Maybe an exowomb is better than pregnancy
The Pod Generation’s near-future satire pits nature against technology. Which is the better curator?
This essay is for TERRAFORM, an essay collection about the future of our planet. Support the project by collecting the digital or print edition 👇🏻
This is a review of “The Pod Generation,” a film by Sophie Barthes starring Emilia Clarke and Chiwetel Ejiofor. It ponders technological progress and just how much we want it. This post contains spoilers.
It’s the near future, and an Apple-like company has created egg-shaped pods that will gestate babies for nine months. One couple has just been called up from the waitlist—the wife Rachel is for it, she’s the breadwinner working in tech, but her husband Alvy is against, he’s a botanist teaching at a university and prefers things the natural way.
This is the hook of “The Pod Generation,” and their marriage serves as the perfect lens through which to ponder technological advancement and just how much we want it. Throughout the film, we oscillate between craving this technological future and resisting it. We see how beautiful nature can be when uninterrupted, and also how harsh.
Is nature the ideal curator? Or does technology better it?
Before modern medicine, pregnancy and childbirth were a real risk, but advancements made both safer. If nature is the ideal curator, should we have left women to have babies the “natural way?” Or can we admit that advancements in science and technology have made childbirth better? The pod is only the next iteration of that debate. In the film, Rachel dreams of a knife cutting through her pregnant belly, the kind of barbaric cesarean surgery that is no longer commonplace in her world. Isn’t the pod better than that?
And there are real benefits: The pod uses only the most viable and healthy embryos, the babies aren’t exposed to toxins or viruses or bacteria during pregnancy, and they are supported with “optimal nutrition,” as they develop. There are no premature births or the usual risks associated with childbirth. The pod even makes it easy for same sex couples to have children or those with fertility issues.
To convince her husband, Rachel and Alvy have dinner with friends who are expecting a baby via pod. As the husband wears the pod like a backpack, the wife explains the benefits. “It is the first time in history that as women, we are not victims of our biology,” she says. “Why would any of us want to feel nauseous and gain 30 pounds, get stretch marks, swollen ankles, varicose veins? Progress has made all this unnecessary.”
“Look at everything we’ve achieved as a species,” Rachel says.
But Alvy’s skeptical. “We’ve achieved having babies in eggshells like penguins,” he says.
Rachel plays the role of technological progress. When she wakes up, her smart toilet monitors her vitals, and a saliva assay tracks her health. Her smart home announces that her serotonin is low, and asks if she would like to schedule a nature pod today. New York is a vibrant garden city with aesthetic, Georgia O’Keefe-inspired architecture, and she works at a treadmill desk with AIs at her ready assistance. After work, she attends a nature pod to relax, and her AI therapist helps her sort through apprehensions about planning a family.
The husband Alvy plays the counterforce of nature. He begins the day in his home garden, placing his hands in the soil. At work in his university garden, he asks students to hug or touch one of the trees in the greenhouse. They close their eyes, breathe. “When we stare at leaves or touch a tree, we can’t mull over thoughts, we have to let go. Slowly our attention circuits get disconnected. Our frontal cortex calms down. Our minds can wander again and set itself free.”
At one point, Alvy muses that if he could be the one to get pregnant he would, but since he can’t, he doesn’t want to make that decision for her. They both want a child and decide to move forward with the pod, but we feel this tension play out through their marriage. Alvy wants to move to an island where their child can be around nature, Rachel wonders why they would leave the city when they have nature pods here. As they move through the process, Alvy says he would speak with a human therapist if they existed, but Rachel says her AI therapist “knows more than any human therapist could ever dream to learn in a lifetime.”
Throughout the film, I find myself relating to both. I want the medical advancements that monitor our health, even as I’d rather spend my day outside than in a nature pod. I want the technologically advanced garden city, even if I don’t want to work at that treadmill desk. I have seen therapists and found them no more expert in the human condition and how to change it than anyone else, even as I value reading human thought and philosophy more than any AI. I would rather have a baby in a pod than go through pregnancy and childbirth and their associated risks, even if I don’t think a company should be providing that service.
Interestingly, it’s not nature or technology that plays the antagonist here, but a crude capitalism that corrupts them both. The tech company Rachel works for, Pegazus, encourages her to take advantage of the pod, and even covers the downpayment—it’s the more productive way for their employees to have children. When they give her a promotion, they offer the perk. “We want to make sure we maintain the best and brightest women,” her boss says.
