Should we adapt birth for our culture of convenience and control?

Central Saint Martins, London | December 2018

We live in an increasingly technocratic world. We trust technology to solve our most complex and intimate problems and use it to control every aspect of our lives. When it comes to birth, one of our most basic biological processes, there are many who imagine a world of external wombs as being the ultimate freedom from biology, a promise of complete control and liberation for women from the unpredictable and dangerous condition of pregnancy.

Western healthcare has a way of normalizing technological interventions originally invented to address emergencies. The rise of amniocentesis and scheduled Cesarean sections illustrate a culture where pregnancy is considered a pathology and a risk to be mitigated, instead of the 100,000 year old biocultural process it is.

As we continue to develop extracorporeal wombs for premature babies, we must consider how this technology may be normalized and communicated as the safest, most convenient, and preferred birth plan for tomorrow’s reproductive woman.