Sometimes, when I read stories like these, it really makes me want to leave the planet. I mean, the EctoPods weren't enough?
Apparently not. In men's eternal quest for complete self-sufficiency from having to be in a relationship with a real woman, there is always surrogacy, which is a great evil, as I have tried to explain in this essay. But I guess that is not enough? Maybe the idea that a real woman--the child's birthmother--is talking to the child, singing to it, etc., is just too much?
So now it is proposed that unconscious women in vegetative states become surrogate mothers for couples wanting to have children. That's right--the bodies of comatose women would be used to create babies for paying customers. The concept is called "whole body gestational donation," and it's hard to think of anything more dystopian.
It's also hard for me not to think we are being pranked or provoked here. But the idea is that by signing an organ donor card, a woman would also be agreeing to the use of her body to gestate a baby if she was in a coma.
One of the most sinister quotes in the entire piece is this: "[P]regnancy is risky, [one University of Oslo doctor] says, far more so than measles. The global health community has resolved to eradicate this dangerous disease, so it stands to reason that a dangerous experience like pregnancy should be eradicated as well. “We cannot yet forego the uterus altogether for the reproduction of our species,” Smajdor contends. “But we can transfer the risks of gestation to those who are no longer able to be harmed by them.”
Beyond the idea that risks should be transferred to a human being who is not in a position to say no, just think about what this doctor is saying: she is saying there is a solid rationale to stamp out pregnancy because its risks are higher than some infectious diseases which we are in the process of stamping out!
That's right--what is being said is that a woman's reproductive capabilities should never be put to use by her because the risk of damage to her is unacceptably high.
Womanhood, it appears, should be thrown on the dustheap of history. There is no value to it, and exercising its powers will harm you. Just relinquish reproduction, women.
Of course, as I have written elsewhere, it is that first heart-to-heart relationship between mother and the child in her uterus that makes us human. It is that first relationship which makes us free and that protects us from tyranny, as Harry Potter's mother's spell protected him from his deadliest enemy. Flesh and blood mothers are the last, best defense of everything we could possibly call civilization, for they are the last, best defence of the inviolability of the human being.
I suppose, though, it's karma. We have so disrespected mothers, mothering labor, mother's advice, mother's wisdom, that our last best defense as human beings may be taken from us without pushback. I see too many young women today who wish to keep their bodies unspotted by the work of pregnancy.
This is not liberation for women, not in the least. What will be lost will be irreplaceable. On women hangs all the possibility of freedom and happiness for humankind. Dispense with women's labor and you dispense with the reason to go on.
I sorrow to be living in these days, to see the hellscape humanity is building for itself. "Whole body gestational donation" is one part of that hellscape.