OPINION
J M White
It all began with organ donations. We were told our gift of our organs could save lives and they do.
Surrogacy has been perfected. This is a type of temporary organ donation. Initially, women agreed to rent-a-womb under the misapprehension that they were doing a good deed, providing the childless with an infant created from their own sperm or egg. Now a woman can just accept the money and provide the service for anyone, anywhere, no questions asked. Once a procedure gets to the stage where it is accepted as normal, the ‘business’ can forge ahead into areas never before thought of except in science fiction. And, more ominously, once one procedure is perfected and has proven profitable, science moves on to the next profitable venture because if there is no profit involved, there will be no research.
There is now something called Whole Body Gestational Donation. It means exactly what it says.
You will be kept functioning after brain death has been medically established, but no longer as a woman. You will have become, to all intents and purposes, a birthing machine.
To understand how this will work and the moral and ethical implications that will be observed, there is an Abstract titled Whole Body Gestational Donation published online on 22 November 2022.
Anybody who has read Dune will know that an Axlotl tank is a living woman placed into a vegetative state and her still functioning body used as a gestational chamber. This is no longer the stuff of science fiction. For a woman in a long-term coma to conceive is not only quite possible but it has already been done. Not once, but several times. Quite successfully.
rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/coma-birth-woman-arisona-hacienda-healthcare-
Whole Body Gestational Donors can also be used to gestate DNA-altered embryos and clones. Forget about those little artificial incubator wombs with Mummy’s egg and Daddy’s sperm cooking away in the living room and Mummy and Daddy smiling down on their little foetus as it grows apace. A real uterus is much more straightforward. Altered embryos and clones for implantation are already well along the path to being perfected.
Men won’t be left out of the madness. You too are the gift that never stops giving.
‘…concerns, however, might be mitigated if men could also participate in Whole Body Gestational Donation… In 1999, Robert Winston told reporters that there were no intrinsic medical problems with initiating a male pregnancy: the danger would be in the delivery… But for brain-dead donors, the concept ‘fatal’ is meaningless: the gestator is already dead…’
So – it will be a caesarean. Or something worse. But don’t worry. You won’t feel a thing.