5,000 women are born without a womb and others, for example some cancer sufferers, must have theirs removed.

Next year, the first ever womb transplants will take place in the UK as part of a clinical trial involving 10 women.

If successful, doctors responsible for the trial believe that these women (who were previously infertile) will be able to bear children.

Indeed, a baby boy was already born from a similar trial in Sweden last year.

As with all new reproductive technologies, there are ethical considerations related to how such technologies will be administered. Who will be given the right to access them? And what might it mean for gay men and trans women? Who will be able to afford to access them? And what are the broader implications of how an advancement like this will affect social conditions?

In a recent piece in the Guardian, journalist Eleanor Robertson jumps forward in time to a point where scientists won’t just be transplanting wombs, they may actually be creating them — raising foetuses in artificial wombs outside women’s bodies in a process known a ectogenesis.

Robertson asks: “What would it mean for the uterus – and therefore, the biological necessity of women’s reproductive labour – if it were to become obsolete?”

According to some predictions ectogenesis will be possible within the next two decades and could become commonplace within 30 years.

Whether people will be comfortable using it remains to be seen, although it seems unlikely that they won’t be. But, as Robertson explains, the potential impact on women and feminism will also be enormous.

What exactly are the societal implications as we approach the age of “motherless birth”?

One argument follows that giving birth, aside from being excruciating, can be medically dangerous for some mothers — and babies.

Ectogenesis removes the physical risks posed by child birth, while also relieving women of the sole responsibility for the physical well being of their unborn foetuses.

If such technologies became affordably commonplace, some women may choose simply to opt for what would be a relatively pain-free route to parenthood.

Working women would be freed from the the pressure to hide pregnancies at work, they could be easily planned and kept private, effectively removing the risk of workplace discrimination on the basis of pregnancy.

Many of the most significant political efforts of contemporary feminism are predicated on an assumed link between women and reproduction, specifically women’s reproductive rights and their rights to control their own bodies.

As Robertson says, “Our most accepted rationale for abortion rests on the pregnant person’s right to control over her own body – what we call bodily autonomy. So what happens when it’s possible to extract a foetus from a uterus without killing it, and place it in the WombPro9000 for the remaining gestational period?”

Some social conservatives, including pro-lifers, have already seized on ectogenesis as a way to ensure foetus’ “right to life”, even if a mother would have otherwise chosen to abort it.

Theoretically, it could be placed in an artificial womb to be raised by it’s father, the state or given up for adoption.

Some men’s rights activists are already regarding ectogenesis as a way to remove the “social power” that women hold through childbirth.

Without even entering into a dystopian Brave New World conception of child-rearing, there is the very real risk that ectogenesis could pose a threat to human rights.

“Mothers who test positive for drugs are already being thrown in prison for ‘chemical endangerment’,” Robertson writes.

“What if states had the power to remove children from ‘unfit parents’ before birth? It’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t be used – like institutionalisation, incarceration, and underpaid employment – to discipline poor and non-white communities, and people with disabilities.”

There’s certainly a lot to think about.