Will children one day be "grown" outside the body? Artificial wombs promise to revolutionise parenting, but so far they mainly save extremely premature babies
It's one of those images that simultaneously evoke fascination and unpleasant chills. A room full of transparent bags or tanks in which babies are developing in sterile fluid. Parents come to visit, watch the growth of the fetus on display, choose music, light, perhaps even the "optimal" environment. Pregnancy becomes a biological process, a service, a medical interface, a technological stage between conception and birth.
It sounds like a world Aldous Huxley, Netflix or an internet scammer selling a 'pregnancy robot' would love to invent. Part real research, part wishful thinking, part ethical nightmare and part pure viral nonsense. And because the topic touches on parenting, bodies, sexuality, queer families and inequality, there will be a very loud social debate around it for a long time to come.
Not a robotic mother, but a lifeline for premature babies
Let's start with the most important one: artificial wombs are not a technology today that allows to "grow" a child from fertilization to birth. Rather, what is closest to clinical reality is referred to as partial ectogenesis. It is not about replacing an entire pregnancy, but about supporting extremely premature babies at a time when they are already born but their lungs, brains and other organs are not yet ready for life outside the womb.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration describes current artificial womb technologies as devices designed for extremely premature babies after about 22 weeks of pregnancy. The goal is not to push the "viability" threshold ever lower at any cost, but to create a kind of bridge between premature birth and a later stage of development when the baby is more likely to survive with fewer consequences.
The reason for pursuing such a technology at all is very specific and painfully human. According to the World Health Organisation, approximately 13.4 million babies will be born prematurely in 2020, roughly one in ten babies born in the world. Complications associated with premature birth are also among the leading causes of death in children under five.
Today's neonatology can work wonders. But extremely premature babies often pay a high price for their bodies having to breathe air too soon. Lungs that should still have been maturing in a watery environment for weeks are exposed to mechanical ventilation, light, sounds, infections and a whole host of intensive medicine that saves lives but can itself leave consequences. The artificial womb is designed to delay this moment: instead of having to start functioning as a newborn immediately, the baby would remain for some time in an environment that mimics the womb.
Lambs in a transparent bag changed the debate
The most famous breakthrough came from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. A team there developed a system often described as a "biobag": a transparent bag filled with a fluid similar to amniotic fluid. In it, the premature lamb is not connected to a conventional ventilator, but via an umbilical cord to an extracorporeal circuit that exchanges oxygen and carbon dioxide. The fetal heart continues to pump blood in the same way as in the womb.
In preclinical studies, lambs have been able to survive and develop for several weeks in a similar system. It was this animal data that opened the way to consider the first human clinical trials. Scientific American warned as early as 2023 that US regulators were to consider possible testing of a womb-mimicking system in extremely premature babies.
Meanwhile, research continues. Duke University in 2025 described further work on the EXTEND system, which is designed to keep an extremely premature baby in a fluid similar to amniotic fluid until later in development. The authors also emphasize that the system is not intended to make a non-viable pregnancy viable, but to make very early-born babies more likely to survive with less morbidity.
This is a crucial difference. Medicine is not yet moving into a world where two men, a single person or anyone else orders a baby into a laboratory "cocoon" from day one. It moves in a world of parents who give birth at 22, 23 or 24 weeks and whose baby may be offered another chance by modern medicine.
But why are we so interested in the idea of a baby without a pregnancy anyway?
Because once we acknowledge that fetal development can at least partially continue outside the body, the fantasy immediately begins to take off. What if it had been possible from mid-pregnancy? What about from the first trimester? What about from fertilization? What if pregnancy ceased to be a biological limit, a health risk, and a social role historically borne mainly by women?
But it would be more accurate to talk about the pregnant body, not just women. Pregnancy can also be experienced by trans men and non-binary people. At the same time, it is the queer perspective that can very quickly reveal how much our ideas of parenthood are still tied to the "man, woman, child, womb, birth" model in the artificial womb debate.
For gay couples, a complete artificial womb could theoretically represent a major shift. Today, biological parenthood for two men runs up against the limits of reproductive medicine, legislation, egg donation and surrogacy. If one day there were not only an artificial womb but also a safe way to create eggs or sperm from other cells in the body, the reproductive map would be rewritten even more radically.
