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reigns. In 2011, for example, Eva Ottosson, a fifty-six-year old mother of two from Nottingham, England began proceedings to have her womb transplanted into her twenty-five-year-old daughter, Sara. Sara was born lacking a uterus and some parts of the vagina, yet wanted to experience pregnancy and childbirth. In an interview with the Telegraph newspaper, Sara expressed no uneasiness about receiving the womb that had carried her to term. ‘I’m a biology teacher, and it’s just an organ like any other organ,’ she said. Eva had asked, ‘Isn’t it weird?’ – but her daughter had answered with an unequivocal no. On the other hand, many people undergoing organ transplants later report feeling as though something about them has changed – not just that a physical bit has been grafted into them, or that they have recovered their health, but that they have acquired new tastes, behaviours, or personality traits, which they usually link to the donor. It might be that the womb, because it has been viewed historically as a vessel for another life, doesn’t trigger the same feelings in transplant recipients. But if it does, there may be some odd feelings after the procedure, despite Sara’s sure answer.

In any case, the surgery, scheduled for 2012, is not something that the mother and daughter take lightly. Sara noted that she was ‘more worried that my mum is going to have a big operation.’ Indeed, Mats Brännström, the surgeon planning the groundbreaking transplant, has been working on the procedure for years. He is convinced that it will be more technically demanding than a kidney, liver, or heart transplant. He is especially focused on the complicated connections between the womb and the blood supply and between the womb and the vagina. Will these surgically created connections be strong enough to survive the strain of pregnancy?

Brännström has had successes with some early operations, conducted in sheep. He and his team were able to remove the wombs of five ewes, keep the tissues alive outside of the body for a couple of hours, and then replace the wombs in the original animals, reconnecting the blood supply and the vagina successfully. And four of the five ewes subsequently became pregnant. Brännström and his colleagues have also performed the procedure on mice, rats, and baboons, with two out of five baboons that underwent the surgery resuming regular menstruation afterwards. These are small, incremental steps, but transplantation in humans is the end goal.

Of course, even if Brännström succeeds, womb transplants may not be a viable option for everyone – think of a woman who has already had an invasive hysterectomy in order to remove cancer then choosing to undertake a series of transplant operations, with all of the medical risks that would entail. A safer, more desirable course of action might be to turn to a womb outside of your own body. Though today the technology is quite limited, researchers in the field are right to believe that a fully functional artificial womb will come to exist in the next decade or so.

There is obviously a complicated relationship between an embryo in the womb and its mother, in terms of how a developing baby develops an immune system and takes on board a range of environmental cues while in a mother’s body. Indeed, there are many issues that are still not understood, about epigenetics and more. Yet, much has been learned about the underpinnings of disease in the last couple of decades, and that knowledge is breaking open the last remaining barriers to an artificial womb for humans. An artificial womb, after all, will primarily be used to bridge the gap between the fertilization of an egg in a test tube and the movement of the developing embryo into an incubator – since Amillia Taylor’s birth a period approaching a brief twenty weeks. And it could help to save pregnancies, whether their origins are in vitro or in vivo, in which the embryo is not yet able to survive with current incubator technology – including many ectopic pregnancies that could endanger the life of the carrying parent.

But an artificial womb could also offer solutions, much as IVF did, both for those with clinical need (which would include gay men if you consider that neither partner will have a womb of their own, and will clinically need one if they want to have a child) and for those who opt for it for various other reasons. For many women who use IVF to become pregnant, the time, pain and expense are wasted when their babies fail to implant in their own wombs. The reasons why this happens are currently not clear, but having access to another womb in a controlled environment certainly sounds like a helpful option for them. During labour, the birth canal is sometimes a treacherous place for babies and the ordeal can lead to death – a scenario that would be avoided if gestation were not inside the woman’s body. And because, of course, a woman would not technically have to carry her child, and as pregnancy poses a risk to the mother – in particular, it can genuinely endanger the health of an older mother – this is one advantage, and a use of the technology that becomes very tricky to argue against.

But if you remove a foetus’s development from the context of the ‘natural’ womb, an idea that some opponents say is like putting a foetus in a box for forty weeks, will you also remove the ‘special bond’ that forms between a mother and her child? To all intents and purposes, however, this question is a red herring: carrying a baby has never been a prerequisite for loving one’s baby or being able to bond with it – otherwise the same issues would be an argument against adoptive parents, mothers who use surrogates, and