When Rachel takes a tour of The Womb Center, a video features the founder of Pegazus, a Jeff Bezos type out to save the world. “When we saw birth rates drop in the first world, we got very concerned,” he says. “Our answer was to acquire the Womb center to help solve childbirth and empower women and men. At Pegazus, we want fulfilled mothers, we want them to pursue their careers and dreams.”
The tour guide agrees: “This thing is called technological progress.”
In the early 19th century, man’s dominance over nature was seen as a blessing. Timothy Walker’s 1831 treatise “Defense of Mechanical Philosophy” extolled the virtues of technological progress.
“Where [Nature] denied us rivers, Mechanism has supplied them. Where she left our planet incomfortably rough, Mechanism has applied the roller. Where her mountains have been found in the way, Mechanism has boldly levelled or cut through them. Even the ocean, by which she thought to have parted her quarrelsome children, Mechanism has encouraged them to step across…”
Today we see things less romantically. The machine that allowed us to cut tunnels through mountains is destroying the mountain. The airplanes that allowed us to cross oceans are polluting our skies. If we once thought that machines saved us from a harsh and unforgiving nature, now we see harsh and unforgiving machines destroying beautiful and utopic nature.
We have to recognize that both things are true: Without technological advancement, humans starve from famine, perish in the seas, die in childbirth. But with better agriculture, better travel, better medicine, we can become separated from nature.
“We’ve decided at some point that nature is a commodity and that’s when things started to unravel,” Alvy says. “It’s a divorce from ourselves in a way… it makes us so emotionally starved.”
How can we enjoy the benefits of both?
There are certainly benefits to the pod. Alvy is surprised to discover how connected he becomes to the gestating baby. The couple can peer inside and see their child developing in a way we can’t do today. They cuddle together on the couch to watch that new life grow. And the pod allows Alvy to carry the child as he once wished he could do. He takes to wearing the pod as a backpack. He reads to it, holds it as he prunes his trees. He takes it to the greenhouse at work where his colleagues congratulate him on the pending arrival.
But Rachel begins to feel disconnected, as though she is caring for a Tomagachi. She uses an app on her phone to choose the music her baby listens to and the kind of foods it eats. She can track the baby’s stats, how many days it has been gestating, what size it is. She starts dreaming of being pregnant, of feeling the baby in her womb. At the gym, she encounters a woman who is obviously pregnant and invites her to feel the baby kick. Rachel’s envious, but even here progress remains ambiguous. The other woman is just as envious of the pod. “You’re so lucky, we couldn’t get a spot,” she says. “Maybe for the next one.”
Rachel grows concerned. “Alvy is able to bond with our child but I’m not,” she says to her therapist.
“I just spend more time with the pod, it’s as simple as that,” he replies.
Once again, capitalism rears its ugly head. When Rachel starts wearing the pod to work, she’s told to leave it in a cupboard with all of the other pods. “HR finds it a distraction,” her coworker tells her. “You don’t want to be labeled the distracted mom.” Her computer tells her that her productivity is 24.5% lower than usual, and she’s pulled into her boss’ office for a check-in. “The algorithm, it noticed a change in productivity,” her boss says, before probing into her mental health to solve this productivity issue.
The next time we see our Jeff Bezos type, he’s on a nightly newscast positioning himself as savior to a US government that failed to produce good healthcare or education. He sees The Womb Center as an antidote, along with his AI education company. When Rachel and Alvy tour the school, a woman from Sweden asks whether the school has accreditation from the board of education, to which the tour guide replies: “Our government is no longer funding education but we are so lucky that great companies like Pegazus are investing in our educational system. It’s much more efficient.”
In this world, the company has gained power and influence over the government, as evidenced by his space company. “To travel to Mars, everyone will need a Pegazus passport,” he says. “We are building an infrastructure and access that no government can afford to build. So it’s normal that in exchange we ask for total compliance.”
The profit motive can be used for good as well as evil. When we make it more expensive to pollute, companies pollute less. When solar panels are less expensive than fossil fuels, companies use those instead. When we make it a tax incentive to provide retirement accounts, companies provide more of them. But the inverse is also true, when it’s more profitable to make farmers buy new seeds every year, companies engineer them that way. When it’s less expensive to dump chemicals in a river, companies will. When it makes everyone richer to buy stocks rather than improve the quality of an airplane, companies can take that shortcut.
