The Baby Machines
Commercial Surrogacy & Working Wombs
“Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
The price of progress :
We do not ask ourselves enough or often what constitutes the price of progress. We question its validity and feasibility, but we rarely discuss the sacrifices we make for it, the ones we have to make for it, or the ones others have to make. ‘We’ especially do not ask what is the price of progress when it is some distant others who will pay. One of the features of our contemporary societies is how easy it is to sell an idea: the stranger and unnatural it is, the better! The comfort and validation one gets after suggesting to save humanity is sufficient, even if it means sacrificing bodies for it. Some call it ‘virtue-signaling’; I call it ‘mephistophelian planning’ since signaling is not the aim; it is only part of a larger plan to convince, provoke, and then make anyone who opposes an idea submit.
Surrogacy is one of those ideas, obviously facilitated by science and technological progress, to make the dream of many couples a reality. Couples traditionally reach out to their respective family members or friends to volunteer and bear the child. The intent in these paragraphs is not to criticize or analyze the concept of surrogacy itself, which can be done in another essay, but to hammer the concealed dynamics of commercial surrogacy.
A working womb
“After awhile you could get used to anything.”
Albert Camus
We have passed the stage of the commodification of women; we have made such progress in human rights that we are at the stage where women are openly reduced to their genitals, hormones, cells, and body parts. The diverse flourishing industries specialized in egg retrieval, fertility tourism, or egg cell banks, can testify on the veracity of this claim.
Today, women do not matter because of their vibrant soul and mind; or because we still hold to the idea that they are human beings with dignity. A woman’s worth depends on her ability to accept dismemberment. Women only matter because they have something which can be extracted, taken, and used, all done under the legality of the dominant ‘ethical’ orthodoxy. Women are the new laboratory rats. Women are the new Lego pieces.
But of course, it does not apply to all women; some are preserved from ever feeling this type of distress and angst. Especially the celebrities who declare they are waiting for their surrogate to ‘deliver their baby’.
How many times did anyone mention their surrogate? Why do we know the faces of the ‘women-consumers’ and not the ‘women-producers’? The answer is pretty straightforward: the image of third-world women in a perpetual state of pregnancy and constantly bearing children of strangers to make a living is not sexy enough. Nothing is glamorous for the surrogacy industry about poor women who use their wombs to feed their families. Nothing is appealing about the state of poverty in places where commercial surrogacy is prosperous. Nothing should be remembered from the images of the stranded babies in Ukraine, as their biological parents have not been able to travel and take them during the pandemic. This is how marketing works, remember? Ugliness is accepted as long as it is hidden and makes businesses profitable, all under the name of science and ethics.
Baby Machines
“Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.”
Jacques Ellul
Greed combined with cynicism made it possible to persuade poor women that they can use their wombs to make a living. Surrogates are spiritually dismembered, little differentiates them substantially from manufacturing machines. What is the difference between the time surrogates take ‘as breaks from pregnancies’ and a manufacturer giving to machines breaks so they can produce more?
Surrogates believe that they adhere to a system they will benefit from but which in reality only abuses them and takes advantage of their precarious situation. Surrogates are alienated. Their so-called consensual agreements are motivated by the illusion that they have no other choice, that the baby they will nourish and develop a bond with is just a strange object in their bodies. Even their wombs are objects. Everything is reduced to its utility.
Those who are afraid of the emergence of cyborgs, of the upcoming blurry barriers between the man and the machine, need to be confronted to reality: we already have women-machines, ethically approved, and ready for business. The arrogance of commercial surrogacy businesses and the slogans masquerading “women empowerment” when it means slavery, are probably already looking for some other victims for their niche hyper-innovative markets where half of it operates in undeveloped countries. The normalization of taking advantage of one’s body for private gain by not just making him renounce to a part of it, but making him use it as a Capital, is the epitome of our century's decadence. One should really wonder what is the real state of a civilization which gladly makes its women profitable working wombs.
Good article. I found it via @FischerKing64. My two cents, as a recent convert to anti commercial surrogacy and as one who is disruptive in business and conservative in politics:
Yes, leftist feminists warned of the commodification of women. But capitalism is far more inventive than they realized. We have a playbook for doing this. Yes, we have now unbundled, disintermediated, and disrupted woman. She is a bunch of parts. Sorry, feminists, it's not just for the convenience of men; it's for other women, too.
But soon she will be unbundled into even smaller parts. Everyone will be unbundled into even smaller parts. Every opportunity will be mined. Every inefficiency will be squeezed. Yikes.
Who is least susceptible to disruption? Who is most susceptible? I don't know the answer. I suspect that you are less susceptible (1) when you have fewer valuable parts to unbundle and (2) when you have more ownership over those parts.
Men bring two big things to reproduction: genes and money/power/status. The first they share with women but are inclined to want to disseminate (!) not concentrate. The second they have ironclad ownership. Thus men will suffer less from disruptive unbundling. They might even enjoy it.
Women bring many more things, and have less ironclad ownership over them. Hence they will suffer more from disruptive unbundling.
As we look to the future, inured to the horrors of transgenderism, I note that in this framework other entities highly susceptible to disruption include children and animals.
God help us.
I agree that there is a price to progress. I might write some of my own thoughts on the matter. If I zoom out of U.S. politics and think of conservatism more broadly as an aesthetic, cultural, social or political philosophy, which seeks to promote or preserve traditional social institutions, than it is easier for me to see the legitimacy in your argument. I believe many seek to eradicate conservatism from political institutions but fail to understand the predictability that conservatisms provides societies. That is not to justify or take away from the plight of various groups. But it does make it easier for me to ponder why some political views are deemed ‘unacceptable’ - even if the very nature of politics necessitates debate and conflict. What is acceptable anyway? I like people who stand for something and are able to make an informed argument about their perspective.