Reproductive Technology as a Threat to Women and Humanity

From the keynote address at the Women’s Declaration International USA Convention September 16, 2023 San Francisco, CA

Women create humanity.

As of today, every human on Earth was born through the body of a woman. Over the course of ten lunar cycles, through our blood and our sweat and our tears, women transform the raw genetic material containing the blueprints of a human being into a person. 

This magic birthing force is at the root of both our power and of our oppression. Men envy it and men want to own it.

Female erasure from human reproduction is a tale as old as patriarchy.

Women make people, and men take credit for it. This manifests as patrilineage, where ancestral descent is traced through the male line. Most of us carry our father’s surnames and most American women, married or not, continue to believe children should have their father’s last names. In many cases this is a survival tactic on the part of women, who want to pacify male egos and not risk angering the men who fathered their children. Women remain economically dependent on these men and passing on male surnames is viewed as a way of ensuring continued male support through child rearing. 

Historically children born to women who were not legally the property of men through marriage were labeled “illegitimate.” These children were denied inheritance rights. They and their mothers faced social punishment.

While men have readily claimed or rejected ownership of children after birth, for most of human history pregnancy and birth were solely women’s work. Human reproduction was the domain of women; women labored and birthed at home in the company of their mothers, sisters, friends, and midwives. As evidenced by the success of humans becoming the dominant species on the planet, most of the time the reproductive process went well. But sometimes births resulted in deaths, and history is full of stories of men blaming women, especially midwives, for the deaths of their offspring. Men began to believe that they should be in charge of childbirth. In Europe, male attempts to control childbirth and eradicate midwives began in the middle ages. 

Men invented forceps, metal tong-like devices used to extract babies from women’s bodies during difficult labors. Kept exclusively in the hands of male providers, forceps marked the beginning of male domination over childbirth. Men also invented chloroform and ether and began advertising anesthetized birth to women in the 1800s. These drugs were only available from male birth attendants. Despite these new technologies, most women still preferred to give birth in the company of other women. 

So men escalated their campaign to control birth. From the late 1800s  through the 1930s, industrialized medical forces in the US successfully campaigned to criminalize midwifery and force all women to give birth with state licensed male attendants. These medical men preferred to centrally manage birthing women rather than attend individual births at home. In 1900, nearly 100% of American women gave birth at home, half with male medical attendants and half with female relatives or community midwives. By 1938, 50% of American births took place in hospitals and nearly all births were attended by male physicians.

This was before widespread availability of antibiotics and safe blood transfusions. There was no evidence that birthing in the hospital created better outcomes for women and their babies. Feminist statistician Marjorie Tew’s work demonstrates that maternal and neonatal deaths both increased when birth moved to the hospital en masse. 

The shift to hospital birth reflected the imposition of the industrial model onto birth. Doctors managed birthing women assembly line style and babies were the end product of the process. By the 1950s, women entered the hospital in labor where male doctors anesthetized them, restrained them to beds with leather straps, manually dilated their cervixes, and then pulled babies out of their bodies with forceps. Everyone now understood that the medical industry delivered babies.

Industrial medicine continues to receive credit for the creation of new humans. Nearly every woman who receives mainstream prenatal care and then births in a hospital truly believes she and her baby would have died without technological intervention. Despite industrialized birth deviating from normal physiology most of the time, we live under the illusion that conditions in hospital birth have improved over the years. Leather restraints have been replaced by pink and blue monitor belts. General anesthesia has given way to numbing women from the waist down. Women now supposedly have the choice whether or not to comply with industrial birth practices, but fear, propaganda, and sometimes outright coercion result in nearly all women “choosing” restraints and anesthesia. Fewer than 2% of American women give birth outside of the hospital system. 

Our culture has normalized restraining women in labor. Pink and blue belts and IV lines have replaced handcuffing women to the bed.

If we factor out improvements in treating severely premature infants and infants born with congenital defects, medical outcomes for newborns have not changed significantly since the late 1960s. But the rate of cesarean birth has increased from 5% to 32%. Far from improving, outcomes for mothers are getting worse, especially among Black and Native American women. American women of every demographic are more likely to die in childbirth today than they were 25 years ago.

