Outer Origin
A Discourse on Ectogenesis and the Value of Human Experience
By: Laura Johnson Dahlke
210 pages
Paperback
ISBN-10 : 1666772097
Pickwick Publications
April 25, 2024
Purchase - Publisher: $30.00
Reviewed by Agnes R. Howard, PhD
A Discourse on Ectogenesis and the Value of Human Experience
By: Laura Johnson Dahlke
210 pages
Paperback
ISBN-10 : 1666772097
Pickwick Publications
April 25, 2024
Purchase - Publisher: $30.00
Reviewed by Agnes R. Howard, PhD
What would be lost if humans were gestated, start to finish, outside of a human body?
Laura Johnson Dahlke reckons that cost in Outer Origin: A Discourse on Ectogenesis and the Value of the Human Experience. She predicts that humans soon will use artificial wombs. Dahlke judges that something significant will be compromised in the process and struggles to name what that significance is. Her argument traces technological advances that predispose humans to embrace ectogenesis. She explains why people now might want to grow babies outside bodies, even why we may think we have to.
Explaining why we should not want to pursue this path is the task of the book’s final sections. Ectogenesis will happen but it is not inevitable. Its inexorability is central to the thesis of this book: “The purpose of this book is to present a discussion on ectogenesis before the headlines report a child arriving by this technology,” she begins (xvii). She is firm on this point: humans will grow babies outside the body of a mother because humans have chosen to do so. Artificial wombs will mark a change in degree not kind. This may be the boldest part of her argument, that there is nothing bold about expecting ectogenesis to come to pass.
As much as this book registers concern about artificial wombs, it is just as much a case against those who consider these devices to be far-out science fiction, because that assumption greases the way to accepting the technology. Dahlke's task is to help readers see how past and present obstetric interventions already predispose stakeholders--prospective parents, healthcare institutions, doctors, regulatory bodies--to accept ectogenesis as it comes. Therefore, we must set boundaries to our acceptance.
The author builds a case around literature, history of science, and medical practice to argue that ectogenesis is the logical progression from reproductive ideas long endorsed in Europe and the United States. Paracelsus, Brave New World, Gattaca, and futurist writings situate artificial wombs as just the next step following forceps, cesareans, anesthesia, contraception, and assisted reproduction. Scientists already know how to start and end gestation in glass through IVF and incubators. Growing human offspring outside of the body is also a logical consequence of experiments done on non-human mammals, like the biobags successfully used to gestate lambs.
And of course, ectogenesis is also a logical outcome of anti-woman assumptions, ancient and modern, that envision females as misbegotten or inferior bodies.
The book’s theoretical heft derives from Martin Heidegger's cautions about technology. Heidegger warned about enframing, the modern trust in machines that shape our sense of what is possible. Instead, we should discern how we want to use machinery since, as the author maintains, “the first step in fostering a free relationship to technology comes from questioning” (72). The author extends Dana S. Belu's concept of reproductive enframing, where medical management treats women as fungible raw materials to optimize. Dahlke proposes extra-uterine destining to name regrettable current attitudes that make ectogenesis look fated rather than optional.
The author casts older obstetric technologies as precedents for artificial wombs, things imposed to make birth more uniform and efficient (25). But birth-related technologies can be meaningfully distinguished from each other. Impetus to aid birth through tools is not equivalent to the desire to eliminate human birth altogether. Some tools aim to remove perceived pollution of the female body from man’s experience of generation, while others seek to protect the female body from harm.
A technology may intend to protect men from women or to protect women. Dahlke recognizes that these apparently contrary motivations can converge. What some women do not like about being pregnant and what men do not like about the mess of the female body might come to the same issue, a problem to eliminate. Indeed, artificial wombs sometimes get promoted as feminist advances on grounds that they liberate women from consequences of sex and equalize adults by setting parenthood apart from the embodied experience of both sexes.
Straining to explain what is not just natural but good, to justify what should not need justification, Dahlke assembles a defense of embodied reproduction. She presents some attributes of birth that matter to individuals and some to humans at large. She reminds us that birth is important in its universality, drawing humans together because we all are of woman born. She proposes that birth also matters as a site of individuation and uniqueness. Above all, birth is an occasion of awe, human accommodation to vastness (149). Birth can be a peak experience for an individual, which redounds to the general good. The author’s ascription of awe to birth jars a little against the book’s overall emphasis on the span of gestation rather than just its dramatic conclusion. Still, she is right that bringing a new person into life is not just good for the woman who does it but for society and species, as “awe enriches the collective” (161).
If ectogenesis becomes the norm in birth, “humanity has much to lose” since women would less often have access to this transformation (165). Because “[m]aternal awe, too, has been foundational to the human race, with its transformative effects reverberating throughout history,” Dahlke argues, “People everywhere must ponder the significance of what heretofore has been their most common link–shared natality and birth” (165).
