On Artificial Wombs
“The smallest evil if neglected, will reach the greatest proportions.”
― Pliny the Younger
Corpses instead of Bodies:
The decomposition of the mind and the body is the consequence not of a utopian project, but of marginal assumptions with serious effects, as they consist in conceiving the mind as outside the body. The body is a spare part. The body is a hindrance, an obstacle; one more misery to maintain and feed, to make sleep sometimes. The body is a burden. The body is a barrier to a more egalitarian and democratic society. The body is the metastasis of our existence. Determinism combined with transhumanism; made the body not just wrongfully seen as an obstacle to live with or to be modified, but to be eliminated.
Spiritual materialism pushed our contemporaries to dissociate unreservedly physical experiences from abstract ones. The mind only thinks and does not feel. Bodies are corpses, they only function, and do not live. It, therefore, explains why current innovations thrive to only ‘stimulate’ the few cells that we have left.
Of all the bodies, the most unloved is, I would say, that of women. A pregnant woman is just a chore. Nothing is more annoying for our brains in Silicon Valley than a woman who must for nine months carry her child, prepare her body to welcome an infant, and maintain her body to house him or her.
They do not see a pregnant woman as the incarnation of kindness, gentleness, and sacrifice. There is no symbolic or figurative respect for her. They see her as a loss of productivity. According to them, getting pregnant is costly for our dynamic and flamboyant economy, where the homeless die in the dark and where youth are suffocated with debt. They prefer less expensive and more efficient corpses. Indeed, a pregnant woman is synonymous with a mobile nest, a waste of money and time. A pregnant woman is the antithesis of transhumanist progress, as she is out of the human condition debates, and out of history, but she is the center of ideological battles, an interchangeable pawn in the sea of ambitious dystopian futurists.
“The coming being is whatever being.”
― Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community
Biopower and the new privileged class:
For the canon of scientism and progressivism bodies do not mean anything, they are just a bunch of cells we have to feed. The ideal would be to, once and for all, end our dependence on ourselves, our bodies.
Artificial wombs, which were created to support premature newborns, were driven by a noble idea: it was about saving lives. However, just like any just and good cause, temptations of evil grew enough so that artificial wombs get considered as the next ‘thing’ to commercialize to liberate women’s bodies. Especially those who need to work and make a living. They will be condemned, for utilitarian reasons, to never experience the joy of pregnancy.
No working woman can take a break from the perpetual servitude. Her labor is more important than her biological experiences or her maternal transformations. Only those who can afford to be pregnant will be allowed to enjoy a corporeal existence. Only those who pay can escape the mind and body dissociation.
Why change norms so that women enjoy their pregnancies in peace, when they can be deprived of the very desire to enjoy anything related to their bodies? Why end the culturally accepted economic enslavement, so that women work and preserve their dignity, when they can simply buy a plastic bag, and see with bitterness their baby grow in them so they make a few bucks? Why do anything better when we can make everything much worse and profit from it? Why think of heaven when it is easier to imagine hell?
Those who call for the re-establishment of moral values, those who protest against the use of technological advancements that alienate us, often miss the point. The problem is far more complex, paradoxical, and disturbing. The main issue is that we have produced a generation that is comfortable with transgressing the intimate biological nature of others to advance its ideals. There is a certain political entitlement, the illusion that our bodies do not belong to us, not to our minds, not to ourselves, they belong to ‘something’, a changing and a politically fluid ‘something’.
Artificial wombs are the manifestation of the biopower race; once commercialized it will be practically impossible to resist wicked desires to employ them and to weaponize them. We will no longer have the luxury of clinging to Agamben, who knew the distinctions between forms of life and saw real tyranny in the reduction of lives into biological ones. The 21st century will mainly consist of individuals reclaiming their biology. The 21st century will be about the rebels who still want to be human, to remain human.
Sad if your prediction comes true. Why are we teaching ourselves that the most rewarding thing in life is to provide labor to your employer? We will see so many women who decided against having kids for the sake of their career overcome with depression in their 40s and 50s. Calling it now. And then the rich will use surrogates but will they be any better off?
Liberal ideologies seek to obliterate the horizontal relationships that unite people in communities, to replace them with artificial/vertical ties that bind atomized individuals to the State and its handmaid corporate capitalism. The many manifestations of genderfluidity -biology denied- are expressions of this drive.