Event Details

Join us for a lunchtime discussion celebrating Evie Kendal's new book, Science Fiction and the Ethics of Artificial Wombs. Evie will be in conversation Future of Human Reproduction team members Stephen Wilkinson and Georgia Walton.

Mark your calendar for a lunch time discussion with the Future of Human Reproduction research project and Evie Kendal: bioethicist, public health scientist, and senior lecturer in health promotion, as we celebrate the launch of her new book, Science Fiction and the Ethics of Artificial Wombs.

Evie will be in conversation with bioethicist Stephen Wilkinson and English Literature researcher Georgia Walton.

This event is free and will include time for questions and answers from the audience.

Book description:

Ectogenesis, or artificial wombs, is not yet a reality. But is it the future? In this revolutionary book, Evie Kendal explores the potential that ectogenesis has to promote sexual equality in human reproduction, and the role science fiction plays in imagining possible futures where this technology is realised.

Arguing against techno-conservative views of reproduction from a liberal feminist perspective, this interdisciplinary volume examines the benefits that growing a foetus in an artificial environment could bring in saving women from the sole burden of gestation. Further considering the complex dynamic between ectogenesis and science fiction, Kendal highlights several problems with the current methods of engagement with science fiction in bioethics. Proposing alternatives, she argues that new methods should capitalise on science fiction’s ability to both communicate biotechnical change and explore how to integrate emerging technologies into society.

With extended case studies, including Dawn by Octavia E. Butler, Science Fiction and the Ethics of Artificial Wombs brings together bioethics, philosophy, feminist thought and literary theory to tackle urgent questions about how we think about and imagine this potential new way of creating human life.