Paper short abstract:

Artificial womb technology (AWT) makes durable the perspectives of Australian participants on reproductive rights and the accessibility of emerging technologies. Simultaneously, AWT radically challenges implicit hierarchies of deservedness with respect to bionormativity, kinship and parenting worth.

Paper long abstract:

Recent advancements in artificial womb technology (AWT) suggest that human clinical trials may be possible within the next decade. The previous introduction of other new reproductive health technologies suggest that implicit cultural biases underpin legislation, regulation and subsidization (Wynn and Foster, 2017). Further, Colen (1995) defined “stratified reproduction” to demonstrate that only some categories of people are empowered to reproduce. As such, our multi-methods study (conducted entirely online during COVID-19 pandemic) aimed to explore Australian perspectives on AWT. From November 2020 to March 2021, we conducted a community-based survey with 183 Australian citizens and 20 semi-structured in-depth interviews with a subset of survey respondents. Our study finds that implicit ideologies about who deserves to reproduce and who deserves state assistance in order to reproduce underpin attitudes towards AWT. Participants were strongly in favour of using AWT in instances of physical infertility and premature childbirth. In contrast, participants expressed reticence at AWT being used in instances of social infertility, for cosmetic reasons or in instances that deviated from bionormative models of family. Our findings suggest that even with the advent of technologies that can disrupt existing models of kinship and increase accessibility of reproduction to non-traditional actors, participants have a tendency to perpetuate stratified models of reproduction. Making these biases explicit and analysing the assumptions about kinship, sexuality and reproduction that underpin them is the first step toward informing new policy, legislation, funding models, and activism to ensure both patient-centered care and that AWT does not simply reinforce existing social hierarchies.