Wired Mesh

A Farewell to Wombs

There are neo-Luddites who remind us of our own hubris, and carefully warn of the unseen dangers of new technology. Then there is Gene Veith.

Yes, the author of Postmodern Times is back with an exciting new argument in World Magazine: Scientists are busy engineering "the technological obsolescence of motherhood."

All, right now, settle down. Let's have everybody stop laughing and take a look at his article. I'll give you a minute to compose yourself.

Veith's topic is the approaching availablity of artificial wombs, which may become a viable medical option in less than a decade. A quick Internet search shows that different teams of scientists are developing distinct types of artificial wombs, but Veith focuses mainly on the work of Yoshinori Kuwabara at Juntendo University in Tokyo, perhaps in part because Kuwabara's work just sounds so creepy. According to The Guardian, "his team has removed foetuses from goats and placed them in clear plastic tanks filled with amniotic fluid stabilised at body temperature." (As a side note, you'd think Kuwabara could have taken five minutes and found a less disconcertingly symbolic creature; at this rate, why not just title the research "Project 666" and terrify everybody?)

The purpose of Kuwabara's project is not in fact to creep everyone out with bionic goats, but to create an artificial womb that could support a baby to term if its mother's womb becomes a hostile environment. Other research teams, which Veith also notes, are working to create wombs from a mother's own endometrium (womb-lining) cells, so that previously barren women could in fact conceive, and the artificial womb be placed inside the mother's body after the most dangerous phases of the first trimester. These two types of wombs combined, most experts agree, will likely lead within the next six years (There's that number again. Damn.) to an artificial womb that can support a child for the entire term of a pregnancy.

Veith doesn't much like this. He notes that it could be a boon to pro-lifers, since unwanted babies could now be supported outside their mothers (he doesn't note that it's also good for gays, for the obvious reasons, but maybe that's just as well). But then he comes to the core of his argument, a bright shining place where paranoia mates with illogic. Let us journey there now.

"This may well be perceived as the ultimate medical victory. Just as medicine has cured many ailments and mitigated so much human suffering, now there will be a cure for the pains of childbearing. What woman would voluntarily choose the discomforts of pregnancy and the suffering of labor when her baby instead could simply come out of a machine?"

Well, I don't know, Gene... how about all of them? This is a fascinating argument, because it seems to be coming from a man who has never actually met a pregnant mother. I feel confident saying this because at least 50 come through my office every day. Most of them have pregnancies that range from merely painful to excruciating. And all of them, with a few drug-addict exceptions, are madly in love with the child inside them. They have been since they first saw the little pink dot on the pregnancy test. They are enduring tremendous difficulty for the sake of child they love without having seen. To suggest that any woman would prefer that her baby be born in a plastic pod is to completely ignore the mystery of mother-child bonding. It is the argument of somebody who spends too much time with men.

On the other hand, many of these women would be thrilled to hear of an artificial womb, not because it would make their lives easier but because it might save the life of their child. Working for a perinatologist for just four months, I have quickly become amazed at the many ways that a mother's womb can become literally poisonous to her baby. Just last Thursday I photographed an amnio exchange, a procedure where a chillingly large needle is inserted into the womb to drain out the amniotic fluid and replace it with clean saline, simply because the baby had developed in such a way that the amniotic fluid had become deadly to it. These, Gene, are the mothers that could benefit from artificial wombs -- not those who lack love for their babies, but those who grip their husbands' hands while giant needles are plunged into their stomachs, in the hope that it might help save their children's lives. But moving on...

"Women would be obsolete. Their all-important power to engender and bear children would be transferred to a machine, liberating them from motherhood and handing feminists a huge victory."

Let us pause for a moment and consider the mind-boggling stupidity of this paragraph. If women stop getting pregnant, they won't matter anymore. I always wondered where the person's essence was located: was it in the head, the heart, or perhaps somewhere more ephemeral? Now we know: the most "all-important" part of a woman, at least, is in her genitals. The editors of Maxim will be pleased.

It would be nice to say that this is a view held by Veith alone. But according to Dr. Scott Gelfand, of Oklahoma State University, "Some feminists even say artificial wombs mean men could eliminate women from the planet and still perpetuate our species. That's a bit alarmist." (A bit?) And yes, it looks like at least some feminists are happily bouncing about the room at the thought that their sisters are free from babymakin'. One, with the endlessly fascinating moniker Shulamith Firestone, wrote some time back that "pregnancy is the temporary deformation of the body of the individual for the sake of the species. Moreover, childbirth hurts and isn't good for you. At the very least, development of an option should make possible an honest examination of the ancient value of motherhood."

