Birth is an inseparable part of human experience — we were all born out of human bodies. Yet rapidly developing artificial womb technologies are on the cusp of replacing conventional birth, the social and political ramifications of which could be drastic. In this piece, Director of the Society for the Study of Pregnancy and Birth, Anna Hennessey, argues that these technologies have real potential to upend our social institutions, as well as our conceptions of gender, family and personhood — an understanding of the severity of this phenomenon involves realising the sublime and existential aspects of pregnancy and birth, not just their biological ones.

Birth is the most foundational act of human experience; if we are not born, then there is no experience to be had. When most of us think about the act of birth, we imagine it happening in hospitals or sometimes homes—not in laboratories. Similarly, we usually think of women as the ones who give birth, though people who do not identify as women give birth too. In both cases, we imagine newborn infants emerging from female and human bodies.

Medical research groups and private companies have been developing advanced artificial wombs that are now on the cusp of supporting life before birth. These work in a way that goes beyond that of the historical infant incubator, known as an isolette, which has been used widely for decades in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs) around the world. Although these artificial wombs cannot yet gestate life from conception to birth, we need to have the conversations now—before they are capable—about what it would mean for the human experience if they could.

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Should such technologies develop to their full potential, we will need to renegotiate what it means to be born or give birth.

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Arguments for why we need artificial womb technology primarily revolve around the issue of supporting premature babies. More speculative projects explore developing the technology further to support those who want children but cannot or do not want to go through childbirth, or to help countries in which the population is in decline. Most of us are already familiar with reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization (IVF) and modern infant incubators. Is an object such as an artificial womb so different, or is it just the logical advancement in the history of these technologies? Humans adapt to new technologies—whereas cryptocurrency or even credit cards were once met with skepticism by people who could not imagine an immaterial form of cash, these forms are now widely used and accepted. Could we similarly adapt to babies being born from artificial wombs or even from humanoid robots? Or is something lost when birth ceases to be a human activity, and if so, what is it that we are losing?

Artificial womb technology, also known as ectogenesis, dates to 1954, when an inventor named Emanuel Greenberg filed the first patent for an artificial uterus (see figure below). As science writer Tom Ireland has described in his 2024 article “To Be Born in a Bag,” the ethics of early experimentation with this technology would be difficult to grasp for those in the modern world. Ireland cites early research using Greenberg’s artificial uterus, for example, that involved keeping aborted human fetuses alive for several hours during experimentation with the contraption. Since that time, those creating artificial wombs have primarily focused on how to temporarily assist a premature infant during key developmental phases of gestation, though others have worked to create a device that could replicate the womb, pregnancy, and birth.