A plastic bag pulses in a Philadelphia laboratory, filled with synthetic amniotic fluid. Inside floats a lamb foetus, connected to an artificial placenta, developing normally despite never having occupied its mother’s womb. That 2017 experiment reignited a debate dormant since Shulamith Firestone’s 1970 manifesto: can artificial wombs—ectogenesis, in the jargon—deliver women from what she called “the tyranny of reproduction”?

Firestone’s argument was bracingly direct. Pregnancy, she declared, was “barbaric”. Women’s oppression stemmed from their reproductive biology. Free them from gestation and you free them from subjugation.

Fifty-odd years on, teams in America, the Netherlands and Japan have kept animal foetuses alive in external ‘biobags’ for weeks. Human trials targeting 22-24 week premature foetuses might start by 2027. The US Food and Drug Administration held advisory meetings in 2023 to mull over regulatory frameworks. Progress, certainly. Liberation? Not remotely.

Who gets it?

Start with what researchers actually have. These biobags handle only partial ectogenesis—transferring already-developing foetuses to artificial environments. The tricky bits—embryo implantation, early placental formation—barely work in labs. Complete artificial gestation from conception to birth remains decades distant, hostage to breakthroughs in placental bioengineering and infection control that nobody has managed yet.

This gap matters because nobody is developing artificial wombs to liberate healthy women. The entire enterprise aims to save desperately premature infants. Prematurity causes 16 per cent of infant deaths. That’s the medical imperative. Feminist emancipation is a nice theoretical bonus, but decades away—if it arrives at all.

Even assuming that the technology eventually works, who gets it? Artificial wombs will debut as pricey medical kit locked inside well-equipped neonatal units in wealthy nations. A Chinese firm floated a 14,000 US dollars price tag before the whole thing turned out to be a scam. Even at that cost, most women couldn’t afford it. In rich countries, racial disparities in maternal care guarantee that white, affluent women would benefit first. Everyone else waits.

This isn’t liberation. IVF followed the same script—revolutionary technology that mostly helps those who can pay for it. The surrogacy market, worth 25 billion US dollars in 2024, created hierarchies where wealthy Westerners rent wombs in poor countries. Artificial wombs would entrench these patterns, not break them.

Men with machines

The real problem, however, runs far deeper. Pregnancy lasts nine months. Childcare lasts decades. Remove gestation from women’s bodies and you’ve solved precisely nothing if women still do nearly all the nappy-changing, school-running, and housework. Artificial wombs redistribute reproductive labour only if that labour meant pregnancy alone. It doesn’t. Ask any mother.

Worse, the technology reinforces exactly the wrong metaphor. Philosophers call it the ‘container model’—treating the foetus as an independent being merely housed temporarily in a woman’s body. This framing devalues gestational labour and makes women seem dispensable. Far from expanding women’s authority over reproduction, artificial wombs risk shrinking it by suggesting that biology confers no special status. Men with machines can do the job.

Then there’s abortion. In jurisdictions where viability determines access, artificial wombs create a nightmarish possibility: foetuses viable from conception. Anti-abortion campaigners see the opportunity clearly. Why terminate when you can transfer? Never mind that this means forcing women into surgery to extract unwanted pregnancies for mechanical incubation. That’s not liberation. That’s reproductive dystopia.

History offers no comfort. Forced sterilisations during the eugenics era. China’s one-child policy. Contemporary patterns of coercion against Black and marginalised women. Reproductive technologies get weaponised. Artificial wombs arrive into societies riddled with inequality and states keen to control reproduction. Without ironclad legal protections—which nobody’s yet drafted—the technology becomes just another tool for determining who breeds and how.

Power relations need reimagining

None of this means artificial wombs lack value. Women facing life-threatening pregnancies would gain genuine options. So would those born without functioning uteri. These are real expansions of reproductive choice. But choice isn’t liberation. Not when the technology costs a fortune, reinforces problematic metaphors about pregnancy and leaves untouched the social arrangements that make child-rearing women’s work.

The philosopher Anna Smajdor argues for a “moral imperative for ectogenesis”. Gestational risks are real; technology that eliminates them must be pursued. Fair enough. But this assumes biology is the problem. What if the problem is workplaces that punish pregnancy, healthcare systems that fail pregnant women, and cultures that treat childcare as mothers’ natural duty? Fix those and you wouldn’t need to outsource gestation to machines.

Firestone wanted technology to free women from their bodies. Half a century later, the technology is finally catching up. But liberation hasn’t arrived and won’t, because engineering solutions can’t fix social problems. Power relations need reimagining. Care work needs redistributing. Inequalities need confronting. Synthetic amniotic fluid can’t do any of that. Until societies address what makes pregnancy oppressive—it’s not biology—artificial wombs remain just another arena where technological possibility meets social reality and loses.

Photo: Dreamstime.