We now have over three generations of women whose subjective experience of pregnancy and birth has been overshadowed by endless lab testing, ultrasound scanning, and other forms of medical surveillance. Women are so removed from the biological continuity of pregnancy and birth transforming seamlessly into motherhood, that most American women describe their entry into parenting as “when I brought you home from the hospital.” 

Homebirth creates a qualitatively different entry into motherhood than the industrial model of birth.

And now, the entry into motherhood is increasingly described as “when you were placed in my arms after the surrogate birthed you.”

Khloe Kardashian posing in hospital bed with child she commissioned through surrogacy market

We can all recognize the invisibility of women and erasure of pregnancy and birth as the beginning of motherhood in the right’s anti-abortion mantra, “Adoption, not abortion.” The profoundly life-changing process of pregnancy, which is the foundational experience of every human being, is casually disregarded. 

With the embrace of surrogacy, reproductive liberals now engage in the same erasure of the biological basis of motherhood. Both pro-surrogacy and anti-abortion rhetoric center around the belief that human beings are created at fertilization. Women’s bodies are just incubators serving a temporary role before babies can be delivered to their rightful owners. The primal, physical mothering that is pregnancy and childbirth is degraded and erased.

US Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and husband posing in hospital bed with children acquired through adoption

Throughout history, upper class families have stolen children from poor women through adoption. The legalization of abortion in the United States in 1973 drastically decreased the number of children available to adopt. In 1976 a male lawyer named Noel Keane developed the legal concept of surrogacy and drafted the first surrogacy contracts. In 1980, courts ruled these contracts legal and Elizabeth Kane became the first paid contracted surrogate. In 1985 the first gestational surrogacy occurred when a woman was paid to be implanted with and gestate a genetically unrelated embryo. Until 1990 most surrogacy cases involved women undergoing artificial insemination with the buyer’s sperm and the woman’s own eggs. After 1990, most surrogacy has involved in vitro fertilization of non-genetically related embryos implanted in the women who gestate and birth the babies.

The foundational patriarchal belief that only genetic gamete contribution “legitimizes” a child has morphed into “gestational surrogacy.” Like their anti-abortion contemporaries, surrogacy advocates believe that embryos are legal entities separate from the women who gestate them. In both cases ownership of children begins with fertilization and whether a pregnancy is a result of sex with a man or embryo transfer, a woman is legally obligated to carry to term. The woman’s physical labor that creates the baby is “unrelated” to the child. 

Before gestational surrogacy, the women hired to make babies for others were labeled surrogate mothers. Now they are simply referred to as surrogates or gestational carriers. The word mother is reserved for the buyer of the baby, if the buyer happens to be female. Surrogacy represents the end game of liberal equality feminism. Women can now insert their gametes into another person and come back nine months later to collect their legal property.

Chrissy Teigen kissing the abdomen of the working class woman she hired to gestate and birth her baby

The past few years have brought an enormous amount of propaganda promoting surrogacy. Liberal feminist trend setters have been at the forefront of the campaign. Sex in the City star Sarah Jessica Parker, bragged that she used other women as surrogates because she did not want to endure the health risks of pregnancy. She also stated that pregnancy and childbirth would derail her career. Media stories tell us that Parker’s promotion of surrogacy convinced her co-star Cynthia Nixon to also hire a working class woman to gestate and birth a child. Other prominent female entertainers who have procured their children through surrogacy include Nicole Kidman, Tyra Banks, Lucy Liu, Chrissy Teigen, Paris Hilton, Rebel Wilson, Jodie Foster, and Amber Heard. Each of these women has a distinct brand and is used by the media to market surrogacy to different demographic groups.

Queer Eye star Tan France pretending to be pregnant, announcing to his followers he is renting a woman and buying a baby through the surrogacy market.