Companies will do what’s cheapest, and we need to ensure that the cheapest version is the best version.
The pod is no exception. Early in the film, The Womb Center delivers babies once they release proteins and hormones, specific to childbirth. “The baby decides,” an attendant explains. “Nature knows best!” Later in the film, however, the company changes their policy and induces at 39 weeks. “Some of the babies weren’t releasing their birth hormone, they were just lingering in pods for a few more weeks,” the attendant explains. “We can’t afford that. Our pods are in such demand.”
When Rachel and Alvy decide to keep the pod at home until birth, they are denied, the company collects valuable data from the pods in the weeks leading up to birth. “It’s all in your contract,” they’re told. “The baby is yours, but the pod is a product of the Womb Center.”
In response to this commodification of childbearing, Rachel dreams that she’s shopping for a baby at the supermarket, and this serves as her breaking point. They escape to their island home with the pod, where they wander through the forest by day, watch the sunset on the dock with the pod between them, and nestle by a woodfire at night. They return to nature, and find it absolutely beautiful.
By the end of the film, Alvy has embraced more of the tech world, it has allowed him to connect with nature in a way he previously couldn’t, and Rachel has rescinded much of it, it caused her separation from it. Both push away from a capitalism that commodifies nature and technology alike. When the pod alerts them that their baby is ready to be born, the couple pry it open with a screwdriver and pull their baby into their arms. From all the advances of technology comes a baby born of all the beauty of nature, delivered into a world built on their terms.
At a Q&A with the director, Sophie Barthes said that she wanted to pose a question: “Is this the future we want? If we don’t ask these questions now, it’s going to be too late. All of these technologies will be available eventually.”
When asked what part of this world she would want, Barthes said none of it. She wants the life on the island at the end. But my takeaway wasn’t that nature is the ideal curator, or that technologies are the corrupting force, but that we need to build the future in a way that encompasses the best of both.
Many parts of “The Pod Generation’s” near-future world are beautiful. The city is stunning, the health advancements incredible, the couple have a greenhouse in their condo in one of the upper floors of a skyscraper and use technology to improve their emotional wellbeing and emotional intelligence. The pod itself comes with a lot of good—many already use in vitro fertilization to get pregnant and versions of an exowomb when babies are born as early as 22 weeks—but forcing a company to provide these services with profitability and productivity in mind isn’t the best way to do it.
Technology can tame nature in a way that facilitates human progress. But nature is beautiful too, and we shouldn’t divorce ourselves from it in the process. Perhaps if we can evolve capitalism to serve in the best interest of all of us, not just the shareholders at the top, we can build technology that serves in the best interest of humanity and enjoy both in equal measure, finding beauty in the cross-section.
But I’d love to know your thoughts:
Thanks for reading and thinking with me,
P.S. Thank you
for editing this piece!
The fundamental question is how can we make the technology connect us more to nature and make us more human instead of making us more like machines.
Pregnancy and childbirth was the most amazing, empowering experience of my life. I absolutely can't get on board with an exowomb as better than pregnancy. A woman's body evolved to grow and birth a child, and I have strong feelings about how women are being robbed of this experience by the conditioning of a patriarchal, capitalistic medical system. For me, creating, carrying, birthing and bonding with a child are a sacred rite, even Divine in nature. I felt a deep sense of awe and wonder everyday. I mean, my body was capable of creating a child, birthing it and then feeding it with milk that was made especially for that unique child and it's needs in that moment. I fantastic feedback loop. It's awe-inspiring. Miraculous, really.
That said, I am not anti-technology, and I believe everyone has the right to choose how they want to carry and birth their child. Perhaps, pods have their place in certain situations where a woman is unable to get pregnant or carry a baby to term. Or, in a situation where a woman just would prefer this method, but I do not agree with any corporation or employer creating a situation where the pod is preferable or the use of it rewarded. In my opinion, the woman and her body are the ideal curator. Period.
Also, perhaps Sophia Barthes just really likes to be in Nature! I mean, I often miss the days that I lived in a mud hut in the middle of a village as a Peace Corps volunteer. That said, I was guaranteed healthcare and knew I would leave eventually. And, perhaps I am blocking out the leaky roof, the goats making crazy noises at night, and the heat of the dry season. 😅 But, there is something so peaceful and contented about living a simple life. I prefer it. Maybe Sophia does to?