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Liberalism, the ideology which spearheaded the effort to end the treatment of blacks as property, now spearheads the effort to make sure babies are treated as property.

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It should also be noted that families like the Kardashians have not only normalized this but have made surrogacy fashionable. Why gain 30 pounds when someone else can do it for you? Shame on them all!

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I filled out that form raising issues with surrogacy. Myself and other women like me were clearly ignored.

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There is nothing “outdated” about the mother-child bond!

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In a very real way, you are free because you were born to a mother who loved you more than she loved the state or an ideology or a social system, and who would thus fight to the death to protect you from the predations of all these. Even knowing such love can exist, even in cases where your mother has already passed on to her eternal reward, gives you the courage to resist the large and impersonal forces that would squash you. Take her away, erase her, replace her, and the individual is truly defenseless. Motherhood lays the foundation stones of all freedom.

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It strikes me that, on a psychological level, a lot of the mad, scary stuff that is currently happening is the disembodied, dissociated mind of the tech genius, pushing for payback against society at large.

Being out of the body, it can't process emotions, and so is condemned to endlessly try and make everything "fair," to absurd levels.

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When a woman sells an egg, she sells her birthright of connection and joining to her descendants. When a woman joins with a fetus in surrogacy, sharing a full-body connection for nine months, and then for pay relinquishes the resulting child, she sells her birthright of connection and joining to her descendants. And society, dominated by men who devalue corporeal reproduction because they will never experience it, is quite willing to maintain the erasure of these women by pretending that the egg seller and the surrogate mother do not exist: their names may appear nowhere on the birth certificate of the child born of their bodies. The child of these women—for it is their child—will never even know who they are. Some societies are even willing to state a child has no mother at all, but only a father or fathers, when such a statement is a complete lie. We have seen such erasure before in the genealogies of our forefathers that do not even mention our foremothers; that we see it again, now, in 21st century forms of erasure, is heartbreaking. That such erasure is considered “progress” is profoundly misogynist. That some who consider themselves feminists do not even see the misogyny of these acts is stunning.

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I agree these things are terrible, but should we allow the evil people to do what they want as long as they leave us alone? I think the world is divided into believers and unbelievers. We can’t force them to live righteously. We need to protect ourselves and our families from them and their insanity . That means finding like minded people and forming real relationships, as Paul Kingsnorth and others have said . We can’t stop progress and evil, but we can learn to live apart from it.

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Mary, I know this comment may seem off subject, but you ought to listen to Daniel Schmatchenberger, if you have not already done. so You are deep in the horrors of bioengineering going very wrong. Daniel's thinking puts your thinking into the context of the meta crisis. Here is his most recent conversation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc

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Oh Mary, your academic pedigree is showing :D "This embodied and emotional dialectic of attunement and bonding is a core adaptive process that helps further the survival and healthy development of human infants, during their most vulnerable years." As a preeminent trailer laureate, it took a couple of passes to understand "babies need their mothers". Great work as always, necessary and lucid even to mouthbreathers like me.

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“We have to leave behind the mute passivity of tech determinism.” This is a succinct and short but deeply true and powerful line. I think you can (in an admittedly somewhat reductive manner) describe the metaphysical story of the West for 500 years as tech determinism in the name of greater control of nature.

I think the technology has come to a point where the only way forward for human-focused culture is to ditch this metaphysic. I don’t mean Luddism but placing the march of technology under a greater story.

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it's just so sad. so sad for humanity. it is the erasure of all that is natural and beautiful in us. these are death dances.

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Horrible. But thank you for the article and update. The removal of relational strings to materiality and being continues on!

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"human nature gets re-ordered to the exploitative, transactional domain of the market. " Your essay reminded my of a new venture company "EctoLife" (discussed on the Pilgrims in the Machine substack) , who is planning a facility will be able to incubate up to 30,000 babies per year, each one grown in an artificial womb. At this time this is at the 'concept stage', "EctoLife press release is meant to reassure us this is a good thing—even a cool thing. The narrative is essential. The scientific advances of the fiat—the fourth industrial age technologies—are so radical, and pose such a serious threat to what it means to be human, that a powerful narrative is needed to convince society that the technologies are necessary. "https://pilgrimsinthemachine.substack.com/p/pod-babies-click-and-buy-a-fetus

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those are absolutely scary developments. Thank you Mary for doing the works. I am not a native speaker, so I appreciate your clear and straight forward style if writing a lot.

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Nice mix of quite an old-left concern about power and money and materiality, with the new insights about the war on human nature. It's becoming clearer to me where the battle lines are going to be drawn over these kinds of issues. I think part of the armour / weapons needed for the fight is an aesthetic that people can instinctively be drawn to. The freedom mongers have their aesthetic, and we all know it fairly well by now. Not in a theoretical / conceptual way, but in a TV ad, soap opera, docu-drama, magazine cover sort of way - what does the alternative look like?

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