Evie Kendal, Science Fiction and the Ethics of Artificial Wombs (London: Bloomsbury, 2025) 240 pp. £76.50 Hb. ISBN: 9781350542976
Ectogenesis, the name given to technologies that allow gestation external to the human body through artificial wombs, is one of the most important current fields of study in biotechnology and reproductive science. The ethical discussions of this technology are contentious, and often warped by perceptions (and misperceptions) created by its inclusion in fiction which feed into reporting by journalists and criticism by pundits. There is a growing corpus of scholarship on the interrelation between the science fiction genre and biotechnology to which Evie Kendal’s book contributes.
Kendal’s focus seems clear from the earliest pages: ectogenesis is of medical, social, economic, and political benefit to women, foetuses, homosexuals, and infertile people, and it is a ‘poverty of imagination’ and patriarchal mythologising of natural pregnancy that serve as barriers (4). This poverty of imagination, Kendal argues, emerges from an overreliance on negative representations of ectogenesis by ethicists, and supports a ‘techno-conservative view of human reproduction and definitions of family’ (6). Likewise, criticisms of artificial wombs from radical feminists which emphasise the capacity for appropriation of reproductive technologies by the patriarchal order, are castigated as ‘fundamentalist’, treating ‘women and their experiences of reproduction in the aggregate, a collective of potentially pregnant persons, rather than individuals’ (9). Kendal’s position is treated as a compromise emphasising individual reproductive freedoms over collective control of reproductive technology.
Kendal’s chapter ‘Locating Ectogenesis’ provides a review of the current state of the science of artificial womb technologies, alongside its history of representations in media, and the role of that media in shaping the bioethical discussions of the technology. Kendal is candid when discussing the contradictions that emerge from feminist discussions of power and reproduction ‘regarding the potential for procreation to serve as a source of female empowerment or disempowerment’ (19). She explicates the nuances of the debates around ectogenesis beyond the simple should or should not of engagement with the technology, extracting the ethics of selection criteria, access, decision-making authority, foetal extraction, and of foetal rights once removed from the womb.
Kendal goes on to position bioethics within philosophies of imagination, with particular focus on the impact of visual imagination and visual bioethics. She explores the contradiction created between the ‘manicured foetal images’ employed by the right-to-life movement which overlay cultural conceptions of personhood onto the foetus through visualisation, and the equivalent ‘free-floating foetal image’ that ‘invoke feelings of horror or disgust, rather than concern for the foetus’ (50). Kendal’s analysis of Michael Bay’s The Island (2005) and the Wachowskis’ The Matrix (1999) serves well in this regard. Her warning of the harmful cycle between science fiction writers and conservative ethicists, where a writer draws on contemporary bioethical debates in their writing, and their work go on to be used by opponents of biotechnology as examples against that technology, is compelling. The decision to employ Suvin’s definition of science fiction, with its prioritising of utopian fiction, is thus pragmatic in the face of the prevalence of negative portrayals of ectogenesis.
The chapter concerning science fiction’s engagement with bioethics is the weakest section of the book, consisting mostly of a list of science fiction tropes tangentially involving ectogenesis. Her analysis of the mad scientist trope and the negative consequences of its employment in science fiction of ectogenesis is sufficient for her purposes. Her use of science fiction that portrays societies in which ectogenesis is a necessity, like the all-male society of Ethan of Athos, is valuable in her raising questions about the assumptions made about procreation as a sexed act. Most of the examples used, however, deviate from the assumed focus of the book. The analysis of human-animal hybrids in science fiction, for example, is out of place and even Kendal points out that the ectogenesis is ‘superfluous’ (74). Her warnings about the relationship between ectogenesis and the commodification of babies through narratives of human farming is worth future analysis, with greater focus on the more-likely designer babies phenomenon.
The fourth chapter on bioethics’ engagement with science fiction targets the use and misuse of science fiction by several involved actors. Science communicators and journalists are noted for their lack of neutrality in reporting, their use of science fiction like Brave New World creating inherently negative framing even where it is inappropriate and irrelevant to the topic being reported on. Lawyers and policy makers are met sympathetically, with Kendal using examples of such figures using science fiction to fill absences left by actual scientific and legal scholarship. Scientists are similarly treated by Kendal. Her identification of the dichotomy between bioethicists employing specific texts of science fiction, while also disdaining the invocation of the genre, offers an invaluable insight into the problems that the use of science fiction in bioethics writing can have. The role of fear created by science fiction, and the resulting techno-conservatism is well argued by Kendal.
The fifth chapter reveals that Kendal buried the lede in this book. This is the most actionable chapter, offering a methodology for bioethical scholarship and pedagogy. Her case study is also far more useful than the fragmentary listing of tropes in Chapter Three. While the choice of Octavia Butler’s Dawn as a case study is odd, which Kendal herself notes, considering ‘artificial wombs are only explicitly mentioned in the text once’ the actual employment of Kendal’s methodology is impressive (133). Through her ‘bioethics-in-literature’ approach, it is here that Kendal offers important challenges to the negative portrayals of biotechnology like ectogenesis in the use and misuse of science fiction by bioethicists (120). Potential solutions to valid problems with ectogenesis are offered through this framework. The ethics of the design of artificial wombs is strongly argued, with design arguments for the benefit of the foetus, for prospective parents, and for public perception.
Science Fiction and the Ethics of Artificial Wombs reads in parts as though the artificial wombs were secondary to Kendal’s actual goals. While the introductory chapters offer a valuable review of ectogenesis from the scientific and bioethical perspectives, the true value of the book is in the final chapter which provides material that can be applied far more broadly. This may not be the go-to book for someone looking for a complete bioethics for ectogenesis. It is however an important book for those researching literature and bioethics including ectogenesis. I am hopeful that the project Kendal describes of a codified ‘creative utopian bioethics methodology’ comes to fruition (160). If it is going to, this book is a strong start.
Jake Street, Lancaster University
