Our future. Technology replacing life. It's not just about tomatoes, but human babies too...

Last year, when I discovered that the COVID vaccine and it's effects on fertility were completely unknown (source: UK government website) I woke in the middle of the night with the words 'artificial wombs' in my head. Then I heard the sound of an owl hooting. It was a very spooky moment, more so when I realised that artificial wombs were actually in development.

I've just come across this discussion on Woman's hour with an artificial womb designer and author Helen Sedgwick, whose latest novel The Growing Season, features artificial wombs.

For me, I was so excited to become pregnant and maybe I was a bit of a perfectionist, but I really felt that the relationship began from day one, the moment I knew I was pregnant. Even before perhaps as I'd dreamed of a picture of a little girl in a silver picture frame a few weeks before realising I was pregnant.

I read a book called Prenatal Parenting and it shared how all of our feelings are felt by our baby Our happiness is our baby's happiness. Our stress is their stress. Stress while pregnant can actually contribute to pre-term birth.

And life doesn't always turn out the way we plan it, and there are many factors beyond our control. My best attempts at mothering my child from the very beginning, didn't manage to stop having a birth with medical interventions, but that's another story. As a parent educator I learnt how listening to our children's feelings help them to heal and recover from stress, and difficult experiences.

Anyway, back to babies in the womb. It really strikes me that it is a visceral, five senses experience, of love and attachment, and even when there are challenges, difficult times or hard feelings, that is part of a baby's story, their history, what they absorb in the womb, and how it creates who they are, how they entangle and unpack who they are, later in life, even if they don't consciously remember it.

As a parent educator, working with children, and seeing how they do remember, perhaps more than we realise, has made me understand that these early times, pregnancy and birth, really matter. What happens matter, and how we help children heal and recover afterwards.

Children heal, through tears, tantrums and playing, often replaying the struggles. When my daughter was a toddler she had a habit of climbing over my shoulder, dropping down into my lap, gazing up at me, and saying, ''it's your new baby coming through.'' She also once sat in between my legs, saying ''I'm in the place where babies live before they are born and there are no grown ups.''

What if there were literally no grown-ups? What if the first pages in the baby's story were blank? An artificial environment with no voices, a fake heartbeat and perhaps stories read to them on the weekend during 'visiting hours.'

Listening to this interview I felt my stomach lurch, and tears come into my eyes.

I'm glad that during this interview the interviewer asked sceptical questions, and seemed concerned about the ethics, but I also know how easy it is in our reality for the goalposts to shift, and ethical values to change, as the unthinkable, becomes normal.

While these wombs could be used to improve the survival rates of premature babies, the thought of a baby spending a whole nine months in an artificial environment, seems like a step too far.

A Healing Conversation With My Daughter About Birth from my parenting blog.