Speculative Fiction exploring the inherent sexism of Artificial Wombs

They told us once that we were being relieved of the burden of childbirth. That we should celebrate. No more tearing flesh, no more screaming through labor, no more blood staining white sheets. That was the promise when the first artificial wombs were switched on. I was only a child then, too young to understand what was being stolen.

Sometimes on days like this, after a harvest, as I lie on my bed and wait for the pain to subside, I remember my grandmother’s stories. She told me that birth was bloody and sacred, terrifying and magnificent. That a woman could moan, cry, bleed, and yet still bring forth a child—her body bearing witness to the ferocity and beauty of life. I never knew what she meant until the harvesting began. Only then did I understand what was taken: not just birth, but dignity. Not just pregnancy, but the right to be more than a resource.

The irony isn’t lost on me. For centuries, they told women they were supporting our ability to carry and birth. Then, when machines could do it cleaner, quieter, more efficiently, our wombs became redundant. What they wanted now was smaller, buried deeper: the eggs within us. The one part of our biology they couldn’t renounce. The pain they promised they were releasing us from instead became our whole world.

Now I am thirty-two, and I have been harvested since I was thirteen. Month after month, the men in white coats come with their needles and their cold hands, and I lie still, legs spread, pain twisting through me until I want to scream. They drain what little value my body holds in their eyes. Eggs. That is all I am. The doctors don’t ask, don’t explain. They don’t need to. Consent has long been irrelevant.

Now I am haunted by a paradox: women once suffered through birth, yet they still called it magnificent. I suffer too, but my suffering has no magnificence, no creation, no child to hold in my arms. Only extraction. Only emptiness. This is the future they built: a world where even our suffering is sterile, stripped of meaning, perfected into silence.

I learned to hate my body the way they did.  Messy. Inefficient. Un-male. Every jab of the needle, every cramp, every wave of nausea reminded me of that fact. The men who own us don’t even see us as human anymore. To them, I am not a person, only a shell holding genetic material to be siphoned and catalogued. Some sort of lesser animal.

They say the world is ruled by order now. By hierarchy. By men who have perfected what their ancestors only dreamed. The Heirs of the great Houses grow in glass chambers, tended by machines. They emerge spotless, bloodless, each one destined for power, their lineage carefully catalogued, their genes fine-tuned from the eggs ripped from bodies like mine. The men call it purity. Legacy. Progress.

Only the wealthiest men control this reproduction. They are called the Fathers. They speak of dynasties as if they themselves are gods, their hands never dirty, their children never born through blood nor flesh. They no longer even look at women, except in two contexts: the breeding wards, where we are livestock, and the harems, where flesh is taken not for creation but for their pleasure.

I’ve seen the harem women. Draped in rich colours, perfumed, paraded like prizes. But behind the fabrics, they are prisoners too, their bodies reduced to another form of resource. Stripped, of course, of the unnecessary internal biology… the Fathers wouldn’t want offspring outside their control, formed outside the precise genetic algorithms they cultivate. They are the lucky ones, some say, because at least they are spared the needles, the hormone surges, the knives of egg retrieval. I am not so sure. Both fates are shackles; both strip you of self until you can no longer remember you are human. Just different shades of the same contempt.

And then there are the eunuchs—the boys born from harvested eggs, altered before maturity, trained as servants. They move silently through the halls, eyes downcast, bodies made to serve. Sometimes I wonder if they envy us, or if we envy them. For though we have no freedom, we are spared the blows of the Fathers and their Heirs.

The men who rule call this peace. They compare themselves to the Greeks, to the Romans—civilisations that praised order, hierarchy, control. They forget—or perhaps they remember too well—that those worlds were built on the bodies of women and slaves. They have resurrected that logic, perfected it with machines.

I was told that women once had a hand in shaping history. That we loved, organized, created, resisted. But here, in this world, not even our names are remembered. Our bodies are resources. Our suffering is erased, just as birth itself has been erased.

