This machine could keep a baby alive outside the womb. How will the world decide to use it?

Juliette van Haren and Frank Delbressine are developing a transfer device that allows a baby to be transferred from a natural womb to an artificial womb after premature birth. Photograph: TU/e - Eindhoven University of Technology/Bart van Overbeeke

Beth Schafer lay in a hospital bed, bracing for the birth of her son. The first contractions rippled through her body before she felt remotely ready. She knew, with a mother’s pit-of-the-stomach intuition, that her baby was not ready either.

At just 23 weeks of gestation, her son teetered on the cliff edge of viability, the fragile threshold where modern medicine offers any promise of keeping babies alive.