Artificial Wombs: Between Saving Lives and Playing Black Mirror

Earlier this year we covered China’s grand plan to fix its birth-rate crisis with humanoid pregnancy robots, android nursemaids carrying lab-gestated babies like luxury Tamagotchis. It was dystopia with a price tag, pitched somewhere between The Matrix and a government white paper.

Now comes something very different. A joint Japanese–Australian team has unveiled EVE therapy, an artificial womb not built to raise birth rates or fuel sci-fi nightmares, but to give extremely premature babies a fighting chance. Instead of android mums, think of a carefully controlled habitat, oxygen, nutrients, and warmth delivered through tubes that mimic nature just enough to keep development going. It’s not about replacing pregnancy; it’s about extending survival.

The contrast is sharp. China’s project has the whiff of population management and organ-farm paranoia. EVE, by comparison, feels almost modest, a clinical tool designed to bridge the cruel gap between too-soon birth and the limits of incubators. Incubators stabilise newborns. Artificial wombs like EVE let them keep growing.

But the sci-fi unease doesn’t disappear. If machines can now stand in for evolution, even temporarily, we are still rewriting the rules of reproduction. Today it’s premature infants in hospital wards. Tomorrow? Who knows which government or corporation decides the next “logical” application.

For now, though, EVE is a reminder that not all artificial wombs belong in dystopian headlines. Some may actually save lives. The rest of us just have to keep asking the awkward question: where does medicine end, and outsourcing humanity begin?