When I was younger, I used to dream of my grandmother’s stories, where women still bore their own children, even through blood and suffering. She said it was magnificent, to feel life moving inside you, to hold creation within your own body. Now I know I will never feel that. My body has been stripped of that dignity. It is only a site of extraction, something to be farmed.

In my youth when I grew angry from the pain I used to imagine smashing the chambers where they grow the Heirs of powerful men, watching the glass shatter, the machines fail, the infant rupturing onto the floor. Following these thoughts waves of guilt and shame would twist in my gut for weeks: how could I be so vile and uncaring? Sometimes I would imagine what it would be to feel my own body freed from the forced chemical cycles of egg ripening, experience it as mine again, unharvested, unowned. But dreams are dangerous here.

So I’ve learnt to close my eyes when they come with the needles. And I remind myself: I am not a person. I am a resource. I am a silent body. I bite my lip against the pain. It never gets easier, each time as painful as the first. As I lie gazing blankly at the grey ceiling, I weakly hover my hand over my abdomen as if to safeguard the body I am powerless to protect.

I wasn’t always this way—hollowed out, weak, disgusted by the body I live inside. When I was a girl, before the harvesting began, I was free to run and play. My grandmother, a midwife in the old days, told me histories the Father’s forbid: of women who labored on their feet, swaying, moving with gravity and instinct. She told me how midwives knew pregnancy not as an illness but as a potential, birth not as chaos but as power, how she would guide women with touch and presence.

But this fate of women began long, long ago, before my grandmothers time even, when men began the work of perfecting childbirth. First they pushed the midwives out, calling them dirty, uneducated, witches. They replaced them with doctors in crisp coats—men who tied women down on their backs, strapped into stirrups, forced to birth against gravity so it was easier for male eyes and hands. They cut them open with episiotomies, slicing flesh because men knew more efficient ways to birth babies than women’s dumb bodies did,  pulling infants out of cut flesh with cold iron forceps. Rending women’s bodies and minds in ways no healing could ever undo.  Knowing best men calculated pregnancy needed only 39 weeks and so used chemicals to induce birth in a more timely manner. Women’s bodies, so ineffective, so dangerous to the unborn, often needed chemicals and cutting to achieve the safe birth of offspring. And through it all, they told women this was progress. They called it protection.

When the artificial wombs came, the goal was finally achieved. First, they relieved us of the burden of childbirth. Then, once the machines could do it better, quieter, without blood or danger, they relieved themselves of us: the women that for centuries they had hungered to rid themselves of. The gendercide of female infants had throughout time emphasised the worthlessness of the female sex, except of course for reproduction or pleasure. What a burden women had been, contributing so little of value throughout mankind’s history. All great art, science and philosophy was born from men’s brilliant minds.

Now I accept my nothingness, my utility only as a seam of genetic ore to be mined. Nineteen years of hormone injections, endless cycles, the cold gleam of instruments sliding into my body, cramping, bleeding, aching. Each harvest teaches me what they always believed: that my body is gross, dangerous, untrustworthy. Each harvest cycle releases only 15 eggs at the most, the regimen is strict to ensure efficiency. Any material they don’t use straight away is cryogenically preserved for future use… but lately my numbers have been trending down … I know the fate that will soon release me.

As I lie, aching from the last extraction, I think about my grandmother telling me that pain could be sacred, that screams could be magnificent, that women could draw on power buried deep in their body. That life, born from our bodies, was proof of our strength. But I am not strong, I have no power. I am weak, tired, ready for the cycles of pain to end. I feel the ache low in my belly, the bruises blooming where the needles went in. I do not bother to look. I know the marks by heart.

Somewhere in the halls above me, a chamber hums with the life stolen from my body. A son, no doubt destined to inherit the world. His first breath will not smell of blood, or sweat, or milk—only filtered air, only the quiet hum of machines. 

They will call him perfect. They will call him progress. They will never call him mine.

I close my eyes. For nineteen years they have drained me, and for nineteen years I have hated this flesh, this messy, disgusting body. Soon there will be nothing left to take, and I will be relived of this burdensome life. My body has little left to give. The eggs are fewer, the pain outweighs the yield, and I will be replaced by a younger girl. A fresher seam of ore. 