In many liberal feminist circles, gestating and birthing a baby for a gay man or couple is a badge of honor. This service earns women social capital among progressives. Big Fertility sells reproductive technology as an integral part of gay rights. Gay style setters are buying babies at breakneck speed. Gay fashion designer and star of Queer Eye, Tan France, released a photography shoot of himself naked and holding an ultrasound image of a fetus over his abdomen to announce that he was acquiring a baby through surrogacy. Elton John, Perez Hiton, Neil Patrick Harris, Clay Aikin, Anderson Cooper, Lance Bass…at this point it’s hard to think of a famous contemporary gay male entertainer who hasn’t bought a baby through the egg and surrogacy market. Gay conservative darling Dave Rubin and his husband hired two separate surrogates at the same time, one each to gestate embryos created with purchased eggs and their individual sperm. 

The Kardashian family, high class trend setters at the forefront of mainstreaming transgenderism in 2015, have played a prominent role in selling surrogacy. Kim Kardashian has said that hiring surrogates to create her youngest two children was the best decision she ever made. She had experienced complications with her second pregnancy and did not want to risk her health having another child. So she hired a working class woman to grow her children, offloading the medical risks to the surrogate. Khloe Kardashian, considered to be the most likable and “relatable” of the Kardashian women, also purchased a child through surrogacy. Khloe’s press appearances about her complicated emotions surrounding surrogacy are being used to buffer criticism of the practice. In interviews that serve as controlled opposition, glamorous, down-to-earth Khloe admits that surrogacy is economically exploitative and creates poor infant bonding. But of course no one is suggesting ending the practice.

Opening up a conversation about the economic ethics of surrogacy, however, creates room to discuss other possible ways to outsource reproduction, now including whole body gestational donation. In the April 2023 edition of the journal of Theoretical Medical Bioethics, Anna Smajdor suggests that the solution to the exploitation of surrogacy is to use the bodies of so-called brain dead women to gestate babies. While this may seem far-fetched, there is historical precedent to the proposed practice. 

In 2013 a woman in Texas named Marlise Munoz suffered a pulmonary embolism when she was 14 weeks pregnant. She was declared brain dead and her husband wanted to remove her body from life support. Munoz was a paramedic and had always expressed that she did not want to be kept alive artificially. The hospital refused to honor the family’s wishes, citing Texas law mandating life-saving measures if a legally brain-dead woman is pregnant. Munoz was forcibly kept on life support for over two months until a judge ruled in favor of her family and she was allowed to die. 

More recently, in the summer of 2023, two brain dead patients were used in transplantation research. Kidneys with human DNA that had been grown in genetically engineered human-pig hybrids were transplanted into men who had been declared brain-dead. The men were kept alive for over a month while scientists observed the function of the transplanted organs. 

The prospect of brain dead surrogates makes the current state of surrogacy seem almost quaint.

Buying babies usually requires buying eggs and sperm, and the human gamete market is booming.  Young women and men are promised easy money for selling their eggs and sperm. Mainstream culture and the fertility industry still use the term “donate” for the process in order not to invoke scrutiny and public distaste. Big Fertility bombards female college students with ads for egg “donation.” The quality of these ads has changed in the past few years with many companies now incentivizing women with the opportunity to save some of their own eggs for future use in exchange for the remaining eggs being sold to strangers.

Buying human gametes has been thoroughly normalized. People cavalierly browse catalogs looking for desirable genetic material to create their lab-grown children. Many feminists who balk at other aspects of reproductive technology see no problem with women purchasing sperm brokered by the fertility industry. Some women view these transactions as a step toward reproductive autonomy. Sperm is practically a waste product of the male body and men do not suffer physically from its extraction. Aside from the complicated ethics of purchasing human genetic material, the commercial sperm industry relies on pornography for its existence.

One repeat sperm seller wrote the following about pornography and sperm banks:

“After filling out a questionnaire and interacting with an all-female staff, I would get escorted to a small donation room, given a small plastic tube, and be expected to bust a nut. … All the banks I've been to have their own selection of smut. Usually, it took the form of a pile of magazines or, if I was lucky, a small screen mounted on the wall with a bevy of DVDs on an adjacent table. Growing up in the age of internet porn, I was intrigued by these relics. I had never seen porn DVDs before I started providing a sample of my semen to sperm banks. Some of the discs almost looked as old as me, artifacts from the mid-90s, with names like Anal Frenzy 5 and Cumshot Chronicles 3.”

Compare this process to so-called egg donation (which activist Jennifer Lahl calls “egg poaching.”)

