The campaign to erase women has officially escalated to leaving them out of the sacred act of reproduction.
For years, researchers, celebrities, and OB-GYNs have touted making babies outside of the bedroom as a novelty attraction available for anyone willing to pay. Millions of test tube babies and a million more frozen embryos later, the global fertility industry has found a new way to create life without a key natural component: women.
The Economist ran a series of articles in “Technology Quarterly” this month advocating for the expansion of assisted reproductive technology to in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), an experimental procedure that involves reprograming adult male stem cells to become usable eggs.
At least one of the stories acknowledges that outsourcing reproduction through existing technology like in vitro fertilization is “failing most women.” Already, countries, states, and healthcare facilities are grappling with how to handle ethical, moral, and legal crises like commercial surrogates with cancer and gay men who want taxpayers to fund the creation of motherless children.
As biotechnologists ramp up their fantasies about facilities filled with artificial wombs, dehumanizing “gene editing,” and now, fabricated female gametes, concerns about technology outpacing our humanity should be high.
The solution the British publication repeatedly prescribes to its readers, however — speeding up technical advancements to meet the rapidly growing desire of infertile or sexually incompatible adults to have children — falls prey to one of the biggest scams sold by the multi-billion dollar babymaking business.
The idea that humans can somehow circumvent their natural reproductive limits because of their desire to have children whenever they want is dangerous — it has led to the pain, suffering, and death of women and unborn babies.
Yet, scientists have proved over and over and over that they will continue to pursue unethical means to justify such ends.
Of Mice And Men
Enter Dr. Katsuhiko Hayashi, a Japanese researcher who, after decades of stem cell research, recently used stem cells converted from the skin on male mice tails paired with artificial ovaries to grow oocytes ready for fertilization by another male mouse.
The products of the two male mice were then placed for gestation in surrogate female mice. Of the 630 embryos manufactured with manipulated stem cell eggs and obtained sperm, more than half a dozen baby mice were born and appeared to mature without any defects.
Instead of approaching this new IVG technology with a critical eye, media outlets everywhere praised the discovery as a step towards human same-sex reproduction. In the Economist’s recent article titled “New ways of making babies are on the horizon,” the author called Hayashi’s work one of many “feats of reproductive wizardry” and pondered how long it would take researchers to make the technology mainstream.
“Henry Greely of Stanford University, a legal scholar who specialises in the ethics of new biotech, thinks IVG may within a few decades be widely used even by those who have no fertility problems,” the article suggests. “The reasoning is that, if IVG proves capable of producing viable eggs in copious amounts, it could allow the production of a large enough number of embryos to allow screening for a wide number of genetic traits, and that could be something many parents might want.”
Hayashi admits that elevating the technology beyond rodents will take time and face ethical hurdles.
“It (will be) difficult to produce babies from male-male (human) couples because of both technical and ethical reasons,” Hayashi told eager members of the press. “But it is theoretically possible to produce babies from male-male couples, as shown in this study.”
Yet, he’s already begun working with Silicon Valley startups to potentially mainstream the technology for humans.
“I myself am gay and something I’m very personally interested in in terms of how it could allow people like me to be able to have biological children with their partners,” Matt Krisiloff, founder of fertility research company Conception, explained in a video interview with The Economist.
Conception’s website states its interest in the technology rests in the idea that it “would give women the opportunity to have children well into their forties and fifties, eliminate barriers for couples suffering from infertility, and potentially allow male-male couples to have biological children.”
Other beneficiaries, The Economist says, would be “women with low ovarian reserves” and “transgender women.”
Eventually, Krisiloff’s company hopes to use the technology to empower the type of genetic testing that lets parents replace the inherent value of life with a numeric placeholder.
“This could become one of the most important technologies ever created,” Conception’s front page suggests.
Salt In The Wound
Krisiloff’s background is in artificial intelligence. He was a founding member of Open AI, the company that created ChatGPT. As I’ve written in previous articles, the similarities in the AI and ART industries begin with a driving desire to propel humans beyond the natural limits of our bodies and minds.
Krisiloff’s expressed desire to offer parenthood to not just those who can afford it but those who deliberately choose to leave half of a procreator out of the process is a recipe for disaster. More importantly, it seeks to deliberately sideline women from something only possible because of them.
Women, especially those who are strapped for cash, already face commodification from the fertility industry through ever-popular egg “donation” and rent-a-womb contracts. If they are willing to sign on a dotted line that binds them to sacrificing their bodies, women and the babies born of their eggs or womb are forever opened to a world of pain and suffering for the sake of someone else’s desires.
Creating and raising a child between two men or two women, studies show, deliberately puts the children being bought in these scenarios at a lifelong disadvantage. Kids who are born and raised by their married biological mother and father are more likely to lead healthier, safer, and better-educated lives well above the poverty line, not any other way.
Women aren’t just necessary for raising healthy children, they are necessary for creating those children. No matter how hard scientists try to distance themselves from the sacred act of reproduction, humans can’t permanently bypass biology without suffering moral, ethical, and physical consequences.
