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Ready, Set, Grow: Emergency planning for a hypothetical ectogenesis facility
Using speculative fiction in emergency management is well established, with zombies being one example that can be found in both education campaigns and exercises. Despite science fiction and science communication focusing extensively on emerging technology forecasting, emergency planning tends to only follow actual incidents involving new technologies. Ectogenesis technologies that would allow a fetus to be fully grown outside of the womb are currently only speculative. As such technology starts to cross over from the realm of science fiction into real-world prototyping, a lot of ethical debate has focused on safety considerations and how best to secure equity of access. While bioethicists, lawyers, designers, medical researchers and even start-ups are already engaging with ectogenesis as a potential reality, emergency management has not yet. This presentation will consider a hypothetical future ectogenesis facility faced with an emergency scenario, such as a blackout caused by an extreme weather event. Using this scenario we will explore the emergency planning requirements needed for safe and equitable use of future ectogenesis technology. We will apply a gendered lens to the emergency planning requirements, considering such novel ethical challenges as where such a facility might rank in an evacuation hierarchy, given the possibility evacuation could save many “human lives” without saving any “people,” depending on how the entity inside an ectogenesis chamber is morally and legally classified. Considering the ethical issues for emergency preparedness planning in such a hypothetical highlights key issues relevant to the design and implementation of this emerging technology and the need for emergency management to engage with new technologies before they begin to be used.
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