In order to sell her eggs, or have her own eggs extracted for the purpose of IVF, a woman is not simply sent into a pornography-filled room. She is first given high dose oral contraceptive pills to override her own fertility cycle. She takes this medication for three weeks, and then is subjected to a transvaginal ultrasound to assess her ovaries. When it has been determined by ultrasound that she does not have any current ripening egg follicles, she is prescribed Lupron or another GnRH agonist. She injects herself with Lupron every day for 7-14 days. The fertility doctors then give her a synthetic follicle stimulating hormone which she also must inject daily. This hormone over-stimulates the ovaries, causing them to ripen many more eggs than the natural one to two ova per cycle. She is subjected to another transvaginal ultrasound to determine that her eggs are ripe. Doctors then anesthetize her, insert a long needle through her vaginal wall, and under ultrasound guidance remove as many ripe eggs as they can find.

People believe that differing rates of compensation for eggs and sperm in the human gamete market make up for the discrepancy in effort and risk between the two processes. Men selling their sperm are paid an average of $120 per ejaculation. They can sell sperm up to twice a week, and can make over $10,000 a year jerking off to porn at sperm banks. Sperm banks will accept sperm from men ages 18 to 39, and there is literally no medical risk to the process of retrieving sperm. A man who remains healthy could theoretically sell sperm weekly for several decades, making hundreds of thousands of dollars over this time period. 

Women who sell their eggs are paid an average of $5000 per egg retrieval. Women whose eggs are highly desirable on the human egg market (generally women who are Jewish or Asian, tall, from healthy families, naturally thin, athletic, and academically talented) can make up to $20,000 per procedure. Due to the health risks and the decreasing quality of a woman’s eggs after multiple rounds of ovarian hyperstimulation, fertility clinics do not allow women to sell their eggs more than six times.

No man has ever died from masturbating to porn at a sperm bank, but death is a possible side effect of selling eggs. Sperm donation entails male pleasure. Egg donation entails severe female discomfort and pain. Egg selling carries risks of hemorrhage, infection, and infertility. There are no long-term studies on the effects of egg selling on women’s bodies. Egg donors sign consent forms saying there is no evidence that the process can lead to cancer or other serious health sequelae, but what this means is no studies have been conducted on the topic.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) carries the same risks to women as egg selling in addition to the risks of pregnancy and birth. Studies on women who have undergone IVF show that multiple rounds of ovarian hyperstimulation double the lifetime risk of ovarian cancer. IVF pregnancies have increased risks of identical twinning, placental malfunction, cesarean delivery, depression and anxiety. IVF children are ten times more likely to suffer from the deadly cancer neuroblastoma than children who are conceived naturally. They also have higher rates of leukemia, liver cancer, brain cancer, and soft tissue cancers. Despite the illusive promise of genetically healthier children, children conceived via IVF are more likely to suffer from premature birth, low birth weight, cardiac malformations, and disorders of the central nervous system. The oldest person conceived through IVF is only 45 years old, so we are just now beginning to observe the longer term consequences of this experiment on humanity.

IVF qualifies as medical torture and medical experimentation on women. Despite grand promises, IVF continues to have a very low success rate. The process fails to produce a viable pregnancy more often than it succeeds. Fertility doctors subject women to painful and humiliating procedures, and only 50% to 60% of women who undergo three or more rounds of egg harvesting and IVF eventually become pregnant.  

But every round of IVF yields information furthering the scientific quest for total control of human reproduction. Big Fertility has been learning a lot over decades of human experimentation. The process of IVF has progressed from simply putting an egg and a sperm sample in a petri dish and allowing fertilization to occur. Most IVF embryos are now the product of intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI). To accomplish ICSI, scientists remove the outer membrane of the egg, the zona pellucida, the intelligent membrane which allows a chosen sperm to enter and fertilize the ovum. When this layer is intact, an egg will self-destruct if scientists attempt to mechanically penetrate her. Scientists wash off the zona pellucida, then remove the tail from a sperm, place the head of the sperm in a micropipette and forcibly inject the sperm head into the egg. At best, ICSI removes all natural intelligence from the process of human fertilization. At worse it can be described as egg rape. 

