The irony of the womb debate

Regarding:

Brave New World: UK ethicist wants women to abandon motherhood, use artificial wombs

I find it ironic that secular ethicists who advocate something like this (not many so far that I know of) say that we should employ more intelligent design in the production of new people. You see this irony in Brave New World: Lenina Crowne, despite her apparent ditziness, came into existence through intelligent design in one of the utopia's "hatcheries"; while John the Savage, who represents traditional humanity and its different set of world views, came into existence through random chance, namely, a contraception failure and natural pregnancy.

This debate also has a cryonics connection. Robert Ettinger inserts a brief argument for using artificial wombs in Man Into Superman (1972). Specifically:

"M" is for Her Misery

Attempts to make women "equal" have seemed hopeless (as well as indecent) to some in view of apparently changeless biological function-carrying children in the womb, childbearing, and suckling. These represent physical handicaps which have given women nearly slave status in most cultures; but they also account for her elevation to a position of acknowledged nobility and special claims. A father is just a man, but a mother is a martyred saint. This situation, however, seems near an end.

Actually, it is a little hard to see why suckling or carrying a child should produce a special bond, any more than in other forms of parasitism. Does one feel special tenderness toward his tapeworm? It is true that some pediatricians have claimed advantages for breast feeding, but I imagine few mothers of bottle babies will admit to a lesser intensity of motherly feeling. Likewise, even though fathers desert their families somewhat more frequently than mothers, I doubt very much that the average father is any weaker in ability to love than the mother. (The desertion rate is affected by many other factors, including greater job mobility for men.)

Certainly breast feeding is on the way out, despite occasional flurries of fashion. It must go because in too many ways it degrades the woman. It reduces her to a biological machine, an elemental function rather than a fully human person. It restricts her, physically and psychologically; it sets narrow limits on things she can do and times she can do them. It interferes with her career. It may alter her sex life. In short, it is an intolerable imposition, which was once a virtue only through necessity. It is attractive now, one suspects, mainly to those women who want to be career mothers, who seek status in the easy way available even to the laziest and least capable, or else to those who are confused and misled. (Of course, the lazy and incapable have to live too, and we must also take account of exceptional temperaments. No doubt for a while there will be a place for the career mother, if she can latch onto a career father.)

Well within the next century, the term "bottle baby" could apply not just to nursing, but to gestation. Ectogenesis, or extra uterine gestation or "test-tube babies," will become feasible according to expert prediction, and as soon as the practice is economical, it may very possibly be quickly and almost universally adopted. There has already been partial success in joining sperm and egg and growing the fetus in an artificial womb; when the technique is perfected, women will be fully emancipated from the bondage of their bodies.

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, babies were "decanted" rather than born, and "mother" was a dirty word. Huxley's world was an antiutopia, but for confused and not entirely valid reasons. Many women don't believe it, but I am convinced ectogenesis will be a nearly unqualified benefit, and that almost all women will welcome the chance to be "fathers" instead of mothers. At first, they will claim their main reason for approving of it are that the fetus will receive greater protection and more reliable care under controlled conditions, and possibly that husbands will have less inconvenience, but they won't miss the swollen bellies and the backaches either. If some women insist on carrying the unborn "under their hearts" (and over their bowels), perhaps science will still serve them, and provide them with marsupial pouches so they can continue to carry the young after birth, like the kangaroos, giving them even more transcendental motherhood.

"Huxley's world was an antiutopia, but for confused and not entirely valid reasons." And I tend to agree. Huxley couldn't have foreseen or controlled how people who read his novel would repurpose some of its ideas for practical ends. For another example, back in 1994, during my one and only opportunity to meet Robert Ettinger, I heard him say that he got the idea for cryonics from Neil R. Jones's otherwise unremarkable science fiction story, "The Jameson Satellite." Only Ettinger said that Jones didn't see the implications of his own idea: Instead of depending on aliens to revive frozen individuals, we could depend on our own people to do that when it becomes medically feasible.

I don't particularly care how babies get here, as long as I don't have to pay for them. The current feminist ideology views the state as a husband substitute, to spare women from the indignity of having to marry beta males. The welfare system which instantiates this ideology basically subjects the entire, tax-paying male population to a fraudulent paternity suit for child support.