“But unless I’m failing to understand some critical risk here, a factory based in the US, employing Americans, seems like a win?“
Who owns and runs it? Who gets to keep the profits? How well are the workers paid and treated? Who else is in the factory besides Americans? Even more critical: what else is in the factories besides production facilities? The questions aren’t rhetorical. The answers determine risk.
"as Abigail Tucker shows in Mom Genes, the biophysical process of gestation creates radical neurological changes in a woman, which primes her for intense attunement and devotion to the newborn baby. In other words: gestation doesn’t just create a baby, it creates a mother.
What happens, then, if we develop the capacity to create babies without also creating mothers? At the top of the social hierarchy, the answer might well still be loving families; after all, the world is full of great dads, and devoted adoptive parents. And it’s also true, of course, that not every mother is attuned and devoted. Normatively, though, the pattern holds; maternal infanticide or cruelty is so shocking precisely because it’s so rare.
But when we talk about a facility that could manufacture 30,000 podbabies a year, without also manufacturing 30,000 mothers, we’re talking about a potentially infinite wave of motherless children, large numbers of which might have no ‘and someone’, as Winnicott put it. What might the fate of such infants be? We see a glimpse of this future in the dystopian images of rows of un-claimed surrogate babies tended by nannies in war-torn Ukraine, or the disabled surrogate babies rejected by their commissioning parents.
Cheapen gestation and attenuate motherhood still further with a mass-production model, and it’s easy to imagine human life, thus manufactured without motherly love, becoming so cheap as to be worthless. In such a world, motherless babies might be manufactured and warehoused for medical experimentation or the transplant industry, for example, or raised as expendable fodder for the military, for unpleasant or low-status occupations or simply as a slave class."
She also has a quick piece referencing the PW transmaxx article, which is some top shelf weird shit. I highly recommend reading her for a sane take on modern feminism
“But unless I’m failing to understand some critical risk here, a factory based in the US, employing Americans, seems like a win?“
Who owns and runs it? Who gets to keep the profits? How well are the workers paid and treated? Who else is in the factory besides Americans? Even more critical: what else is in the factories besides production facilities? The questions aren’t rhetorical. The answers determine risk.
Mary Harrington has a great essay about the synthetic wombs over at unherd, and she has touched on that unsettling image of brain dead gestators:
https://unherd.com/thepost/podbabies-coming-to-a-womb-facility-near-you/
"as Abigail Tucker shows in Mom Genes, the biophysical process of gestation creates radical neurological changes in a woman, which primes her for intense attunement and devotion to the newborn baby. In other words: gestation doesn’t just create a baby, it creates a mother.
What happens, then, if we develop the capacity to create babies without also creating mothers? At the top of the social hierarchy, the answer might well still be loving families; after all, the world is full of great dads, and devoted adoptive parents. And it’s also true, of course, that not every mother is attuned and devoted. Normatively, though, the pattern holds; maternal infanticide or cruelty is so shocking precisely because it’s so rare.
But when we talk about a facility that could manufacture 30,000 podbabies a year, without also manufacturing 30,000 mothers, we’re talking about a potentially infinite wave of motherless children, large numbers of which might have no ‘and someone’, as Winnicott put it. What might the fate of such infants be? We see a glimpse of this future in the dystopian images of rows of un-claimed surrogate babies tended by nannies in war-torn Ukraine, or the disabled surrogate babies rejected by their commissioning parents.
Cheapen gestation and attenuate motherhood still further with a mass-production model, and it’s easy to imagine human life, thus manufactured without motherly love, becoming so cheap as to be worthless. In such a world, motherless babies might be manufactured and warehoused for medical experimentation or the transplant industry, for example, or raised as expendable fodder for the military, for unpleasant or low-status occupations or simply as a slave class."
She also has a quick piece referencing the PW transmaxx article, which is some top shelf weird shit. I highly recommend reading her for a sane take on modern feminism
"Full Self-Driving" = Full-scale consumer fraud
Mike how much funding do we need to secure to get another season of Anatomy of Next
These British Amazon workers are paid in Pounds, not Euros.