At least half of all attempts to fertilize an egg outside of the female body fail to create an embryo. When IVF does work, embryos are allowed to grow in the lab for three to five days until they consist of approximately 60 cells. At this point scientists remove one cell for genetic testing, a process called preimplantation genetic diagnosis or PGD. IVF customers are told this makes the process safer by eliminating the chance of implanting an embryo with a genetic defect. There are as yet no studies on the long-term consequences of removing over 1% of a person’s embryonic matter.

Without interventional support, human embryos created outside of a woman stop growing within a few days. Lab grown embryos are either transferred into women after five to seven days or cryogenically frozen for later use. Embryo transfer involves one or more embryos being placed in a sterile catheter then inserted into the woman’s uterus. Fertility doctors then give women synthetic hormones and closely surveil their bodies to determine if pregnancy has occurred. Women must inject themselves daily with progesterone and are subjected to frequent transvaginal ultrasounds for the first ten weeks after the embryo transfer. 

Currently, one in fifty American live births result from artificial reproductive technology. In Denmark, ten percent of children born in 2022 were conceived through IVF.

Infertility can create grief and desperation, leaving women vulnerable to predatory forces. Big Fertility offers to save women from our defective bodies and give us children. But the $23 billion dollar a year fertility industry does not expend resources to cure infertility. Very little research is being done on why so many women are experiencing infertility. It is not coincidental that the medical industry and international health organizations spend billions inducing infertility in women around the world. Hormonal contraception and sterilizing surgeries are aggressively pushed on poor women, young women, and women of color by the same forces making money treating infertility in wealthier populations.

In the West, young women are subjected to the long con of pressure to delay childbearing until the socially acceptable age of their late thirties or early forties, the time when female fertility sharply declines. Instead of creating policies and social practices that support women having children when they are most fertile and most likely to have good maternal and child health outcomes, liberal feminist forces are now studying and promoting the idea that true equality for women means the ability to have genetically related children across the entire adult lifespan. The same forces intentionally creating female infertility are also pouring billions of dollars into “extending female reproductive longevity.” What this means, according to the people funding the research, is making the process of egg retrieval and storage easier and more affordable. 

While scientists have not been working on an actual cure for infertility, they have been meticulously studying human embryonic development. Promising relief from human suffering, fertility scientists are experimenting with gene editing of embryos with CRISPR technology. The first known genetically edited humans were born in 2018. The September 11, 2023 edition of The New Yorker contains a thirteen page article on gene editing of human embryos. 

Despite warnings against the practice in dystopian tales from previous generations, we have entered the world of designer babies. Children born through IVF already undergo pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). Detailed understanding of the human genome and the technology to genetically edit embryos currently exists. In 2017, Stanford scholar Harry Greely wrote The End of Sex, in which he convincingly argues that by 2040 the majority of children born in the developed world will be created through this technology. Greely is fully supportive of this brave new world, envisioning a society no longer plagued by children with genetic diseases like Tay Sachs and Down Syndrome, but also free of cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and other illnesses with genetic causes. I am less optimistic.

My pessimism deepens when I think about the burgeoning field of artificial gametes. In March 2023, media around the world announced that scientists had created mice with two fathers. Since the early 2000s, researchers have been working on in vitro gametogenesis, or IVG, the process of creating artificial sperm and egg cells. Blood, hair or skin cells are transformed into stem cells. These stem cells are then genetically engineered into sperm and egg cells. Last year scientists succeeded in fertilizing artificial eggs with artificial sperm and creating viable mouse embryos. These embryos were gestated and birthed by female mice, but the published results asserted that the mice had no mothers.

Very wealthy gay men are quite interested in the possibility of creating babies with two genetic fathers. One of these men is Matt Krisiloff, a venture capitalist involved in the development of ChatGPT. Krisiloff states he wants to have genetically related children with his partner Lucas Harrington,the founder of Mammoth Biosciences, a company at the forefront of CRISPR gene editing technology. With money from Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and former boyfriend of Krisiloff, these men started Conception Biosciences. The motto of Conception is “Turning stem cells into human eggs.” These men may be close to achieving their goal of genetically motherless children. On September 7, 2023, Israeli scientists announced they had created a human embryo without the use of natural sperm or egg cells.

