A Womb of One’s Own

That you are reading this right now means at least one thing is certain: someone, somewhere, at some point, gave birth to you. It’s as simple as that — a universal fact. “After all,” writes Claire Horn, a post-doctoral fellow at Dalhousie University, “gestation is one of the few experiences that can be said to impact everyone.” But that might not be the case for much longer.

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the French physician Stéphane Tarnier introduced modern incubators: “glass-fronted boxes” that were heralded as a kind of “Artificial Foster-Mother.” Modelled after the warming contraption zookeepers used to help chicks grow, the “ ‘brooding-hen’ incubator” became a fixture not only in hospitals but also in fairgrounds worldwide. In 1896, spectators flocked to the Kinderbrutenstalt (child hatchery) at the Great Industrial Exposition in Berlin to catch a glimpse of the “structure for infants,” and a year later those in Britain walked away from a...