The Bioengineering Womb
Gilder, George
George Gilder THE BIOENGINEERING WOMB It could mean that men and women will never again have to get along. A book about men and marriage written during the last half of the twentieth century...
...Free Press, $23.50...
...For when we break the tie between sexual intercourse and procreation, destroy the childhood memory of the nurturing and omnipotent mother, banish the mystique of the breasts and the womb and of the female curves and softnesses, we could remove as well much of the special attraction of heterosexual love...
...Under less intense control and training, homosexual impulses can arise in such a sequestered all-male group...
...Virtually every sentence, every description, every lesson embodies this sexual duality, and the female anatomy provides a rich field of metaphor for every degradation...
...Human biology, however, may well obstruct the biologists and their schemes of technocratic sex...
...The question is whether we apply these sciences to preserve and enhance the human species or to invade and transform the most profound and definitive domains of its sexuality...
...It advances the day when parents will be able to choose the gender of their child, either ordering a fetus of the preferred sex or aborting all undesired ones...
...First, with time, her sexual powers would decrease...
...It thus pro-motes the trend toward regarding sex as just another means of pleasure, and weakens the male connection to the psychologically potent realm of procreation...
...The next step after test-tube conception—extracorporeal gestation and ectogenesis—is far more complicated...
...If artificial wombs were achieved, the state could assume in-creasing control over the genetic future of the race...
...Test-tube conception also will potentially reduce demand to adopt children...
...In other words, he doesn't know...
...has been scrupulously weighed and explored in a recent book by Leon R. Kass, a doctor who thinks like the best of lawyers and writes like the best of writers.' In a more purely literary mode, Edward Grossman's essay "The Obsolescent Mother" (which appeared in the May 1971 Atlantic) has elegiacally captured the possible impact of the new techniques on the long, historic saga of childbirth in mystery and tumult...
...Norman Mailer was thus most profound when he defined the movement of women's liberation as the fifth column of the technocracy...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 23...
...and cloning, the exact reproduction or "xeroxing" of particular genotypes...
...Progress toward cloning feeds on a stream of recent successes related to in vitro fertilization, the conception of a child in a laboratory dish, and the transmittal of the blastocyte or fertilized egg to the uterine wall...
...A book about men and marriage written during the last half of the twentieth century labors under a cloud...
...The progress in bioengineering enables the world to contemplate nothing less than a new stage of evolution, such as was intimated at the end of the movie 2001 and similar science fiction...
...Although ideologues persist in their dreams of transcending gender, the evidence of profound differences between the sexes has now been widely accepted even by many sexual liberals...
...It has the additional fillip of making possible the abolition of males, since the three 'See Leon R. Kass, Toward a More Natural Science: Biology and Human Affairs...
...We can no longer retreat to automatic affirmations of biological destiny...
...But it can be deadly to individuality and civilization...
...Often seen as offering a new liberation of women—and actually promising a series of impressive medical benefits—the new life sciences also pose grave dangers to both sexes...
...And it works...
...Yet this seemingly innocent practice, which will ultimately help millions of childless couples to have babies, also poses many perplexing problems...
...New, more partial, and detached forms of motherhood become possible for busy or preoccupied women...
...The bonding process that occurs in the military, however, has no homoerotic content...
...Clones, chimeras (human-animal hybrids), and other experimental "sports" might be generated and flushed at will...
...A clone is created by implanting the nucleus of a human cell, from any part of the body, into the enucleated cell of a female egg...
...Since the fertilized ovum does not have to be placed in the body of the real "mother," it can be farmed out to any willing woman—for pay...
...Men en-joy being male, and being married...
...In this resistance, the new feminists should find many male allies...
...The good things are manly and collective...
...This article is taken from Men and Marriage...
...Kass quotes C.S...
...Scientists can only guess at the likely chronology of new developments...
...When you want to create a solidaristic group of male killers, that is what you do, you kill the woman in them...
...That widely accepted practice has already given a few hundred medical students technical paternity over several hundred thou-sand children...
...The system of marriage that tames men and evokes their love is the chief obstacle to this technocratic future...
...Under normal circumstances, biology is destiny...
...The very role of mother and the profound biological tie with her child become optional...
...Now mostly confined to laboratories, it is emerging year by year to become a major force in the definition and prospects of the two sexes, of masculinity and femininity...