The pro-tech propaganda outlet Wired magazine routinely runs articles praising Sam Altman and his colleagues. Wired has enthusiastically endorsed all of Altman’s endeavors, from artificial intelligence to artificial sperm and egg cells. On August 31, 2023, Wired published an article entitled, “Preferring Biological Children Is Immoral.” The article asserts that genetic familial relationships are social constructs based in white supremacy. Foreseeing a world where most children are created through artificial reproductive technology and gene editing, the authors argue for a future where preferring genetically related children is stigmatized. But they do offer one exception. Due to a history of reproductive marginalization, it will still be ethical for gay men to prefer and select for genetically related offspring.

In her article entitled “Mommy, what did you do in the industrial revolution?”, radical feminist perinatologist and homebirth mother Lauren Plante laments that birth has moved “first out of the home, and now out of the vagina.” We currently face the possibility that pregnancy and birth may move out of the female body entirely. Viatra Biomedical corporation has raised over $25 million dollars with the goal of creating artificial wombs. The European Union program Horizon has dedicated 2.9 million euros to researching and developing artificial wombs. The director of the EU artificial womb project Guid Oei said in 2019, “During the next five years, we will conduct further research and test these technologies in a European collaboration, and continue to develop them until we manage to realize a first prototype of an artificial womb. That is a wonderful challenge.”

As K Yang notes in her brilliant presentation “The Great Reset of Motherhood, the propaganda around artificial wombs is escalating. The ruling class is preparing our minds for this technology. We are being exposed to frequent stories about the soon to be available artificial wombs. In December of 2022, EctoLife launched a multi-million dollar ad campaign misleadingly implying that artificial womb facilities already exist. In June 2023, Psychology Today ran an article entitled “In a decade human bodies may not be required to make a baby.”

We need to start having the conversation about whether or not an organism created with gametes made from skin cells and gestated in an artificial womb is human. We need to talk about this before the technology is already in use and we are silenced. We will be accused of hurting the feelings and erasing the existence of those who have used this technology. Looking at the trajectory of fertility medicine over the past 50 years, we cannot assume that scientists will fail at this project.   

While we wait for what seems like the inevitable artificial wombs, research on uterus transplantation is advancing quickly. Over 40 infants have now been born to women who had received living or deceased donor wombs. No one knows how these children will be affected by growing in a transplanted organ and being exposed to anti-rejection medication throughout pregnancy, but the science advances nonetheless. Many American university hospital systems now boast uterine transplant programs. The University of Pennsylvania womb transplant department actively recruits women to undergo elective hysterectomy and donate their healthy wombs to the project. Under the guise of helping the tiny subset of women who were born without wombs, scientists are gleaning enormous amounts of information on how to eventually transplant uteruses into men.

When I bring up the topic of men receiving uterus transplants, I inevitably hear a chorus of “that will never happen” followed by a list of perceived reasons why the male body cannot support a functioning uterus. The scientists hard at work at transplanting uteruses into men are well aware of all of these arguments and they are countering each one. 

Fifty years of Big Fertility’s mass experimentation on women has yielded information on how to create a baby using a body that is not hospitable to pregnancy and birth.  Scientists are examining data from women with a rare congenital condition in which females are born without a vagina and uterus who have undergone uterine transplants and vaginoplasty. These women do not have connective tissue or a vascular system attached to a uterus. Womb transplants in this demographic are being studied with the goal of learning how to transplant a uterus into a male body.

Scientists are also studying patients with congenital-adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), which causes masculinization of female fetuses and lifelong hormonal dysfunction in affected girls and women. Women with classical CAH produce high levels of testosterone and usually have external genitalia that appear male.There are very few recorded cases of natural conception and birth in women with classical CAH. But many women with CAH have been treated in fertility clinics, and some of these treatments have led to viable pregnancies and live births. Scientists believe the data from these cases support the safety of uterine transplant and pregnancy in males whose testicles remain intact.

While radical feminists have rejected the term “pregnant men” as it is applied to pregnant trans-identified women, the fertility industry is taking information gained from this population to further research on actual male pregnancy. 

