When A 'Mother' Becomes A 'Carrier'

In this article the writer of the tweet above - who also stubbornly insists on further depersonsalising and commodifying the role of women who carry a child for someone else by referring to them as 'carriers' – takes a theoretical biotechnology that is laden with complex moral, political and legal issues and which is highly unlikely ever to be available to people outside the thin layer of very affluent people who want designer offspring, and weaves a fantasy in which women are all but written out of reproduction.

And not just women. In this monstrous new world, any imperfect human is to be written out at embryo stage -  and who knows where the definition of imperfection will end? 

 

The use of the term surrogate was intended to break down the belief that the woman who gestates a foetus, is that child's mother. The idea is a woman capable of producing viable eggs and/or carrying a foetus to term fills a gap in the creation of a child for a single person or a couple who cannot have their own children.

 

Describing a woman as a 'carrier' (NB. a carrier is also what we call a person infected with a disease causing organism) depersonalises and commodifies that pregnancy even further, and it illustrates both the vacuity and the rampant narcissism of those people who believe in a future in which female reproductive capacity will be fully controlled and commodified by being technologised, with the ultimate aim of rendering it obsolete.

 

Those who have sunk to this nadir of rank misogyny compound their offence by pretending it is for the good of women – that it is to ‘free’ women up from the restrictions of their biological role in the production of eggs and the gestation of new humans.

 
In this bleak vision, all that is required of the genetic female will be some skin cells and the leasing of her uterus - until such time as science develops a viable artificial womb at which point she will be fully relieved of her role as the mother of the species. 

 

The fact that there may not be a social world in a hundred years, let alone one capable of sustaining this technologised future, seems to have escaped their attention. But of course it would, as they have neither the wit nor the wisdom to conceive of a different, more human way organising both production and reproduction.

 

Trans humanism which is the soil in which these notions take root, clings to variations on the theme of a technologised future of ‘perfected’ humans - either fully human but genetically manipulated to be free from disease and to possess desired physical and behavioural characteristics; or cyborgs, humans with robotic parts.

 

In the context of a highly stratified world built on the premise that progress equals unending growth and consumption, a world that is ruled by a tiny minority of powerful people motivated solely by self-interest, how would such a project end?  With the development of a super elite whose every physical and psychosexual need is served by legions of genetically designed humans and cyborgs? 

 

Forgive me if I see in that, the most monstrous of dystopian nightmares.

(Added after publication :  see this comprehensive thread on Twitter from Bea Jaspert)