Apocalypse Imperial Issue▪ Armageddon Imperial Issue▪ Megathron Federate Issue▪ Rattlesnake Victory Edition▪ Raven State Issue▪ Scorpion Ishukone Watch▪ Tempest Tribal Issue Our fear is that scientists are playing God. We forget that humans have in fact always intervened in nature. We are the one species that needs help from others during childbirth. In the 21st century we use fertility treatments, caesareans, incubators, formula milk, and more. But we used forceps and wet nurses even thousands of years ago. Pregnancy and childbirth are as we have made them. In a sense, then, artificial gestation is at the end of a long road we’ve already started to walk. Horn cautions that a “life support system for an infant is decidedly not the same thing as an entirely new form of gestation.” Yet no innovation, however radical it seemed at first, has caused us to love our children any less. It could be argued that by seeing the inner workings of foetal development, and by stepping in to make childbirth safer, we have more reverence for it. Would it necessarily be the case that a child born outside a human womb would be any less cherished – or any less human? It’s in science fiction where the ramifications of ectogenesis are more thrillingly explored. The chilling 2019 film, I Am Mother, about a child raised in isolation from an embryo by a robot in a post-apocalyptic world, took the idea of the artificial parent to its grim limit. A machine may be more competent and rational than a human – but it will never care like one.

Beaverbrook, squirrelled away in a 470-acre enclave of the Surrey Hills outside Leatherhead, is one of the UK’s swankiest country house hotels. Next month it opens the Dower House as the ultimate private party pad. Like the hotel, it has been decorated by the renowned interior designer Nicola Harding with a quintessentially English aesthetic that features a blend of bespoke, upcycled and antique pieces. It has its own pool, treatment room and 55 acres of walled gardens and woodlands, though guests also have the run of the hotel’s estate, including its glamorous spa, tennis, padel tennis and badminton courts. Trumping those temptations though is the car that comes with the house keys — an Aston Martin DBX707 and, if you don’t fancy driving it, your own chauffeur. For now, the focus is on the rather more mundane question of whether, say, an artificial womb would be better at keeping a premature baby alive than an incubator would. While Horn is a skilled writer with a careful grasp of her subject and its fascinating history – handled with poignancy because she was pregnant while writing the book – Eve can feel at times weighted down by these duller practicalities. This isn’t as unlikely as it sounds. In 2017, American researchers trialled a bag filled with artificial amniotic fluid that kept alive an extremely premature lamb foetus. In 2021, Israeli scientists took mice embryos to the foetal stage in an artificial womb. Once these two methods meet in the middle, says Horn, we will have achieved what the biologist JBS Haldane in 1923 termed “ectogenesis”, more prosaically known as “external gestation”. In her thoughtful debut, Eve, legal scholar Claire Horn examines the boundaries of motherhood through an unusual lens: artificial wombs. Doctors now have the technology to keep some premature babies alive from as early as 22 weeks. Horn looks even further into the future, to when childbirth could transcend the human body altogether. How would our relationships to our children change if they were born outside of us? What would it mean for humanity – and for gender – if babies were made by machines?