Womb in the room… or do we just need perinatal OT’s?

A colleague and I were laughing this morning about her daughter’s idea of “Womb in a Room”. Her daughter sees herself having children in future, but has no desire to ever be pregnant – it interrupts your career, your lifestyle, you relationships and social life, your bodily functions and capacities, and a whole heap of other things. It’s inconvenient. So she had the idea of “Womb in a Room” – where you could have an external womb in the room: You can watch your baby grow, and get on with your life in the interim. I remembered seeing this YouTube video years ago about the incubator pod – it’s exactly a “Womb in a Room”. We laughed as we watched the YouTube clip, but by the end of it we were both feeling quite sober.

So many stages of perinatal transitions interrupt women’s routines, schedules and functional performance capacities. It’s a big deal for many women. This clip made me consider that there are many ways to tackle this issue of inconvenience. One way is, conceptually, to outsource your pregnancy to incubation pod. I’m a sci-fi dork through and through. I love it, and I’m excited by the futuristic fantasy of this on a conceptual level. But sitting here in real life, I’m finding myself deeply confronted by this piece of technology, and have decided I’m not really into the pod. Whilst I think this might conceptually be an incredible technological innovation for helping premature babies to safely develop in a controlled environment outside of the natural womb; for me, the buck pretty much stops there.

The ‘inconveniences’ of perinatal transitions are real, and they truly do need to be addressed. Women need to feel they are empowered to choose whatever lifestyle they like throughout motherhood. I hope that the future will be full of OT’s supporting women throughout perinatal stages, so they can lead their very best lives as women and mothers. And a few pods to help families in special circumstances, and for premmie babies have the best shot they can. Who knows what the future will hold? But what an amazing world we live in ♥