Peer-reviewed article
Reproductive technology's animal unconscious: multispecies motherhood and humanimal horror.
Walton G, O'Key D ·
Summary
Written by AI, not yet AICS's view · claude-haiku-4-5-20251001This peer-reviewed essay uses cultural critique and animal studies methods to examine the role of animals in reproductive technology research and medical narratives. It compares how the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia represents their artificial placenta experiments using lambs with representations in two horror films. The analysis explores how animals are positioned as sacrificial objects within debates about human reproduction and medical ethics.
Key points
- Preclinical animal testing remains underdiscussed in medical humanities scholarship
- The essay compares CHOP's artificial placenta research using lambs with horror film narratives
- Both the medical research and horror films represent human reproduction as dependent on animal exploitation
- Animals are figured as sacrificial objects across scientific research, medical narratives and horror genres
- Combined animal studies and medical humanities approaches unsettle conventional positioning of animals in medical research
Limitations
This is a theoretical and cultural critique essay, not an empirical study of child health outcomes or interventions. It does not evaluate effectiveness of medical treatments or provide evidence about impacts on children's health or well-being.
Abstract
Preclinical animal testing has played a critical role within medical history. Yet it remains an underdiscussed topic within the medical humanities. What might happen, then, if we analyse the animal studies of the lab via the method of cultural critique that is animal studies? This essay responds to this question by exploring the roles that animals play, and are made to play, within the technologies for, debates about and narratives of human reproduction. The essay is comparative. First, it focuses on how the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) represents their experiments with lambs as part of their development of an artificial placenta. Then, it juxtaposes these narratives with two recent horror films that dramatise and hyperbolise the very human-animal relations on which CHOP's research relies. Both Laura Moss's Birth/Rebirth (2023) and Valdimar Jóhannsson's Lamb (2021) can be read, we suggest, as narratives of multispecies family-making that, in their representation of human reproduction as dependent on the exploitation of animal reproduction, signify and subvert the species hierarchies that attend animal testing. Yet we also wish to track how each of these films, just like CHOP, ultimately figures animals as sacrificial objects. We argue that reading these texts together illuminates the politics of species that undergirds CHOP's research, its medical humanities critique and the horror genre. More than simply adding an animal studies perspective to the debate about the future of human reproduction, this essay models forms of reading that, by combining the interpretive practices of animal studies and medical humanities, unsettle the ways that animals are positioned as literal and symbolic surrogates for the human.