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Over those two years, however, the extreme stress of the situation had led to the breakdown of the Wyatts’ marriage, with the two parents visiting their severely disabled child only infrequently in the hospital ward. A second series of legal clashes ensued, this time over sustaining care for Charlotte. In the end, the child was placed with foster parents. By 2009, her father was visiting her monthly, according to an interview with the Daily Mail. He reported that, though Charlotte still needed some oxygen every day, she loved to listen to nursery rhymes and could stand and walk with the help of a walking frame. ‘Going through the courts to keep Charlotte alive totally drained me,’ he said. ‘But now, when I look at her smiling face, I know it was the best thing I ever did.’

While it is currently feasible to keep the very premature alive, good health and quality of life are by no means guaranteed – and there can be a devastating toll on both child and parents. An artificial womb that can sustain and continue the development of extremely young foetuses could completely reinvent the parameters of neonatal medicine, helping to give children like Charlotte a less traumatic life.

Regardless of such gains, a fully functional artificial womb will also present entirely new ethical dilemmas, including some we may not be ready to negotiate. What if a foetus that would otherwise be aborted could be removed from its mother’s body and gestated artificially? Would that improve the chances of adoption for a child, given that many couples prefer to adopt a baby rather than an older child? Would each year’s 189,574 aborted pregnancies, as occurred in 2010 in England and Wales, be viewed as the prospect of a joyful miracle in the tradition of the first test-tube babies, or would they be seen as supplanting the placement of older children needing a home?

How will this new technology alter the identity of a mother, a role that would cease to trigger a biological bond, even if her own egg is used? For instance, there has been a great deal of research into the hormones oxytocin and arginine vasopressin. In mammals, the levels of these hormones are elevated in mothers’ brains. Oxytocin levels also increase during labour and reach a peak at the time of delivery. Both oxytocin and vasopressin have been linked to the instinct towards maternal care and mother–child and other affectionate, family bonding. The hormones have even been seen to rise when mothers engage in other supportive and bonding behaviours, long after pregnancy, though it is not known how and why this occurs. If a mother did not experience the increase in hormones related to pregnancy, would it make a difference later in life? Would it be possible to give a mother a dose of the hormones, in place of this natural release? It is apparent, from the experiences of many adoptive mothers, that a mother–child bond forms even in the absence of pregnancy, but it may be that those who choose to adopt happen also to have a strong instinct for maternal care. It may be that separating the physical experience of pregnancy from the body of a mother also requires separating it from the mother’s biological brain.

Further, since a child’s identity is in part shaped by the communication of hormones and other information from mother to foetus, pregnancy via an artificial womb would redefine what it means to be a biological parent. Perhaps in the future a mother who uses an artificial womb will primarily be seen as a genetic and social parent, since all of the biological exchanges of pregnancy will gain new significance. Could the artificial womb become yet another symbol of the ways in which a woman is or is not a ‘good mother’? By relinquishing the chance to shape her child’s development from embryo to full term, a mother might be ensuring a more resilient temperament for her offspring, after all. In a case where a woman uses a donor egg and an artificial womb (by choice or necessity), the baby will have neither gestated with the mother nor bear any of her genes. Would the egg donor have more legal rights to the child in this case? In these ways, the very concept of an artificial womb reveals how societies view women. Even in the twenty-first century, a woman is still often defined by her role in procreation.

Consider, for instance, surrogacy, the practice of using another person’s womb to carry your embryo to term. The role of surrogate mother, sometimes described as putting up a ‘womb for rent’, is considered by some to be exploitation, especially as the practice has been more and more often outsourced to countries where a high proportion of the population live in poverty. Countries such as India.

Since 2002, when the Indian government legalized paid surrogate pregnancy – critics say they did so in the hopes of giving birth to a new ‘pink-collar’ industry – young Indian women have been queuing up to become surrogate mothers. There are doctors in nearly every major Indian city working with women who want to be surrogates; there is even a town in the state of Gujarat – its name is Anand, which in Sanskrit means ‘bliss’ – that is poised to claim the mantle of the nation’s go-to centre for paid pregnancy. In 2009, one Mumbai doctor told the London Evening Standard newspaper that she delivers more than fifteen babies for British couples every month – about one every forty-eight hours. (Unfortunately, despite the legalization of the service, the government does not keep reliable numbers of how many women have become surrogates.)

It’s not surprising that Indian women are signing up in hordes – they are paid between $6000 and $10,000 (£3700–£6000) to be a surrogate, which amounts