It is the development of so-called in vitro gametogenesis, the creation of sex cells in the laboratory, that is moving forward rapidly. The Guardian wrote in 2025 about scientists estimating that the creation of viable human eggs or sperm in the lab could be a matter of five to ten years, and in theory the technology could open the way to biological children of same-sex couples. But at the same time, experts stress that safety, genetic risks and regulation remain huge challenges.
A future in which two men have a child genetically linked to both of them, without the need for surrogacy, is therefore conceivable. But conceivable does not mean affordable, safe, legal or ethically resolved.
The end of pregnancy as liberation or a new form of pressure?
At first glance, the artificial womb may seem like an emancipatory technology. Pregnancy is not a romantic advertisement for motherhood. It is a physically demanding, medically risky and socially burdened process. For some people it brings joy, for others it brings trauma, pain, loss of control over the body or economic impact. The idea that parenthood might not be redeemed by the burdens of pregnancy may sound like a revolution.
But there is a darker side to every reproductive technology. If an artificial womb once worked safely, would it really expand freedom? Or would it become another pressure? Could companies one day subtly suggest that it is more "responsible" career-wise not to get pregnant and use external gestation? Could states in countries with low birth rates push for new methods of reproduction? Could pregnancy become something that poorer people keep while richer people pay for a safer technological option?
These are the questions that bioethicists are already addressing today. Researchers in the Future of Human Reproduction program point out that complete ectogenesis, the development of humans from conception to birth outside the human body, remains speculative. Current research mainly concerns partial ectogenesis for extremely premature babies. At the same time, however, the future availability of similar technologies may open up issues of unequal access, commercialisation, reproductive tourism or political abuse.
And then there is another explosive area: abortion. If it were possible to safely move a foetus from the body into an artificial womb, opponents of abortion could argue that it is no longer necessary to terminate a pregnancy, but simply to 'transfer it elsewhere'. But that would fundamentally change the meaning of bodily autonomy. The right not to be pregnant is not the same as the obligation to become a biological parent against one's will. This is why some lawyers and bioethicists warn that technology must not be used as a tool to coerce pregnant people.
Science fiction that has been sold before it exists
A huge business will revolve around artificial wombs long before they are actually ready. There are already viral stories about "pregnancy robots" or futuristic baby factories. Live Science, for example , debunked a viral claim about a Chinese "pregnancy robot" in 2025, pointing out that it was an unverified to false story, while real research is mainly focused on supporting extremely premature babies, not robotic pregnancies from conception to birth.
This is important to the public debate. Reproductive medicine is an area where despair, hope and money meet in an extremely sensitive space. People who cannot have a child often hear promises that sound like last chances. The more futuristic the technology, the greater the risk that clinics, startups, investors and self-proclaimed visionaries will spring up around it, selling more emotion than evidence.
Just look at the current world of assisted reproduction. IVF has changed the lives of millions of people. At the same time, there is a market around it for complementary methods, genetic tests, 'enhancements' and add-ons whose benefits may not always be as clear-cut as the marketing suggests. An artificial womb could take this problem to a whole new level. If hope can be sold, it can also be packaged luxuriously.
What would this mean for queer parenting?
For queer people, perhaps the most interesting thing about the whole issue is that it breaks down the seemingly self-evident biological equation. Parenting doesn't have to look one way. A family doesn't have to come into being only where a sperm, an egg, a uterus, and a heterosexual couple meet. Queer people have known this for a long time, often long before the legislation.
Artificial wombs could one day reduce dependence on surrogacy. They could help people for whom pregnancy is medically dangerous. They could change options for trans people, infertile couples, single parents and same-sex couples. They could also expand the definition of parenthood so that biological attachment ceases to be the prerogative of those who fit into the traditional reproductive anatomy.
But at the same time, we must not confuse technological possibility with justice. If such reproduction is once available only to the rich, a new boundary will emerge between those who can buy a biological future and those who will remain dependent on the old inequalities. The queer community knows very well that the right to a family is not just a matter of medicine, but also of laws, money, recognition and social respect.
