section_path: Philosophical considerations/Gender equality
section_name: Gender equality
paragraph_text: Gender equality
  
  In the 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, feminist Shulamith Firestone wrote that differences in biological reproductive roles are a source of gender inequality. Firestone singled out pregnancy and childbirth, making the argument that an artificial womb would free "women from the tyranny of their reproductive biology."
  
  Arathi Prasad argues in her column in The Guardian in her article "How artificial wombs will change our ideas of gender, family and equality" that "t will... give men an essential tool to have a child entirely without a woman, should they choose. It will ask us to question concepts of gender and parenthood." She furthermore argues for the benefits for same-sex couples, saying: "It might also mean that the divide between mother and father can be dispensed with: a womb outside a woman’s body would serve women, trans women and male same-sex couples equally without prejudice." It could even be a solution for women with absolute uterine infertility.