I wonder, briefly, what it might have been to hold a child against my skin, slick with blood, slippery with life. To feel that terrible, magnificent moment of birth. To know it as mine.

Curling to face the wall, I pull my knees to my chest. The thought is too heavy. I let it go.

Somewhere above the dull hum of the mechanical wombs fills the silence.

Speculative fiction often goes hand in hand with future thinking. I find nonchalant discourse about artificial wombs, often by men, to be sexist. Too often, these conversations are framed as if they exist in a vacuum, as if technology simply unfolds in neutral space. But artificial wombs cannot be understood outside the long, violent history of men’s interference in childbirth. From the exclusion and criminalisation of midwives, to the imposition of lithotomy positions that worked against women’s bodies but for male convenience, to routine episiotomies and forceps deliveries that tore women apart in the name of efficiency (source : https://evidencebasedbirth.com/replay-ebb-206-evidence-on-perineal-tears-and-the-importance-of-avoiding-episiotomy-with-ebb-founder-dr-rebecca-dekker/#:~:text=Dr.%20Joseph%20DeLee%20was,in%20the%20late%201990s ), to the more recent trend in 39 week inductions according to hospital timetables rather than women’s rhythms. While technical and medical developments can save lives, it seems there comes a time when the pendulum swings too far. It’s clear from research on obstetric violence that when it comes to birth women in develop nations are all ready living in a technocratic dystopia.

To imagine that artificial wombs would somehow break from this history, to believe they would not perpetuate further violence against women, is naïve at best, purposefully dangerous at worst. The claim that women must be “relieved of the burden of childbirth” ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1n8k312/comment/nchn439/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button ) echoes centuries of patriarchal rhetoric: that women’s bodies are in need of intervention. Yet when women themselves are asked what they want, the answers are clear: not liberation from childbirth, but the right to birth safely, supported, and in the manner they choose. Not more technology, but more humanisation.

Even now, in supposedly advanced healthcare systems, women describe childbirth as dehumanising, coercive, violating : … “A dr yelling at me while I have my legs spread … feels like rape”… “My birth experience was like being raped repeatedly over a 25 h period”… “Being held down on the bed so people could do things to me”… “Emotional blackmail used by Obstetrician to try to coerce me into consenting for unwanted (and unnecessary caesarean)”(source: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10778012221140138 )What many women ask for instead is simple: the option to dim the lights, to birth in water, to be monitored discreetly rather than intrusively, to be surrounded by loved ones, to go into physiological labour, and treated by trusted midwives/medical professionals that treat them with respect and gain consent. Even basic things like presenting absolute risk instead of relative risk (the difference between your risk for xyz doubles vrs your risk increases from 1 in 1000 to 2 in 1000) so women & their families can make informed decisions.

To imagine artificial wombs as the solution to the negative experiences women have in pregnancy and birth, is either accidentally, or purposefully, misogynistic ( https://youtube.com/watch?v=rFcUKoWsaUQ&lc=Ugy65ArHy4O-vrk-iM94AaABAg&si=h5aCoev_STfTONXx ). There are so many levels of improvement that can be made to experiences of pregnancy, birth and child-raising that come well before artificial wombs enter the discussion. Especially given the recent regression of women’s reproductive rights in America.

Many women spend months preparing physically, psychologically and emotionally for their experience of birth. Many more women go through years of difficult IVF for the opportunity to carry and give birth to a child. Discourse on artificial wombs rarely recognises the empowering, enriching, very human experience birth can be for many women. Surely there comes a time in future thinking discourse where we make space to discuss how we grow our humanity, instead of driving technological development relentlessly and mindlessly forward? More technological development seems unlikely to solve many of the complex problems that technological development has helped create across a range of contemporary human experience.

N.b. No where have I suggested we stop using medical or technological developments. I haven’t said that all women have a great birth experience, or that that’s possible. I am just suggesting we need more humanity, not more technology.