Between 2005 and 2007 Pioneer Productions launched its groundbreaking trilogy of documentaries, In the Womb, taking a global audience on a spellbinding journey into the very beginnings of life. State-of-the-art 4D technology and arresting computer-generated imagery met with live-action medical photography to open the world of the womb as never before. The foetus was shown developing in a nurturing yet perilous eco-system, interacting with its living environment and, in the case of multiple-births, with its siblings. This was bodied forth with touching immediacy in the documentary In the Womb: Multiples which revealed the womb to be a space in which early emotional ties could be formed and human boundaries tested. Twins and multiples were captured as they engaged in recognisable acts of social exchange, seeming to play, fight and even, in one particularly memorable instance, kiss (Fig. I.1).

These documentaries mark an important historical phase in the biomedical epistemology of the womb which, in the twentieth century, was inaugurated by the pioneering photography of Lennart Nilsson.