Technocratic Birth
“Encouraging public discourse on controversial reproductive technologies through design fiction and realism”
Do reproductive technologies empower women?
Recent scientific advancements in artificial wombs and sex cells grown from skin offer hope for parents of premature babies and people struggling with infertility. For healthy women, they promise liberation from reproductive duties or a way to beat their biological clocks.
However, even as big companies begin to offer egg-freezing benefits to female employees, countries like the United States are still battling for reproductive freedoms and paid maternity leave. Will technology deliver us from our biology, or does it promise something that technology alone cannot solve?
This project explores how design fiction and realism can promote critical discussions of emerging reproductive technologies and their place in society. The project introduces XX BIOSYSTEMS, a fictional company offering experimental pregnancy services to those seeking an alternative to in vivo birth. Through documentary-style film, it follows two women on their controversial journey to motherhood, investigating the motivations, anxieties and vulnerabilities that may drive us to the complete medicalisation of birth. The film asks whether birth is a tried and true biocultural process, a problem to be solved, or something in between.
With the aim of engaging the public in debate around how these technologies are marketed, regulated and implemented, the project explores our relationship with technology, the complexities of choice and what it means to be human.