Or even a deeper moral question. Can you consider a human grown fully outside of the body, mass produced in factories, the same?
The same as what? Do we all have to be the same? Is a kid who grew up without parents "the same?"
It's one thing to have IVF babies, a parent less wombless baby sounds like a dystopian nightmare.
Building flesh robots rather than changing some aspects of our culture to make it sustainable seems like the wrong way to go about solving a declining population.
1. The only difference between a truly functioning artificial womb and surrogacy is that the surrogate mother doesn't have to suffer, which alleviates human trafficking concerns. The baby does not experience intrauterine bonding to the parents that rase him/her in either case. And I mean truly functioning in that it should really mimic a pregnancy in that the machine stimulates the baby through motions as what would happen when a pregnant woman carries out her daily routine. In addition, it may even use a microphone that transmits from a speaker clipped to the mother so that the baby hears her voice whenever she talks as it would in a real pregnancy by her specifically. There may be some failures in early prototypes that lead to probems with terrible outcomes for those first few human trials but it may be necessary the way that society is going, which leads to the next section...
2. As human society evolves, the human body does not evolve with it. That's because civilization evolves by the decade while animals evolve by the millions of years. Humans are most fertile in our late teens and early twenties. Time is more sensitive for women than men. Or current societal standards have evolved from getting arranged marriages at 15-16 to getting married right out of high school/college to getting married only after our careers are stabilized. And the latter means that couples often get married in the mid-thirties when their peak fertility period has passed by roughly a decade. As technology develops and it takes longer to become an expert in your field and secure a truly stable and rewarding career path, that age is likely to be pushed back even further. Right now, I have friends from different ethnic backgrounds who have failed successively to have kids in their late thirties. My wife knows a woman in her mid-thirties who suffered 3 miscarriages in the first trimester, before asking her family, "How many more times do you want me to suffer this tragedy before you'll accept that my body can't do it?" To which they all told her that she's done and they'll never try to have a baby again. Another couple in their late thirties tried for many years to get pregnant with no success; and then to the joy of the whole family, she did! Then after 2 months, she lost it. She never emotionally recovered from it. I've met a couple aged 38 who have literally failed IVF multiple times because she was too old and her ovaries too poor to produce any viable ovum that could continue the procedure. There are many more stories but the point is that a combination of later marriage age due to evolving career needs (and possibly the widespread use of chemicals which were not used decades ago with the long-term cumulative effects not well-understood) have made humans in developed societies a fragile species in the reporductive sense. Smart, educated people are like pandas right now. And you can't remedy the situation by telling everyone to just go backwards and have kids at 18, leaving their auxillery efforts to develop their careers. So what can you do?
3. A properly implemented artificial womb system is unbeatable. When we actually succeed developing it and getting it to an affordable scale, (which we are so far from that we cannot even see it on the horizon yet,) it will be the savior of advanced society. Surrogate moms have many faults. They have immune systems which fight against a foreign embryo; their bodies chemistries need to be heavily monitered and adjusted pharmaceutically to always be fetus-friendly or they miscarry. They make mistakes; they fall; they miss checkup appointments. Sometimes they drink or smoke knowing the child is not theirs in the long run. Artificial wombs (with the stimulation mentioned in 1) are perfect at every moment. If we can make it the norm for 18 year olds to freeze and store at least 2 independently drawn and independently kept batches of sperm, or more importantly ovum, within nationally secured tax-paid facilities to be withdrawn for fertilization with their selected partners and carried in artificial wombs when they are ready to have children, the biological aspect of the problem would be gone. It would only be cultural, with some people not wanting children or more than 1 child due to financial/lilfe stress.
If every nation was dying at the same rate, you could make the argument that it’s humanity’s problem to fix. But that is clearly not what’s happening. East Asian birth rates are dramatically lower than those of Europe & America. Chinese birth rate is half that of India’s. Almost a third of many countries in the Middle East and Africa.
There will come a time when 95+% of the world’s people will not be East Asian or have anything to do with East Asians. With such demographic change will come cultural, economic, and geopolitical change. The problem may fix itself, sure, but not in the way you’d like. Even if East Asian nations resist the temptation of immigration, it will become harder and harder to defend East Asia's place in the world when you become such a small minority.
To quote a certain writer, “it’s not the end of the world; it’s just the end of you.” I give it twenty years before East Asian countries recognize the full scale of the problem and begin to panic.
1. If every nation experienced the same declining fertility rates, it's probably a toxin being spread in the ozone and humanity is doomed. Generally speaking, the birth rates for advanced countries are all falling while those for technologically poor countries stay high. But even with these populations, they have no power on the global stage. When they try to become developed and highly educated, they will encounter the same problems and see population declines due to the life stresses of advanced societies.
2. It's highly erroneous to extend trende by the multiple centuries because of homeostasis with the environment. For example, if you bout 2 guppies, put them in a 100 gallon tank and watched them become 20 the next month, then 200 in a year, then 2000 in the next year, you would absolutely be wrong to assume that the number would flip endlessly and in 10 years, you'd have 2x10^13 guppies in that tank. They'd reach homeostasis with the amount of resources in the tank and they would not be able to sustain more life. Same thing if 2000 guppies were living in a tank and a reduction in resources caused their population to drop to 1800 in one year, 1600 the next, 1400 following, you would also be wrong to assume that in 10 years, the tank would be empty (assuming of course it wasn't a plague or some other illness killing them) because it will drop until it reaches the new balance of life vs resource in the tank and it will drop no more. If resources are increased, the population will go up again to meet that new balance. Same thing in human society.
3. China doesn't depend on population rise. China's growth has been through the charts in all directions but China's population has been largely stagnant for decades with minimal increase. This is because China's growth depends on modernization and education, turning what used to be huge numbers of low income low contribution individuals into an educated middle class that pulls China along. So even if China's overall population drops some amount for some time, the number of high-contributing individuals is still rising as it always has been due to China's continued modernization efforts and educational investments. The growing number of high-contributing individuals is what counts; that's why technologically poor and underdeveloped countries with high populations and high birth rates have no power in the world while a group of little old men in suits surrounded by technology and wealth decide everything, even though their countries are smaller and have less people with much lower fertility rate.
