Carrying a pregnancy

In 2017 a team at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia kept extremely premature lambs alive and developing for up to four weeks in a fluid filled bag connected to their own umbilical vessels. On 19 September 2023 the Pediatric Advisory Committee of the Food and Drug Administration met to consider what a first human trial of such a device would require, informed by several hundred animal runs. These systems are designed to continue a gestation that a body began, for infants born at the edge of viability, and that is how their designers describe them. Nothing carries a human being from conception to term outside a body. The line is worth writing down rather than leaving to inference, because the machines that assist at the end of a pregnancy are often read as evidence about the whole of it.