Rows and rows of glass eggs fill the screen in a viral animated video. Inside each egg is a computer rendering of a human foetus, electrodes attached to its skin. The video is a concept ad for “EctoLife”, an imagined baby factory of the future.

Illegality is a much weaker barrier than impossibility

For the moment, artificial wombs are still science fiction — but the technology may be closer to reality than many people realise. Already, we are capable in principle of growing human babies outside the womb for roughly half of their gestation. In IVF, we create embryos in a petri dish and allow them to develop there for several days before implanting them. At the other end, premature babies can now survive being born as early as just 21 weeks instead of the usual 40. Researchers have managed to grow foetal mice up to halfway through gestation — roughly the same point where a premature human now has a chance of survival — in specialised liquid-filled jars. Developing artificial wombs that take us all the way from conception to “birth” may be just a matter of connecting the dots.

Rather than any particular technical obstacle, the barrier currently holding back the development of pod-grown humans is probably the strict regulations that forbid most experimentation on human embryos. We shouldn’t sit back and assume artificial wombs can’t happen. They very likely could happen, if the necessary research was allowed to take place. Illegality is a much weaker barrier than impossibility: laws can change, or simply be flouted, as we saw in 2018 when a rogue Chinese scientist created gene-edited babies and presented them to the world as a fait accompli.

Compared to the promise of gleaming rows of glass pods, the reality of how humans currently reproduce feels quite anachronistic. In an age of cashierless grocery stores, of payments via palm recognition and advertising fine-tuned to consumer preferences, how frustrating must it be that manufacture of the most important product of all — new human beings — cannot be scaled up or digitised; can only happen slowly and organically within the bodies of individual women?

Proponents of artificial wombs present them as a boon for infertile couples. Once the genie is out of the bottle, there is no way to keep it within these restricted confines of use.

Get ready to live in the pod and eat the bugs

If and when the technology becomes available, having children the traditional way will soon become an eccentric choice, a bit like homeschooling, or sewing your own clothes. Some might say that if you don’t like artificial wombs, nobody is making you use one. The lifestyle choices available to any one individual depend on what everyone else chooses, however, which in turn affects the expectations others have of what constitutes normal behaviour that should be supported and accommodated. The invention of farming at scale didn’t only make keeping your own cow and churning your own butter unnecessary; it also brought about a world where, for a variety of reasons, it is impossible for the average person to have a cow even if they wanted to. If the past is a foreign country, then the technologies of the past have unusable foreign plugs.

Likewise, as the convenient and mess-free new way to reproduce begins to catch on, it will become harder and harder to remain one of the holdouts determined to do it the old way. Suddenly, it becomes much easier for governments to justify no longer supporting the needs of pregnant women. Your reproductive capacity is now redundant; if you’d rather grow your own than buy a subscription to the baby plant, why should we protect your right to maternity leave or medical care? With demand dwindling, are there even any doctors left who have been taught how to deliver babies the human way?

With an efficient, centralised source of new workers, governments can continue positioning having a family as an unaffordable luxury without staring down the barrel of demographic collapse. You’re thirty years old and spend all your salary renting a box room in a flat you share with four strangers? That used to be at least partly the state’s problem as well as your own — but not anymore. Get ready to live in the pod and eat the bugs.

Control over the supply of new citizens has always resided, by biological necessity, with individual women and families — a fact which has long made states uneasy. History is littered with examples of attempts by governments to interfere in the power of individuals to create new people in their own image: from the sterilisation of undesirables or of particular ethnic groups, to the targeted separation of children from their families. Arguably, the ideology of centralised childcare is a dilute form of the same belief: that creating the next generation of workers is far too important to be left in the hands of any old schmuck who happens to have a functioning set of reproductive organs.

If you believe that the most fundamentally vital manufacturing process would remain in the hands (or wombs) of Mr and Mrs Ordinary Citizen once Amazon or the CCP have the opportunity to centralise it, then I have a nice frosty, solid snowball to sell you in the fiery pits of hell. Reliance on individuals for reproduction has always been a bright line holding back the encroachment of state power over the individual. With that line gone, we should be very worried.