Would any of us want to live in a world without mothers?
The question may sound absurd, but the eugenicists behind test-tube babies and surrogate motherhood now have their sights on genetic engineering and artificial wombs which would cut women out of the reproductive process.
This is the warning sounded in a powerful special edition of the French journal Ecologie & Politique, which has sparked some controversy (see below).
In their introductory article, entitled ‘The obsolesence of birth’, Mathias Lefèvre and Jacques Luzi write: “The creation of an artificial womb would confirm the disassociation, initiated by in vitro fertilisation, between the female body and human reproduction.
“It would no longer be a case of ‘giving birth to the other’ or ‘bringing them into the world’, but of ‘producing a child’ – if possible, without defects”.
They trace the origins of the current threat to a “reductionist, mechanical and utilitarian representation of nature” which incited an “essentially totalitarian global programme”.
This involved the construction of “a new, artificial world, judged to be better than the previous one, in the pursuit of order, enrichment and power. We call this programme ‘industrialism’.”
An important contribution to the journal comes from Silvia Guerini of the Italian group Resistenze al nanomondo, who is one of the founders of FINAARGIT, the international feminist network against all artificial reproduction, gender ideology and transhumanism.
In her article entitled ‘A world without mothers?’, she argues that while the current justification for the technology is on medical grounds, helping people who cannot have babies naturally, the long-term goal for the industry is no doubt to make artificial reproduction the norm.
As Luzi explains, the various branches of biotechnology “are the means by which techno-capitalism can push back the limits of its development by turning life itself into an infinitely-exploitable raw material.
“The biomedical grip on human reproduction is part of the general process of the commodification of life”.
Industrialist greed-monsters cannot stand the thought that there are things we can do ourselves, for free, without them being able to extract any profit.
It would be in their financial self-interest if everyone was obliged to shop at their baby supermarkets, either because for some reason we were sterile or because it was simply no longer the done thing to indulge in dangerously unscientific and unhygienic natural reproduction.
Guerini suggests: “The use of your own body would be considered a sign of social inferiority and poverty. A natural mother would be considered potentially irresponsible, like mothers who currently opt for home birth, refusing the hospitalisation and medicalisation of the process… Natural childbirth would first be treated as irresponsible, then criminal”.
Eugenics, so dear to 20th century totalitarians, is central to the artificial reproduction programme.
Guerini writes: “Remember that there can be no Medically Assisted Procreation (MAP) without the selection of spermatozoa and of embryos… When technoscientists get involved in the process of procreation they want to set the characteristics of each of these elements, choose them, modify them and determine the end result.
“The laboratory environment transforms the birth process into a technical operation: the embryo becomes a product to be selected, improved, rejected or transformed”.
The grotesque direction in which this could take us is indicated by recent American-Chinese-Spanish experiments involving the fusion of genes to create half-human half-monkey embryos, she says.
Every phase of techno-industrial “progress” needs its cheerleaders and today these often seem associated with the “woke” left.
Guerini explains that there have long been some feminists, notably Shulasmith Firestone, who acclaim artificial reproduction as “liberating” women from “biological tyranny”.
And she predicts that artificial wombs will be demanded, like MAP, as a “right” for everyone, including “transgender” people.
These are “false rights”, says Guerini, and need to be exposed as such.
“Having a child cannot be claimed as a right, neither for a heterosexual couple nor for a homosexual couple, nor for a single woman or man. There cannot be a right to have a child. The capacity to generate life cannot be claimed as a new right by men who identify as women. Procreation can never belong to them”.
Guerini notes that “the interests and the demands of the LGBTQ+ movement and of transfeminism on the subject of reproduction converge with those of the techno-scientific and transhumanist system”.
Here, incidentally, she is echoed by Renaud Garcia, whose own contribuution to the journal describes such “woke” pseudo-radicals as “agents of social acceptability” for a techno-system “directed by the caste of possession, power and knowledge”.
Guerini warns: “MAP, selecting embryos, experimenting on embryos, genetic modification and artificial wombs are all deeply-connected aspects of the same transhumanist project.
“Techno-scientific progress is constantly accelerating and ethical barriers are tumbling one after the other, bringing us closer to a new neutral and infinitely-modifiable species in a post-human and post-natural world.
“A world without mothers, which has definitively and totally expropriated women’s bodies and their reproductive dimension, which has definitively and totally taken control of the life-creating process, which engineers the living and which dominates the evolution of the human species itself”.
Garcia, for his part, argues that authentic environmentalists need to “denounce with all their strength the forces of artificial human reproduction and criticise its agents of social acceptability”.
Otherwise, if they swallow all the manipulative propaganda, they will be unable to do anything to halt the advance of the ruthless techno-industrial system – “in other words, the crushing of human nature by the power of the machine”.
