The Post-Partisan Emporium

"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

Defeminisation Women have been liberated from womanhood Frank Wright This post is about the direction of travel of one of the most successful consumer identities of the twentieth century. It will argue that feminism in attempting the liberation of women has begun the process of erasing them completely. Regular readers will be aware of the argument that delimited desire and the removal of restraints on personal choice do not result in liberty but in enslavement. Feminism is a progressive movement, meaning it must constantly find new barriers to break. This permanent revolution articulates the impulse to be free from reality. As with every other so called progressive cause, it is concerned with destabilising the meaning of common words, of making ordinary people incapable of describing their lives with confidence. It mobilises around confusion and control, ultimately promoting inversions of reality as the latest radical chic. This is the fate of all social revolutions - once finished wit