The problem with Firestone, of course, isn't that she's a feminist. The problem is that she's a jerk. And the same thing goes for those writers who fear that men will create artificial wombs, store up a good collection of eggs and then set about the task of beating all the women they can find with big sticks until they're all dead. This is gender power-struggle as an all-encompasing worldview, which is the sort of thing one can expect from people who have grown to value tribal power over any other human experience. But it isn't what one would expect from a Christian, who is supposed to see people as more than the sum of their gender identity. For Veith to assume that such fringe views of humanity are the necesary path of this technology suggests that he once again is out of touch with what most people think about life.

"The family would also be obsolete. Sex has already been divorced from procreation by birth-control technology and a popular culture that has promoted sex as entertainment sensation apart from the family. Already, sex is not even necessary for procreation, as a test tube and a petri dish can work just as well to conceive a new human life. Finish the baby up in an artificial womb, and pop it out when done. Children could be manufactured, in the numbers needed, by the state, which could raise them in specially designed schools. Who needs the family at all?"

It's good to see that Gene Veith made it through middle school and read Huxley with the rest of us, but that doesn't excuse him from having to prove that there are actual cultural trends that will take this technology to such a dystopian end. Are Americans, to use our own people as an example, completely uninterested in creating families? Does the dichotomy between sex and procreation mean that people are no longer interested in procreating? And what in the name of George Orwell inspired Veith's absurd leap to state-controlled birth and child-raising? Is he just trying to get a rise out of paranoid homeschool moms, or does he actually think that Hillary Clinton is plotting somewhere to take the child from parents and give it to a government village? Has the man gone completely insane?

Again, as a Christian, Veith should be able to state with some comfort that there are some things so elementally ingrained into humanity by their creator -- things like the family, say -- that some plastic box isn't going to destroy them. Such dystopianism seems, at best, a little at odds with his faith.

"Technology tends to hand us double-edged swords. Pro-family groups might use this particular sword as a weapon against mass abortion, but it can also be used to cut up the family once and for all."

And my purchase of a pair of scissors could mean that I'm planning to stab somebody in the eye tomorrow afternoon. But simply stating a worst-case scenario isn't the same as making an argument that such horrible visions will come to pass. Gene Veith hasn't made any such arguments. He's just blithering.

The most frustrating aspect of uninformed, abstracting writers is that they distract us from what's really at stake. Gene Veith is right that the gifts of technology are always laced with new dangers to our bodies and our souls. The trouble is that he doesn't have a clue what any of them are. We should be concerned that artificial wombs won't be able to replace the nurturing, heartbeat-laced environment of a mother's body, and that such a loss could have severe effects on a baby's development both physically and psychologically. And we should worry about the increasing potential for designer babies for the richest of couples, and what such tinkering might do not just to our children, but to our own souls. It may be, in fact, that such dangers are so great that the technology of artificial wombs should be rejected outright.

But to make that decision, you have to understand why people would want such a technology. And in the vast majority of people, the desire is simple: they want to have their own beautiful, healthy children, and their bodies won't let them. It doesn't take a lot of heavy thinking to comprehend this, and knowing it makes the choices facing us at least more practical. Gene Veith won't understand artificial wombs until he spends a little time with the hopes and dreams that go into the real ones.

Blood on Your Popcorn?

Whether you blame it on a messy accident or simultaneous bloodymindedness, one thing is clear at the movies this fall: Violence is back in a big, big way. The number one movie in America two weeks ago was Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Volume 1, which has been described as the most gory movie in American cinematic history. I doubt this claim, but Kill Bill certainly has more than its share of defenestrations, flying limbs, fountains of blood spraying into the screen, and the always charming sight of parents being stabbed to death in front of their children. Its box office title has since been wrested away by a remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which I sadly have not had the pleasure of seeing, but appears to have been designed as a diet aid for those who never want to eat anything, ever again. Roger Ebert, who did not like it one little bit, described it as follows: "This movie, strewn with blood, bones, rats, fetishes and severed limbs, photographed in murky darkness, scored with screams, wants to be a test: Can you sit through it?"

As the question at the movies this fall has quickly become, "Do you want blood on your popcorn?," many critics have begun to decry the moral emptiness of Kill Bill and its chainsaw-wielding friends. Natalie Binder writes in The Simon that "the violence in Kill Bill challenges no one. There is no reason for it to be there. The Bride and her compatriots kill, slash, and smash each other to no great consequence... The gushing, spraying, exploding ultraviolence in the film is simply another effect."

It's pretty darn difficult to argue that Kill Bill is anything but amoral, stylish garbage, and even though I've skipped watching the antics of Leatherface, I suspect that Chainsaw doesn't even have the redeeming quality of being stylish. Which means that your blockbuster choices these days are pretty well limited to watching a steaming pile of human entrails or checking out a really cool steaming pile of entrails.

