Dr. Fang Liwei is the chief medical officer at the China Astronaut Research and Training Center. In October 2039, following Li Xuan’s delivery of the first human born beyond Earth at Guanghan Base, he provided the medical rationale for the decision to return mother and child to Earth nine days after birth rather than retain the first “lunar-born” resident:
“We do not know what partial-gravity development does to a newborn’s vestibular system, skeletal loading, or cardiovascular development, because it has never happened before and there is no protocol built from data that doesn’t exist. We do not have infant dosimetry standards for lunar surface exposure, because infants have never been a design consideration for any lunar facility. A newborn cannot consent to being the subject of an open-ended developmental experiment, however historic the circumstances of her birth. The symbolic value of keeping her there was real. It was not a good enough reason.”
His framing — that the absence of data is not permission to proceed, and that the inability to consent makes the experiment ethically unsustainable regardless of its historic value — established the medical-ethics framework for subsequent discussion of reproduction beyond Earth.