Women taking testosterone during pregnancy are mined for data to support the goal of male pregnancy. One researcher states, “The closest analogous population to transgender women may be transgender men on exogenous testosterone…Reassuringly, uncomplicated pregnancies have been reported.”

No one needs a uterus transplant. Unlike other organ donation, uterine transplantation is never necessary to prolong life or restore sensory function. Uterine transplantation poses major known and unknown risks to both recipients and the offspring born from the procedure. It is difficult to make an ethical argument for why only females should be allowed to access this unecessary technology, and those promoting womb transplants into men know this.

All of mainstream medicine has fallen for the “transwomen are women” lie. Males who assert they are female are viewed by many doctors as no different from women born without a uterus and vagina. In addition to creating male pregnancy, researchers are advocating for uterine transplantation into men so these men can experience menstruation.

Some second wave radical feminists, notably Shulamith Firestone and Marge Piercy, celebrated the idea of artificial womb technology and removing human reproduction from the female body. Both Firestone and Piercy postulated that freeing women from reproduction would fully liberate women, allowing us to be full members of society, unburdened from patriarchal oppression and reproductive control. Interestingly, neither Firestone nor Piercy were mothers themselves. 

As a midwife and a woman who found her power through sovereign pregnancy and birth, I disagree strongly with the idea that motherhood is by nature oppressive. I understand the horrors of compulsory motherhood and patriarchal control of women’s reproductive capacity, but my feminist utopia does not involve elimination of pregnancy and birth from the realm of women. Unlike Firestone and Piercy, I shudder when I look into the future and see men making ova from their skin cells and incubating babies in artificial wombs. With the additional development of virtual reality augmented, high-quality sex robots, I fear that ruling class men may stop making women entirely. Though they will probably keep some of us available as exotics. 

Much second wave writing on reproductive technology shares my concerns.

In 1985, Gena Corea wrote The Mother Machine, a radical feminist treatise on reproductive technology that remains incredibly pertinent today. I urge everyone trying to make sense of reproductive technology and its effect on women and humanity to read this book. Corea incisively tells us, “Reproductive technologies … are transforming the experience of motherhood and placing it under the control of men. Woman’s claim to maternity is being loosened; man’s claim to paternity is being strengthened.” 

Janyce Raymond wrote Women as Wombs in 1993 critiquing the emergence of reproductive technologies. She warned that these technologies “increasingly sever the fetus/embryo from the woman,” erase the biological reality of motherhood, and relegate women to mere incubator status. She states, “Radical feminist opponents of the new reproductive technologies do not pit nature against technology, nor do we extol a new version of biology is destiny for women. Opposition to these technologies is based on the more political feminist perspective that women as a class have a stake in reclaiming the female body … by refusing to yield control of it to men, to the fetus, to the state, and most recently to those liberals who advocate that women control our bodies by giving up control.”

I want to end with an excerpt from Patricia Spallone’s prophetic 1989 book on reproductive technology, Beyond Conception.

“Those who trust that IVF, artificial wombs, and genetic engineering can be used to make life better trust that scientists and the state will not abuse their authority over women’s eggs, embryos, and bodies–not realizing that such a view means women should exchange our body parts and reproductive role for ‘progress.’

A woman-centered approach to reproduction recognizes the interrelationship among oppressions, among sexism, racism, ableism, class division. It recognizes economic and global inequalities at play in our dependence on technologies. It means we must accept that everything is not solvable by some technological solution, and admit that there are risks to living that ‘experts’ cannot solve for us.

To change our relationship to science and technology in the most woman-respecting, life-respecting way, we must start from the recognition that we are our bodies, we are ourselves. We do not have to accept the man-made paradoxes and the splitting up of women into parts (eggs, embryos, wombs, placenta) which has been so ingrained as to seem natural. We can overturn the dualities of mind/body, rational/emotional, science/not science, and the ancient conceptional split embryo/woman. Knowledge of women’s fertility and procreative powers must have to do with our bodies and be grounded in our experiences in the world, in feeling and doing (which also includes thinking and observing), not what scientists find out for us in laboratories after they have taken our insides out.”