...By circumventing the act of love, in vitro conception takes another small step toward dislodging sexual intercourse from its pinnacle as both the paramount act of love and the only act of procreation...
...Not only could the female body become a strange combination of otiose spaces and appendages, not only could man become the exemplary, utilitarian physique, but the power of women over men could gradually pass away...
...Man's conquest of nature, if the dreams of the scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men...
...But the new circumstances are not normal...
...In 1978 the first human baby so conceived—Louise Brown—was born in England, and hundreds more have been born in America, mostly after procedures managed by Drs...
...Using artificial insemination, a woman in Michigan has already rented her womb to a friend, borne a child fathered by the friend's husband, and delivered it to the wife...
...It is a powerful ex-ample of the male ties that Lionel Tiger explored so fruitfully in his book Men in Groups...
...Lewis's powerful tract, The Abolition of Man: If any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are patients of that power...
...That is the lesson of the Marines...
...It is deadly to the sentiments that women evoke from men: love, creativity, nurturance, commitment to the future...
...There is no real love, little individuality, and no pro-creative instinct...
...In more immediate terms, the question is whether male or female sexual nature will prevail...
...Successful cloning has already been done with frogs, salamanders, and fruit flies, and by a related technique, scientists have engineered a mouse with genetic material from six parents...
...With government at last controlling both production and reproduction, the dreams of the social planner could at last be fulfilled...
...With in vitro techniques rather than artificial insemination, a much more attractive result—full genetic offspring—could be achieved by such means...
...This is the ultimate pattern that might unfold if the new bioengineering technology is devoted heavily to the agenda of "women's liberation...
...Mass rape has been frequent throughout the history of war...
...But their victims, surprisingly—even when exclusively heterosexual in outside life—can sometimes feel a powerful psychological and even physiological change...
...For whatever dreams of glory men may cherish for society or for other men, few indeed will wish a new biology for themselves or for their sons...
...The cloud is biogenetic engineering and it makes technically possible for the first time in human history a change in the very essence of sexuality...
...From the moment the recruit arrives, the drill instructors begin a torrent of misogynistic and anti-individualist abuse...
...The relief is decidedly better, moreover, since it allows the woman to retain full genetic maternity of her children...
...But it would not likely turn out as Marx en-visaged in his idyll of the country squire...
...The system has its uses in protecting a society from enemies or in abetting the performance of crucial group activities...
...The men are freed to pursue their own sexual cycles in uncivilized groups of hunters...
...necessary elements—a cell nucleus, an enucleated egg, and a womb—can all be provided by a woman...
...Each new power won by man is a power over man as well...
...Individuality is far more deeply threatened, though, in cloning...
...The alternative to the system of men and marriage is usually the system of men and misogyny...
...In addition, the process offers human uses far beyond the circumvention 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 1986 of sterility...
...The woman's breasts and womb would lose their uses...
...It entails in essence the creation of artificial wombs...
...There neither is nor can there be any simple increase in power on man's side...
...Nobel Prize winner James D. Watson, the discoverer of DNA structure, told Congress in the early 1970s of his fearthat cloning will be perfected for humans "within the next twenty to fifty years...
...More than ever before, society needs today a real feminist movement that asserts the primacy of female nature in marriages acid families...
...Otherwise the epitome of male liberation is Marine Corps boot camp...
...He might have added that it is also the fifth column of true patriarchy: the sterile solidarity...
...The family has received thousands of inquiries from others...
...Millions of American men know something about the spirit and feasibility of such a masculine, not even homosexual, society...
...The men who have been to war have told their story...
...The obstacles remain formidable, but impressive successes have been obtained with rats...
...But even within this master generation (itself an infinitesimal minority of the species) the power will be exercised by a minority smaller still...
...They arrive as various and rebellious boys, swearing under their breath what they will do to any drill instructor who lays a hand on them...
...If the family should widely break down, then the world of artificial wombs, clones, and child-development centers can become an important reality rather than a laboratory curiosity...
...Now no larger than a man's hand, it promises to shadow all debate about human sexuality in decades to come...
...This is not a farfetched idea...
...But eventually the state would probably intervene to determine which persons were most suitable for copying...
...extracorporeal gestation (the artificial womb...
...Kass maintains that many of the women who can be helped by this technique also could be given a permanent cure by surgery on their oviducts (particularly if this operation were promoted as lavishly as the fertilization projects...
...We are approaching a time when our destinies can be bioengineered...
