October 22nd, 2025
Interview with Claire Horn
Claire Horn is a Killam postdoctoral research fellow at Dalhousie University’s Health Law Institute. Her work over the last six years has focused on law and policy governing sexual and reproductive health, rights, and technologies. She has written for a variety of academic and nonfiction publications, including the Journal of Medical Ethics, the Medical Law Review, Feminist Legal Studies, Catalyst, Aeon, and Lady Science.
Angel Food: Your book Eve: The Disobedient Future of Birth lies at the intersection of so many interconnected things: legal ethics, cutting-edge biomedical technology, feminist visions for reproductive justice, and eugenicist ideations of control. This makes it incredibly rich and complex and nuanced. It forces the reader to sit with a lot of contradiction and unease about the assumptions we all bring to these topics. How did you come to this project and what was the process of bringing together all these disparate threads?
Claire Horn: I came to this topic in 2016 while researching for my PhD in law. Around that time, there were developments in scientific research that prompted renewed interest in artificial wombs, and I was really fascinated by the legal questions the technology could pose. There was so much that I couldn’t engage with in the scope of a dissertation, and so much that I thought was relevant beyond the context of academic literature. In terms of bringing together the different parts of the book, while writing it I was very much informed by a reproductive justice framework. Reproductive justice was founded by Black feminist grassroots activists and advocates equally for the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to raise a family in a safe and healthy environment, as well as access to the necessary resources to realize these rights. It also understands these things as inextricably linked with other matters of social justice. These ideas helped me to tie together the disparate threads that meet in the book and shaped Eve’s central claim, which is that technologies are only as advanced as the societies into which they are introduced.
Angel Food: You describe two kinds of developing incubator technology in the book. The first is life-sustaining care for very early premature babies (born around 22 or 23 weeks). The second, which is more controversial, involves gestating embryos from the moment of implantation. Could you talk a little bit about each of those and what the ethical or medical issues are around them?
Claire Horn: In a well-resourced hospital today, the point when a preterm baby has a chance of survival is around 23-26 weeks, but complications remain high for babies born before 28 weeks because their organs are not yet sufficiently developed to survive in the outside world. In 2017, researchers in the US created a platform in which they gestated lamb fetuses from the equivalent of approximately 23 weeks in a human for four weeks, bridging this important developmental period. Several research groups are now working on similar technologies around the world. There are differences between these models, but what makes them more like artificial wombs than incubators is that while existing technology treats the complications of preterm birth, these technologies are intended to prevent those complications from arising to begin with by extending the period of gestation. They do this by replicating the environment of the uterus, for example, submerging the extremely preterm baby in continuously circulated artificial amniotic fluid paired with an artificial placenta to deliver nutrients and flush toxins. There have been promising animal trials, and in fall 2023 the FDA convened a clinical advisory committee to explore what would be needed to move to first in human trials.
The other development I look at in the book is research toward cultivating embryos outside the body. Two research teams at Rockefeller and Cambridge universities in 2016 were able to grow embryos on scaffolding up to 13 days, which was quite significant because prior to this point it had been assumed that after around seven days, they would need input from maternal tissue to continue to grow. This showed that embryos could self-organize in the absence of that input for much longer than previously believed. The researchers only stopped due to the 14-day limit, which was then law or strict scientific research guideline in a number of countries. More recently, two groups successfully grew mice from embryos into fetuses with fully formed organs using mechanical artificial wombs, which was the first time mammals had been externally gestated in this way. One group expressed that they hoped to take the mice to full term and eventually replicate the experiment with human embryos if ethics approval permits.
Technology moves much faster than our cultural conversations, and we are often debating ethics well after a technology is in use (we’ve seen this most recently with AI). The immediate, contemporary research on artificial wombs raises ethical, legal, and social questions. For example, what are the ethics of consent in research involving extremely preterm babies and pregnant people? With regard to developments in life-sustaining technology for preterm babies, the pregnant person is actually the first patient and will likely have to undergo an early-stage c-section for the technology to be used, at least initially. Communicating the risks and benefits in a situation where the stakes are extremely high will be a significant challenge, as will demonstrating the efficacy of the treatment against existing forms of care. And in terms of broader social questions, even more so now than when I started writing the book (which was before Roe v. Wade was overturned), reproductive rights are subject to ongoing attacks around the world. In Eve, I examine how (and why) artificial wombs have been drawn on as yet another tool employed by antiabortion legal and political commentators to try to further undermine these rights. The technology, too, is likely to be extremely expensive and complex to use, and I look at what it means to introduce it into circumstances of significant globalized and racialized health inequity among pregnant people and infants.
As to research on embryos, one of the big questions here is around the 14-day limit. The 2016 developments triggered debates about revising that timeline, and it has already changed or is in the process of changing in some jurisdictions. In the book I explore what justifications there would be for going further (for example, better understanding the causes of recurrent pregnancy loss and pregnancy complications), and I also look at what questions we might ask about where to draw the line.
The other thing I delve into in the book is the much more speculative possibility of ectogenesis, which refers to growing a baby outside the body in an artificial womb from implantation through to full term. As I discuss in Eve, there are really substantive legal and scientific barriers as to whether such a thing would ever be possible. But ectogenesis is something we have been speculating on for hundreds of years, since the first incubators in the 1800s generated a rumor that it had become possible to grow babies like flowers in a green house. In Eve, I look at how speculation about the future of ectogenesis tells us quite a bit about contemporary attitudes toward pregnancy, birth, and motherhood.
