Reproductive technology’s animal unconscious : multispecies motherhood and humanimal horror

Walton, Georgia and O’Key, Dominic (2025) Reproductive technology’s animal unconscious : multispecies motherhood and humanimal horror. Medical Humanities. ISSN 1468-215X

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.