Brain-dead women offer the solution and are ideal in several respects. Not only do they raise no objections and demand no payment, but they can also be subjected to physically riskier procedures in order to increase the likelihood of successful births. As many as four embryos could be implanted at once. Should miscarriages occur – or should some of the embryos have to be “reduced” because of illness or the wrong sex, as abortion is described in technical language – none of this would trouble them. In legal and medical terms, they are already dead and are being kept alive only by machines.

An artificially ventilated and nourished birthing machine. No need to invent the artificial incubator. It is already lying there.

Is it not wonderful that a woman’s body can remain useful even after death?

And It Would Be Gender-Equitable Too

From a feminist perspective, the entire arrangement would be considerably fairer because, in the near future, it will probably also be possible to use brain-dead men as birthing machines. Transplant medicine is already working toward successfully transplanting entire uteruses not only into women, but soon into male bodies as well. At last, reproductive equality would have arrived, and humanity’s tiresome reproductive labor would no longer rest solely on women.

Finally: a 50:50 sex quota in the delivery room.

The proposal to use brain-dead surrogates came from the British philosophy professor Anna Smajdor, who teaches medical ethics at the University of Oslo. At the beginning of 2023, she provoked gasps of outrage in the global surrogacy debate, at least among those who failed to understand her detailed article in a respected academic journal for what it was: a cynical exaggeration intended to demonstrate both the horror and the feasibility of what follows once society sets out on the path of exploiting and utilizing the human body.

By her own account, Smajdor was responding to the unfortunately quite serious idea put forward by an Israeli colleague in 2000. With little protest from the academic world at the time, her colleague had suggested carrying out the same process not on brain-dead women, but on patients in a persistent vegetative state.

Sperm donation, egg donation, embryo donation, organ donation, whole-body donation – they form a logical sequence. How long, in fact, can such a body be kept alive by machines and repeatedly impregnated? How many eggs can be extracted from it?

When Feasibility Threatens Annihilation

In the spring of 2023, billionaire Elon Musk joined numerous prominent researchers in the field of artificial intelligence in calling on the industry’s leading research institutions to agree to a voluntary six-month pause in development. Many people rightly found the appeal plausible.

The reasoning was that the uncontrolled potential of this technology was so dangerous that, without limits and regulation, it could provoke world wars and bring about the imminent end of humanity. The fundamental principle was simple: we must not do everything we are capable of doing, because otherwise we may destroy ourselves.

That same year, millions of people around the world went to cinemas to watch the story of Robert Oppenheimer, the developer of the atomic bomb, who recognized the full horror of his invention’s destructive potential only after it had been created.

The continually expanding possibilities of reproductive medicine have long confronted humanity with the same challenge. Here, too, progress carries the threat of destruction. More dangerously still, technology is advancing far faster than man’s ability to reflect on the options it creates.

We do everything we can. We reach deep into the human genome and modify it. The ultimate objective is the artificial uterus and the industrial production of babies on an assembly line, all in order finally to emancipate women from the burden of giving birth.

What a triumph for the women’s movement. Is it not?

Aldous Huxley would nod. He had already thought it through.

An Experiment on Humanity’s Open Heart

We have therefore long since entered a medical and social experiment in which surgery is being performed on an open heart, while no one can any longer say who the patient is and who the doctor is.

In his book The Abolition of Man, CS Lewis put it this way: “What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”

There is one further development: the ambition to dominate nature has expanded to include man himself. When there is no land left to conquer, no animal left to hunt and no human being left to oppress, man must dominate himself.

In this case, he must dominate himself and his own human nature, which unfortunately cannot be separated from his physical body. Without a body, there is no consciousness.

The attempt by man to master himself and perfect his absolute autonomy is therefore now considered successful only once he has overcome his own biology. First nature was deconstructed. Now it is man’s turn.

He does so by denying his own fertility or compelling it.

By rejecting his own sex, redefining it and forcing it into a new artificial form with scalpels and hormones.