...But with in vitro fertilization a fait accompli and the artificial womb advancing steadily, the coming of clones seems perilously close...
...Pornographic movies near military centers reek with attacks on women, and one of the favorite stories told on return to the base from liberty is of the violent abuse of a whore...
...While eschewing a Luddite effort to stop the progress of knowledge, a real woman's movement can rebuke the social planners of Marxism who have been widely thwarted in their efforts to create a "new society" but are now proposing to engineer a "new man...
...Other analysts range from the cogently premonitory to the wildly prophetic...
...We may liberate men to celebrate, like the ancient Spartans or the most extreme homosexuals to-day, a violent, misogynistic, and narcissistic eroticism...
...The male group treats women exclusively as sexual objects...
...Cloning poses the most obvious threat to human individuality, but the other two techniques also have far-reaching implications...
...This process, which can be repeated as often as eggs and wombs are available, creates genetic copies of the donor of the nucleus, identical twins in every way except age...
...In sexual terms, the nature of the change is easier to define...
...They end up, aftertwelve weeks of manhandling, often including violent physical abuse, gladly and voluntarily making large financial gifts to the instructors...
...Contrary to their every expectation, some may become willing partners in homosexuality...
...In prisons, for example, the dominant men often want and extort sexual services...
...Above all, it is perfectly barren...
...This development threatens to diminish further the perceived and felt authority of the basic connections of human life...
...After reading the available literature, an apprehensive layman is left with the impression that it will be a very long time before artificial wombs for humans can be fabricated in number...
...Howard and Georgeanna Jones at their clinic in Norfolk, Virginia...
...The problems are being approached from both ends: the saving of increasingly premature babies and the extension of the life of blastocytes into the embryonic stages...
...The male body would become the physical ideal and lend symbolic authority to the male command of other instruments of power...
...0 The alternative to the system of men and marriage is usually the system of men and misogyny...
...Although some analysts have predicted the liberation of women or the redundancy of males, the technology in fact most profoundly threatens women...
...Few things ever happen much as predicted...
...Ultimately the womb could be made obsolete...
...the despicable are feminine and individual...
...Laboratory fertilization merely seems to extend relief to certain childless women that was previously available only if the sterility afflicted their husbands...
...But the creation of even a small number of elaborate and expensive devices would be ominous because it would relieve the scientists of the tiresome task of finding and managing available women...
...The male group, separated from women, is the male solidarity...
...The three approaches about which most is known are in vitro or test-tube fertilization...
...They are weaker, not stronger...
...a revised edition of his 1973 book, Sexual Suicide, to be published later this year by Pelican Books...
...Just as women tame the barbarians of each generation of men, women can save sexuality from the male barbarians of specialization who would socialize reproduction...
...But key developments may happen even before the turn of the century, for technological ventures into the space of woman, though less cinematically spectacular, are both more advanced and more portentous than any prospective adventures of astronauts...
...Test-tube conception may seem a relatively limited step beyond the use of artificial insemination...
...Men and women grow up in different ways, seek different goals, and transcend their biological separation chiefly through the mystery of love and marriage...
...The technocracy, a dominantly male creation in the first place, would remain in the hands of a male minority...
...But the long-run social implications re-main dire for the human species as we know it...
...It makes possible a further disconnection between motherhood and pregnancy...
...Artfully exploiting the internal pressures of the group, the instructors manage to evoke a fanatical commitment from almost every recruit...
...If marriage endures, the realm of the state and the development and use of the technology can be limited, while the maintenance of human individuality can be assured...
...The nature of the new technology George Gilder is the author of Wealth and Poverty and The Spirit of Enter-prise...
...The women might be released from pregnancy, but the men would be released from marriage, and thus from the influence of female sexuality...
...The real picture is that of one dominant age . . . which resists all previous ages most successfully and dominates all subsequent ages most irresistibly, and thus is the real master of the human species...
...Lewis's vision of a centralized power of reproduction might well give way to a messy proliferation of eugenic experiments and enterprises proceeding over centuries...
...The male physique, far inferior to the woman's in a sexual society, would become superior in a sexual suicide society in which the state manages reproduction...
...The first clones will likely be done for a few rich experimenters or for the scientists themselves...
...In its classic form, it comprises twelve weeks without a moment of liberty, all devoted chiefly to the extirpation of feminine ties and sentiments in the assembled young men...
Vol. 19 • May 1986 • No. 5