Must people everywhere ponder the significance of embodied birth? Many seem to prefer not to. They soon may be willing to give up this work of the body exactly because they never shared appreciation of that “most common link” in the first place. Dahlke explicates awe through analysis of the writings of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, and other men. A fine long tradition exists to describe the sublime. But if readers need to be persuaded that birth is awesome through the authority of Edmund Burke in order to encourage us not to subcontract this job to a machine, then the game might already be lost.
Americans tend to approach pregnancy as though its point is its product, a baby. If we already view childbearing as a mechanical process, why not let a machine do it? Dahlke finds this a failure of imagination: “Childbirth has been depicted as a bodily function with little to offer in the way of betterment, so society now has entered into an era where birth is primarily child-focused without properly valuing the informative power of the process” (33-34). But what is the “betterment” that pregnancy offers, and what information does the process communicate?
People care about having babies. But the significance of birth is strangely difficult to describe to those not already convinced. Whether pregnancy and birth are explained in terms of human dependence, character formation, or potential for beginnings, the event of carrying and delivering a developing baby can leave listeners cold. The fact that American culture never found consensus to appraise pregnancy and birth as important helps explain why technology meets a people predisposed to give those foundational moments up.
The case against ectogenesis can be fortified by finding fuller language to name why it is good that humans are of woman born. Bearing and birthing are important to humanity as a unique period of shared life. The relationship between woman and fetus dazzles by paradoxes: one body becoming two; the pair simultaneously strangers and intimately known to by proximity and genes; a dependent body redefining an independent one. Pregnancy is hospitality, physical welcome of one to another. Pregnancy is a virtuoso performance of the body’s functions, not just reproductive parts called into new operation but extraordinary ramping up of the regular ones. Breath, heartbeat, digestion usually employed for only one user meet the pregnant woman’s heightened needs, plus the varying demands of an other. The body deserves astonishment that it works this way. We have not done altogether well in sharing this astonishment as a common assumption in contemporary cultures.
Though Dahlke's predictions about ectogenesis are persuasive, what shakes its inevitability may be, perhaps ironically, the very power of our technological enframing. Efficient vessels–plastic? glass?--for genetically manipulated offspring may be the way people choose to have children. But more adults seem less interested in coupling or in children. Current low birthrates could also frame a post-human future less interested in producing new human bodies at all, not just producing them outside the pelvic limits of human females.
In any event, if we hope to follow Dahlke’s lead and hold on to what really matters about human gestation, we should get better at saying what that is, and fast.
Agnes R. Howard is adjunct assistant professor of humanities at Christ College, Valparaiso University, and author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us about Being Human (2020) and Disoriented: Embodied Life in Strange Times (2026).
Date of Review: May 15, 2026
How to cite this review:
Howard, Agnes R. Review of Outer Origin: A Discourse on Ectogenesis and the Value of Human Experience. Laura Johnson Dahlke. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2024. Society for the Study of Pregnancy and Birth Reviews, May 2026. https://www.ssprb.org/book-review-outer-origin.html.
Laura Johnson Dahlke reckons that cost in Outer Origin: A Discourse on Ectogenesis and the Value of the Human Experience. She predicts that humans soon will use artificial wombs. Dahlke judges that something significant will be compromised in the process and struggles to name what that significance is. Her argument traces technological advances that predispose humans to embrace ectogenesis. She explains why people now might want to grow babies outside bodies, even why we may think we have to.
Explaining why we should not want to pursue this path is the task of the book’s final sections. Ectogenesis will happen but it is not inevitable. Its inexorability is central to the thesis of this book: “The purpose of this book is to present a discussion on ectogenesis before the headlines report a child arriving by this technology,” she begins (xvii). She is firm on this point: humans will grow babies outside the body of a mother because humans have chosen to do so. Artificial wombs will mark a change in degree not kind. This may be the boldest part of her argument, that there is nothing bold about expecting ectogenesis to come to pass.
As much as this book registers concern about artificial wombs, it is just as much a case against those who consider these devices to be far-out science fiction, because that assumption greases the way to accepting the technology. Dahlke's task is to help readers see how past and present obstetric interventions already predispose stakeholders--prospective parents, healthcare institutions, doctors, regulatory bodies--to accept ectogenesis as it comes. Therefore, we must set boundaries to our acceptance.
The author builds a case around literature, history of science, and medical practice to argue that ectogenesis is the logical progression from reproductive ideas long endorsed in Europe and the United States. Paracelsus, Brave New World, Gattaca, and futurist writings situate artificial wombs as just the next step following forceps, cesareans, anesthesia, contraception, and assisted reproduction. Scientists already know how to start and end gestation in glass through IVF and incubators. Growing human offspring outside of the body is also a logical consequence of experiments done on non-human mammals, like the biobags successfully used to gestate lambs.
And of course, ectogenesis is also a logical outcome of anti-woman assumptions, ancient and modern, that envision females as misbegotten or inferior bodies.
The book’s theoretical heft derives from Martin Heidegger's cautions about technology. Heidegger warned about enframing, the modern trust in machines that shape our sense of what is possible. Instead, we should discern how we want to use machinery since, as the author maintains, “the first step in fostering a free relationship to technology comes from questioning” (72). The author extends Dana S. Belu's concept of reproductive enframing, where medical management treats women as fungible raw materials to optimize. Dahlke proposes extra-uterine destining to name regrettable current attitudes that make ectogenesis look fated rather than optional.
