Death and the artificial placenta

Anna Nelson; Elizabeth Chloe Romanis; Victoria Adkins; Christina Weis; Karolina Kuberska

doi:10.1093/jlb/lsae013

Death and the artificial placenta

J Law Biosci. 2024 Jul 16;11(2):lsae013. doi: 10.1093/jlb/lsae013. eCollection 2024 Jul-Dec.

Authors

Anna Nelson¹, Elizabeth Chloe Romanis^{2

3}, Victoria Adkins⁴, Christina Weis⁵, Karolina Kuberska⁶

Affiliations

¹ School of Law, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, S3 7ND, UK.
² Durham Law School, Durham University, Durham, DH1 3LE, UK.
³ Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, UK.
⁴ School of Law and Criminology, University of Greenwich, London, SE10 9LS, UK.
⁵ School of Allied Health Sciences, De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH, UK.
⁶ Department of Public Health and Primary Care, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, CB2 0SR, UK.

Abstract

Artificial Amnion and Placenta Technology (AAPT)-sometimes referred to as 'Artificial Womb Technology'-could provide an extracorporeal alternative to bodily gestations, allowing a fetus delivered prematurely from the human uterus to continue development while maintaining fetal physiology. As AAPT moves nearer to being used in humans, important ethical and legal questions remain unanswered. In this paper, we explore how the death of the entity sustained by AAPT would be characterized in law. This question matters, as legal ambiguity in this area has the potential to compound uncertainty and the suffering of newly bereaved parent(s). We first identify the existing criteria used to delineate the legal characterization of death, which occurs before birth or during the immediate neonatal period in England and Wales. We then demonstrate that attempting to apply these in the context of AAPT gives rise to a number of challenges, which make it impossible to reach a definitive conclusion as to the nature of death in AAPT using the current legal framework. In doing so, we demonstrate that the current legal framework in England and Wales may be unable to adequately capture the situation of an entity being sustained by AAPT.

Keywords: artificial placenta; artificial womb; death; miscarriage; stillbirth.