I am whatever I identify as.

The Deconstruction of Blood Ties

For those who prefer a theological interpretation, it is, of course, a rebellion against God the Creator. Man refuses to accept himself as a created being and instead becomes his own creator.

Anyone who believes in the natural divine order and in what Pope Benedict XVI described as the “ecology of man” will already suspect that this enterprise will not end well.

Gender theory is the clearest example of this human rebellion of dwarfs against the divine giant.

In this constructed rainbow world, anyone can be anything. Separating biology from the concept of family is a logical extension of queer gender theories, which have already declared biological characteristics irrelevant to the definition of sex and replaced them with an individual’s self-identification. Man now creates himself and chooses the roles he wishes to assume in life.

And when anyone can be a woman, anyone can also be a mother or a father, or alternate between these roles over the course of a lifetime.

Once the definitions of mother and father have been successfully detached from biological kinship, further questions arise. Why should parenthood be limited to two people at all? Would three or four parents not be even better?

Reproductive medicine, continually advanced through embryo research, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, cloning, egg donation and surrogacy, no longer merely dreams of children from artificial wombs. Experiments are already under way.

For this concept to be put into practice, however, one thing is essential: kinship must be consciously redefined, with legal categories taking the place of bloodlines. The groundwork has already been laid.

German jurisprudence now speaks openly of the “legal assignment” of a child rather than the child’s descent when determining who its parents are.

Yet when contracts, rather than ancestry, form the basis of family, human beings are severed from their origins. What is presented as self-determination, progress or even non-discrimination proves in practice to be a growing identity crisis among uprooted people.

At the same time, everyone still wants somehow to be a “family”. That, too, is an overused term whose definition would work even in a swingers’ club: “Anything goes, nothing is required.”

Blended families, single people with children obtained through surrogacy, co-parenting arrangements, polygamous relationships, queer relationships, open relationships and “friends with benefits” – an increasing number of modern lifestyles now claim the label “family”, detached from genetic descent, blood relations or even continuity across generations.

No one wants to be excluded from this supposedly modern celebration of family. Everyone attempts to construct a family of his own.

The Fragmentation of the Production Process

Once the family has been reduced in language to a product of human construction, the child is likewise constructed and produced. Does the word itself not say as much? Re-production.

Once a human being has been reduced, through artificial reproduction, from an individual creature to a product, the production process can be fragmented at will.

Let us conduct a thought experiment: Who is the mother?

A child is conceived using an egg donated in Spain and sperm from an anonymous Danish sperm bank, carried by a Bulgarian surrogate and then adopted by a lesbian couple from the United States.

Who is the mother?

Two thousand years ago, the Roman maxim Mater semper certa est established that the mother was always certain. Here, motherhood has been divided into genetic, biological, social and legal motherhood.

Kinship is determined not by genes, but by contracts. This raises another question: Why should the contract not also be terminated?

In surrogacy, it already can be.

Customers pull out of the deal when the product fails to meet their quality standards: when it is the wrong sex or skin color, or has physical or mental defects, despite the high price paid for it.

The pursuit of the perfect baby is no longer a question of ethics, but of the producers’ quality guarantees.

Just as surrogacy divides the definition of motherhood, the system demands that the child divide its affections accordingly. It is expected to direct feelings such as belonging toward those whom we have legally assigned as its parents.

The conclusion is this: The “gender trouble” that Judith Butler once proclaimed as a means of liberating humanity from its sexed nature destroys far more than a person’s inner certainty about whether he is a man or a woman.

It is already producing a younger generation in a deepening crisis, one that no longer knows who it is, whom it should form bonds with, how many such bonds it should form, whether it should reproduce and, if so, with whom.

It is already reducing women to their reproductive function, exploiting fertility and trading children as objects on the global market.

The question remains: Is this progress?

Does it make man free, autonomous, independent and fulfilled?

Or does he ultimately become a lonely, emotionally crippled being, sitting on a sofa beside a robot that will one day nurse him until he dies?