"Brain-dead gestators are feminist, actually"

The flip side of claiming only our minds make us human

Mary Harrington

Why shouldn’t we gestate human babies in the bodies of brain-dead women? Bioethicist Anna Smajdor poses this question in a paper published last November in the journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics. Smajdor suggests that provided - she is keen to emphasise - the brain-dead individual previously granted consent, their bodies should be available for “gestational donation”.

Furthermore, procuring a baby in this way “should be an option for anyone who wishes to avoid the risks and burdens of gestating a foetus in their own body”. And, she suggests, the bodies of men might theoretically also be induced to gestate. This, we are to be reassured, would resolve feminist objections to a scenario that might otherwise be strongly redolent of every feminist worst nightmare: reducing women, quite literally, to our function as ‘gestators’.

Smajdor is right to suggest that if we’re down with transplanted organs, using living but brain-dead human bodies for a biological process such as gestation is a difference of degree, not kind. And yet people who might just about be willing to stomach organ transplantation from someone who is indisputably dead might recoil at the prospect of human tissue still engaged in the processes of life, up to and including gestating a baby, just without sentience. I’d suggest that this is rooted in a residual sense that being human is neither a purely biological thing, nor a purely abstract, cognitive one, but resides (sometimes uncomfortably) in the fusion of the two. As such, the idea of human tissue multiplying without human sentience is profoundly nightmarish.

And yet this may be changing. For everyone who has grown up wholly or partly online (which is to say most people under 40 in the developed world) is accustomed to socialising in a disembodied way, and by extension thinking of their ‘self’ as distinct from their physical bodies. And among this demographic, it’s growing ever less unusual to see the kind of mind/body dualism that’s radical enough to take blindly proliferating human tissue wholly in its stride.

This dualism isn’t new, exactly. It saw its most well-known early articulation in Descartes’ 1637 Cogito ergo sum. More recently, too, it was expressed by transhumanism advocate Martine Rothblatt in From Transgender to Transhuman, where Rothblatt argues that “freedom of gender” is “the gateway to freedom of form”. That is, once we grasp that we can remodel our bodies’ secondary sex characteristics as we please, we’ll soon extend this to remodelling our bodies more radically, such that in the end we won’t feel constrained by humanoid configuration at all. And this all rests on the assumption that the shape of our bodies has no bearing on the shape of our consciousness. Rather, as Rothblatt puts it: “Humanness is in the mind”, and thus “a human need not have a flesh body, just as a woman need not have a real vagina.”

There isn’t space here to give full consideration to the question of how “human” we’d remain were we to shuck off our humanoid bodies. But the “ethics” of commodifying brain-dead women as foetal incubators serves to underline the unspoken corollary of viewing “humanness” as residing solely “in the mind”. For if this is so, then there’s no reason to view the human body has possessing any kind of integrity whose violation is morally wrong. There’s nothing sacred about our bodies at all. There is, in other words, no moral reason why we shouldn’t treat human flesh as mere meat - whether it’s alive or dead.

Elise Bohan, the transhumanism advocate and author with whom I had a lively and wide-ranging debate recently at UnHerd, routinely uses ‘ape-brained meatsack’ in her book Future Superhuman to denote those components of the human assemblage that, implicitly, she hopes technology will enable us to discard or engineer out of existence. And when ‘meatsack’ is routinely used as an insult, who cares what happens to the meatsacks themselves?

Every fibre of my feminist being recoils from the notion of brain-dead ‘gestators’. It’s a class feminist boogeyman writ large - the idea that The Patriarchy wishes to reduce us to the status of dehumanised ‘breeders’. It’s startling and bitterly ironic to see it advanced as a positive solution to over-surveillance of pregnancy, or “the moral problems of surrogacy”. But, repugnant as this is, it merely serves to illustrate a more far-reaching objectification.

The central problem with this proposal isn’t the implied asymmetry in commodification. The real violence is grounded in the now widely-accepted claim that what and who we are has nothing to do with how we are embodied. To the extent that we accept this claim, we’re defenceless against those who would enclose, hack, modify, patent, experiment on, cultivate, mutate, and commodify the flesh that - we’re told - has no bearing on our ‘true self’.

If we believe what makes us ‘human’ is just our minds, we have no reason to object to the transformation of humans into interchangeable meat parts. And making that transformation equal-opportunities doesn’t make it any less an act of epistemic violence: one that legitimises dismantling the weak, or farming their vegetative bodies, to the greater glory of the strong.

Source: Reactionary Feminist