Angel Food: You engage in really thoughtful ways with feminist scholarship, contemporary and past, and its different visions for artificial wombs and liberation from reproductive labor. Could you talk about how different currents of feminist thought have treated these questions and where you might depart from some of them?
Claire Horn: One feminist contention about ectogenesis, going all the way back to the 1920s but made famous by Shulamith Firestone in the 1970s, was that it could allow women to share and redistribute the work of pregnancy and birth. Firestone wrote “pregnancy is barbaric”, that it had consequences ranging from nausea to death, and that because of the domination of scientific research by men we could put a man on the moon but had no alternative to pregnancy. She felt that because pregnancy and birth were inequitably distributed, so too was the work of childcare.
There is also a thread of more recent liberal feminist commentary that situates the artificial womb as a technology we should invest in to ensure gender equity. There is a distinction between this argument and Firestone’s claims, in that she emphasized liberation, not equity, and argued that in the hands of researchers within her contemporary society, the technology was unlikely to be used in liberatory ways.
On artificial wombs to establish gender equity, I always come back to a quote from sociologist Dorothy Roberts, who looked at the framing of reproductive technologies as new choices to increase “individual freedom” in her 1999 book Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. Roberts pointed out that positioning technologies in this way “operates like blinders that obscure issues of social power that determine the significance of reproductive freedom and control. It obscures them, not by ignoring them altogether, but by claiming to achieve individual freedom without the need to rectify social inequalities.” The same thing, I think, is true for arguments that imagine ectogenesis as a way out of gender inequity in parenting. For a more just world for all pregnant people and all parents, you have to first redress the inequalities that produce conditions in which pregnancy and birth are often (and inequitably so) difficult and dangerous, and in which childcare falls disproportionately on women. In Eve I argue that technology in and of itself cannot solve social problems: these are issues that require social solutions, such as culturally safe, gender inclusive, and respectful pregnancy and birth care for all, universal childcare, equitable parental leave, and substantive shifts in social attitudes toward gender and parenthood.
I think feminist contentions about artificial wombs though, and the possible futures they could represent, are important political provocations; and that they are particularly confronting in this moment in which we are seeing a resurgence of regressive messaging about pregnancy and mothering as a woman’s “natural” role.
Angel Food: In the US, where Angel Food is based, there is of course a very coordinated attack on reproductive rights across the board, starting with abortion, but extending to IVF, surrogacy, sperm and egg donation, and pregnancy healthcare generally. You point out in Eve that the right has both an obsession with biological parenthood and "natural" birth, but also an interest in wielding artificial womb technology as a weapon of control. Since your book came out in 2023, how do you see this technology or debate fitting into the current landscape in the US and elsewhere in the world?
Claire Horn: Eve is a book about what kind of world we are headed toward based on contemporary issues. Our current context is one of significant injustice, one of contemporary challenges to reproductive and human rights and ongoing racialized, classed, and globalised maternal and infant health inequality, one in which the legacy of eugenics persists, and in which binary ideas of gender in pregnancy care and parenthood continue to cause harm. When I wrote the book, I was thinking about the stakes of how we speculate on our future, which has only become more pressing. While I was writing Eve, there had been an exchange among a number of tech bros, Musk among them, about the possibility of “synthetic wombs” to increase the birth rate. In the last couple of years since then, we have seen a real rise in tech billionaires promoting pronatalism. I think this is an example of how we risk mapping all the limitations of our present: health inequality, white supremacy, rigid gender norms, reproductive control, on to technologies to come. I think the precondition of a world where artificial wombs could be used to benefit all pregnant people is realising the aims of reproductive justice.
Angel Food: You were pregnant while writing this book. How did that change or inform your work?
Claire Horn: I often get asked about writing the book while pregnant, and I would say it was interesting in that none of my opinions changed. It reinforced how I felt about the importance of protecting reproductive rights as human rights, my anger about the injustice of insufficient care for pregnant people and the surveillance of pregnant peoples’ bodies. But it did shape the process of my writing. My deadline was the predicted arrival date of my baby, and the chapters followed the course of my pregnancy. The end of the draft was the end of my pregnancy: I turned it over to my editor and had my baby a week later. The process of the book being in the world, doing revisions, and doing interviews after it was published, was all accompanied by nursing, caring for this very real small person, and learning to be a parent. It meant that the subject matter and the book itself felt more intimate than it might otherwise have done, and it did also make me attentive to all these intangible, relational things that occur during pregnancy that cannot be replicated.
Angel Food: We are a literary magazine so — what is some of your favorite fiction or other creative media about pregnancy, parenthood, reproductive justice, or artificial wombs?
Claire Horn: There is so much so I will name the first few things that come to my mind. Liz Berry’s poem “The Republic of Motherhood,” is one that I often return to. I love Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters and We Rip the World Apart by Charlene Carr as books that explore pregnancy and parenthood, Rouge by Mona Awad for its depiction of a complex relationship between a mother and a daughter, and Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi as a novel that draws themes of reproductive justice to the fore. Separately, I have really enjoyed the podcast The Longest Shortest Time, which while nonfiction, brings together different experiences of pregnancy, birth, and parenting creatively.