User blog comment:BunsenH/Monsters: boy or girl? Male or female?/@comment-24577221-20190928201832

If people want to look at how the Breeding Chamber works... if it was a "regular" cloning machine, it wouldn't need the one parent to be male or female. It would just use a cell, and make it reproduce.

The Breeder is like a cloning machine that takes "genetic material" from two parents and tries to combine it to make a single offspring. It still doesn't need either parent to be male or female.

We're not that far from being able to do it in real life, right now.

Reproductive technology is one of the most important plot elements in Lois McMaster Bujold's science fiction books. Early on, she started using the concept of the "uterine replicator", which allows babies to develop in a device rather than in a woman's body. She isn't the first writer to use the idea, by any means; Aldous Huxley's Brave New World uses it, and was written in 1932. But Bujold has done far more to look at the social consequences of that kind of tech. In her setting, cloning is relatively commonplace -- not done frequently, but a fairly routine procedure -- and in one of the books, the plot hinges on two men having a baby together.