Abstract
This chapter argues that the portrayal of ectogenesis in recent British women’s speculative fiction—specifically in Baby X (2016) by Rebecca Ann Smith, Anne Charnock’s Arthur C. Clarke award-winning science fiction novel Dreams Before the Start of Time (2017) and Helen Sedgwick’s The Growing Season (2017)—critiques the state of the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), which has been subject to defunding and privatization over a number of decades. This is already a feminist issue with consequences for reproductive health through the rationing of in vitro fertilization (IVF). These science fiction texts are placed in the context of British texts on ectogenesis and eugenics such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and contemporary feminist debates about the potential value of ectogenesis for women’s liberation.
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Notes
- 1.
See Donchin (1989).
- 2.
See Devlin (2017).
- 3.
These groups were called Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) under New Labour and were later renamed CCGs during a further restructuring of the NHS because of the Health and Social Care Act (2012), passed by the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government (2010–2015). The restructuring and renaming of organizational bodies, using different acronyms rather than simple names, acts as a strategic means of mystifying NHS structures and their responsibilities, impeding public transparency and accountability.
- 4.
This research was produced as part of a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship, pf170027.
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McFarlane, A. (2022). Ectogenesis on the NHS: Reproduction and Privatization in Twenty-first-Century British Science Fiction. In: Vint, S., Buran, S. (eds) Technologies of Feminist Speculative Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Science and Popular Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96192-3_2
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