It says a certain something about the state of American culture, then, that these piles are exactly what filmgoers ought to see, what they need to see. For the visceral violence of a film like Kill Bill, no matter how streamlined for nifty effect, has an undeniable impact. In a scathing review of Bill, the New Yorker's David Denby writes, "And yet, entering into the spirit of Tarantino’s video-store fantasy of martial arts, we may still have a little problem. It’s this: a filmed image has a stubborn hold on reality. An image of a rose may be filtered, digitally repainted, or pixilated, yet it will still carry the real-world associations—the touch, the smell, the romance—that we have with roses. Tarantino wants us to give up such associations, which means giving up ourselves."

What Denby may not realize is that, in dissing Quentin's morally vapid world, he has in fact given the greatest justification for the film's existence. Kill Bill is so immediate in its violence, so head-slammed-in-a-door shocking, that a jaded viewer notices it. And the thing he notices actually connects to the reality of violence. You can't ignore Tarantino's anime sequence, in which heads are crushed in a man's fist, a prepubsescent girl disembowels her enemy, and the camera follows the path of a rifle bullet through a man's brain. And even as you say "cool" to all that, something in your stomach tightens. Something feels wrong. The violence can't be completely dichomized from real life, and it starts to bother you.

And it's about time Americans started feeling a little bothered. This summer's movies featured, almost without exception, aggression without visual human consequences. In The Matrix, Neo exploded buildings and wrecked trucks -- and if anyone died, well, they weren't crucial to the plot, and we didn't have to watch them shuffle off this mortal CoIL. He battled hundreds of enemies at once, without aparently shedding a drop of even virtual plasma. The computer-generated chaos of the Matrix was strangely soporific: with all the talk of battling machines, nothing really human felt at stake in all the CGI fistfights. And while the unreality of The Matrix was at least part of the plot, almost every other summer box office success, from Anger Management to The Hulk, featured heroes saving society through increased agression, all without causing any noticible damage.

This trend reached its nadir in Bad Boys II, a movie that featured its protagonists driving their Humvee through a hillside shantytown in Cuba. Not a single death is shown in the exciting wreckage (were all the poor people out shopping?) and the incident is cheerfully justified with a casual one-liner: "Don't worry. This is where they make the cocaine." Well then! Let's smash some drug dealers with our big-ass American car! Bad boys for life!

It has been said that the most sociopathic of dictators are both sentimental and cruel. If that is indeed the case, then America this summer was rapidly becoming the land of the free and the home of of the wannabe tyrants. Nearly every movie we watched combined the most insulting romantic cliches with a gleeful but bloodless violence. Hulk smash! Hulk love!

And it's hard not to connect such entertainments with the attitude the majority of us took toward the war on Iraq. No matter your feelings on the war, there could be little doubt that American society was becoming comfortable with violence as a matter of public policy, so long as it stayed far from home. The films we were watching were the equivelant of bombs dropped from a jet fighter: we got the kick of attack, without having to see any results. And when we got home from watching the war with Agent Smith and watched the real war on TV, what results we did see on FOXNews were as sentimental as Neo engaging in candlelit passion with Trinity: happy Iraqi children embracing U. S. soldiers, and our tanks tearing down statues of Saddam. Fade to credits.

Compared to these films and news coverage, Kill Bill, for all its amorality, is a punch to the gut, a stong Bloody Mary chaser to a dreadful summer meal. Heck, Chainsaw is honest compared to The Matrix. When a film shows the results of violence, even in an exploitative manner, it dares us to look at what really happens when the Hulk gets angry, or when America charges into the desert. And no matter how you feel about the last year of U. S. foreign policy, it's becoming obvious that this fall is a time when we must consider what our planes and tanks have wrought.

Kill Bill isn't the most profound study of violence in theaters this fall, of course. That honor belongs to Mystic River, Clint Eastwood's quiet, hanting meditation on the futility of revenge. But odd as this may seem, right now Kill Bill is the more important movie to see. Both films contain shots of shots fired into the heads of victims. Mystic River's shot flashes to blizzard white with the crack of the pistol; Bill's anime scene traces the path of the bullet to the victim's head, which disappears in a miasma of bright red. But the crucial difference is that Mystic's scene is a point-of-view shot from the eyes of the pleading victim; it makes us feel sympathy and sorrow for the innocent, which is a fine and healthy emotion. Kill Bill does a more disturbing thing: it reveals the scene to us from the point of view of the bullet. It associates us with the firearm; implicates us in the joy of killing, and the awful mess Tarantino rolls in.