The author casts older obstetric technologies as precedents for artificial wombs, things imposed to make birth more uniform and efficient (25). But birth-related technologies can be meaningfully distinguished from each other. Impetus to aid birth through tools is not equivalent to the desire to eliminate human birth altogether. Some tools aim to remove perceived pollution of the female body from man’s experience of generation, while others seek to protect the female body from harm.
A technology may intend to protect men from women or to protect women. Dahlke recognizes that these apparently contrary motivations can converge. What some women do not like about being pregnant and what men do not like about the mess of the female body might come to the same issue, a problem to eliminate. Indeed, artificial wombs sometimes get promoted as feminist advances on grounds that they liberate women from consequences of sex and equalize adults by setting parenthood apart from the embodied experience of both sexes.
Straining to explain what is not just natural but good, to justify what should not need justification, Dahlke assembles a defense of embodied reproduction. She presents some attributes of birth that matter to individuals and some to humans at large. She reminds us that birth is important in its universality, drawing humans together because we all are of woman born. She proposes that birth also matters as a site of individuation and uniqueness. Above all, birth is an occasion of awe, human accommodation to vastness (149). Birth can be a peak experience for an individual, which redounds to the general good. The author’s ascription of awe to birth jars a little against the book’s overall emphasis on the span of gestation rather than just its dramatic conclusion. Still, she is right that bringing a new person into life is not just good for the woman who does it but for society and species, as “awe enriches the collective” (161).
If ectogenesis becomes the norm in birth, “humanity has much to lose” since women would less often have access to this transformation (165). Because “[m]aternal awe, too, has been foundational to the human race, with its transformative effects reverberating throughout history,” Dahlke argues, “People everywhere must ponder the significance of what heretofore has been their most common link–shared natality and birth” (165).
Must people everywhere ponder the significance of embodied birth? Many seem to prefer not to. They soon may be willing to give up this work of the body exactly because they never shared appreciation of that “most common link” in the first place. Dahlke explicates awe through analysis of the writings of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi, and other men. A fine long tradition exists to describe the sublime. But if readers need to be persuaded that birth is awesome through the authority of Edmund Burke in order to encourage us not to subcontract this job to a machine, then the game might already be lost.
Americans tend to approach pregnancy as though its point is its product, a baby. If we already view childbearing as a mechanical process, why not let a machine do it? Dahlke finds this a failure of imagination: “Childbirth has been depicted as a bodily function with little to offer in the way of betterment, so society now has entered into an era where birth is primarily child-focused without properly valuing the informative power of the process” (33-34). But what is the “betterment” that pregnancy offers, and what information does the process communicate?
People care about having babies. But the significance of birth is strangely difficult to describe to those not already convinced. Whether pregnancy and birth are explained in terms of human dependence, character formation, or potential for beginnings, the event of carrying and delivering a developing baby can leave listeners cold. The fact that American culture never found consensus to appraise pregnancy and birth as important helps explain why technology meets a people predisposed to give those foundational moments up.
The case against ectogenesis can be fortified by finding fuller language to name why it is good that humans are of woman born. Bearing and birthing are important to humanity as a unique period of shared life. The relationship between woman and fetus dazzles by paradoxes: one body becoming two; the pair simultaneously strangers and intimately known to by proximity and genes; a dependent body redefining an independent one. Pregnancy is hospitality, physical welcome of one to another. Pregnancy is a virtuoso performance of the body’s functions, not just reproductive parts called into new operation but extraordinary ramping up of the regular ones. Breath, heartbeat, digestion usually employed for only one user meet the pregnant woman’s heightened needs, plus the varying demands of an other. The body deserves astonishment that it works this way. We have not done altogether well in sharing this astonishment as a common assumption in contemporary cultures.
Though Dahlke's predictions about ectogenesis are persuasive, what shakes its inevitability may be, perhaps ironically, the very power of our technological enframing. Efficient vessels–plastic? glass?--for genetically manipulated offspring may be the way people choose to have children. But more adults seem less interested in coupling or in children. Current low birthrates could also frame a post-human future less interested in producing new human bodies at all, not just producing them outside the pelvic limits of human females.
In any event, if we hope to follow Dahlke’s lead and hold on to what really matters about human gestation, we should get better at saying what that is, and fast.
Agnes R. Howard is adjunct assistant professor of humanities at Christ College, Valparaiso University, and author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us about Being Human (2020) and Disoriented: Embodied Life in Strange Times (2026).
Date of Review: May 15, 2026
How to cite this review:
Howard, Agnes R. Review of Outer Origin: A Discourse on Ectogenesis and the Value of Human Experience. Laura Johnson Dahlke. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2024. Society for the Study of Pregnancy and Birth Reviews, May 2026. https://www.ssprb.org/book-review-outer-origin.html.