This detailed and rigorous analysis locates reproductive technologies in the historical context of the progressive technification of the management of human life, and their relation to the social and medical discourses on femininity, maternity and infertility. The circulation of representations between the individual imaginary and collective myths is the basis of a multidisciplinary complex and original point of view, which confronts a variety of discourses arising from psychoanalysis, medicine, journalism, ethnology, mythology and literature.