Kill Bill and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre appeal to the worst devils in our natures, that is true. But in a time when we've let those demons run and play unsupervised in the back yard, maybe Tarantino and other filmmakers pointing them out is a gift.

How the Last Blog You Would Go To For Structure Will Become the First

My sister called me the other night to let me know, among other things, that something terrible had happened to my blog layout. I assured her that nothing was wrong with Josiah's lovely template -- I just hadn't posted for two weeks.

Sorry about that. I hope you all managed all right without me.

I've been at a bit of an impasse lately with this whole blogging deal. I have no problem with the idea in general, I'm just not terribly happy with my own web presence. It's uneven, a miasma of links, short essays, and occassional flashes of self-revelation. I can't see how this serves a particularly coherent purpose. I mean, if you want daily updates about my life, Josiah has more information than I could ever compile. If you want fascinating links, the Rye-Dawg has you covered. Thus far, my great accomplishment in my venture into the blogosphere has been to become the number one persona non grata of Moscow, Idaho.

It was Andy who suggested a way to develop this space in to something more to my liking. His idea is for me to post less often, with longer pieces, on a more structured schedule. That way, I can focus on publishing pieces that reflect the matters that most care about, and that I hope will inspire the most edifying discussion.

So I'm going to try it. From now on, I'll be posting twice a week. On Tuesday, I'll post a piece on something in the culture at large, anything from a singer's death to a NFL racism scandal, that I think is worth a good group rumination. And on Fridays, I'll try to post something more personal and reflective, some attempt to bring order to my life through writing. You are welcome to discuss this essay as well, although I doubt you will find the subject matter so compelling.

Hopefully, this new format will give me a chance to narrow my focus to the things that I think are most beautiful and important, most worthy of celebration and discussion. At the very least, I'll have more time to write about the preterm premature rupture of membranes, which is what I'm actually paid to do.

Rushing the Quarterback

Many a blog has had its electronic eye focused this week upon the Rush Limbaugh / Donovan McNabb scandal. In case you actually have a life, you should go here to read the basic story.

I think it's obvious that what Rush was doing was not making a broadly racist remark, but instead accusing the media of reverse racism. I also think it's pretty obvious, even to a casual NFL fan, that he's dead wrong. (I've posted on Ryan's blog about why he's wrong.) But what may not be so obvious is why Limbaugh's comments are so grating, and why they reek of a layer of racism under the surface. It has to do with context.

Until about twenty years ago, there were no black quarterbacks in the NFL. The first I can remember was Doug Williams, and he was in the early '80s. Now, there were plenty of black athletes, but no QBS. Also no black coaches. Why not? Because there was an unspoken assumption that black people, while naturally gifted physically, were too stupid to play the more mental positions in the sport, QB and coaching.

Years later, there are still very few black QBs and coaches in the league. Of the few that exist, some are dreadfully overrated (Akili Smith, Dennis Green). Some are so good it's impossible to overrate them (Tony Dungy, Mike Vick). But because most black QBs have tended to be running QBs, they're still thought of as a different, less intelligent class of quarterback. There are still plenty of people who watch Michael Vick on TV and say, "Yeah, the boy can run, but that's what those people do." (If you don't believe me, go to Merv's on a Sunday afternoon. Ask them what they think of Vick.)

So when Rush Limbaugh accuses the media of overhyping Vick because they want to see a black QB do well, the subtle suggestion hangs in the air that black quarterbacks can never do well, because they aren't smart enough. If Rush wanted to avoid this implication, all he had to say was, "I think this is an individual case. McNabb is overrated because he's black, but Michael Vick is possibly the best quarterback in the league, and Steve McNair is perhaps the toughest and smartest." But he didn't say that. He just said that the media wants black QBs to do well (which may be true), failing to mention that black quarterbacks ARE doing well.

His comments actually have a lot in common with the old Doug Wilson statement on blogs. (You remember that, right?) Wilson was right to say that many blogs are self-centered exercises in navel-gazing. But his tone, and the fact that he halfheartedly mentioned that exceptions exist to his rule, made a lot of folks understandably angry. He had damned all their work in a broad, uninformed swoop. In the same way, Limbaugh's comment isn't directly racist (even if it's wrong), but his failure to mention the exceptions to his rule made a lot of folks understandably angry. He had mocked the gains black quarterbacks had worked so hard for, with one broad, uninformed swoop.

And while it's impossible to be sure of motive, I think a lot of people suspected that both Wilson and Limbaugh said what they did to get a rise out of the folks most likely to be hurt by their statements. They appeared to be baiting people.

The entire Limbaugh fracas is less about pigment than it is about tone.