The progress boner doesn't care about your health

What's cancer when you can have more freedom and more stuff?

A new study reveals that all forms of hormonal contraception are linked to approximately 25% greater chance of developing breast cancer. Researchers at the University of Oxford looked at the NHS records of around 10,000 British women who were diagnosed with breast cancer between 1996 and 2017, and compared them with a control group of around 18,000 women of similar ages and locations who had not been thus diagnosed. The study found around a 25% greater likelihood of breast cancer diagnosis for women who had used any form of hormonal contraception, whether pill, injection, implant or IUD.

Experts were quick to point out that the risk remained low. But there’s always the option of just avoiding increasing your risk of breast cancer even from ‘very low’ to ‘somewhat less low’, via the simple expedient of not using hormonal contraceptives at all. In Feminism Against Progress I make a related case for saying no: the pro-sex, pro-intimacy and pro-embodiment argument for declining hormonal contraception, in a chapter I was proud to see published this week in the UK Spectator. To this, then, we might add the pro-not-getting-breast-cancer case.

It turns out, meanwhile, that arguing against the Pill brings the most surprising people out of the woodwork as straight up devotees of Progress Theology. Spiked contrarian Brendan O’Neill, who is often read in the UK context as at least conservatism-adjacent for his aversion to woke pieties, was very upset with me for daring to mention the disastrous impacts of contraceptive technology on aquatic life.

He argued that surely a bit of water table pollution and amphibian hermaphroditism is a trivial price to pay for women’s sexual emancipation. And I can see why he might. Louise Perry convincingly makes the case that women are not the only, or even the principal, beneficiaries of the Pill, and the sexual revolution that it produced. So perhaps it’s understandable that some men might be offended by a feminist case for women reclaiming natural fertility as the substantive ground for gatekeeping sexual access to our bodies.

This all points to a grim but familiar insight: if the reproductive health of frogs and fish seems, to many, an acceptable price to pay for cost-free sexual access to women, an elevated risk of breast cancer will no doubt also seem a trivial price. Would this cavalier disregard for health cut the other way, if it were borne by men? Well, a previous attempt at creating a male birth control pill was abandoned when male users reported side effects such as weight gain, irritability and acne - all side-effects commonly reported by female Pill users. So: no, probably not. Keep risking that breast cancer though, ladies, it’s liberating!

In the book I also set out a wider framework for what I understand “liberation” to mean in this context: one in which, culturally speaking, the Pill and abortion have played a pivotal role in tipping us into the transhumanist era. I’ve said a bit more on that theme, and its downstream consequences, in a recent Triggernometry interview here:

I’m not unambiguously anti-tech, and have said so on many occasions. But the tech-enabled war on nature in the name of freedom needs to be weighed critically for its trade-offs as well as its benefits. And what’s striking about the discourse around the health (and indeed ecological) impacts of this pivotal transhumanist technology, hormonal birth control, is how angry even usually gleefully “contrarian” voices get when you challenge its position in the sacred frame. For to True Believers the forward march of Progress can only be defended as - in O’Neill’s words - a “precondition for the creation of a world of more things and more freedom”. Perish the thought that any of us pause to wonder who gets the things, how the freedom is distributed, or what the externalities might be.

As this angry response from an “anti-woke” progressive demonstrates, “woke” and “anti-woke” are only superficially in opposition, to the extent either perspective embraces the inexorable onward march of tech in the name of “more stuff and more freedom”. And, inevitably, this march includes into women’s bodies, in service to women’s “freedom” - and (ssh) also to men’s boners, woke and anti-woke alike. Much as ecological degradation is dismissed as a necessary trade-off for “more things and more freedom”, so too “experts” and advocates and horny men likewise dismiss side-effects on women, let alone on frogs and fish, should noticing them threaten the frictionless technologisation of “human” bodies upon which so much else depends.

The still wider point is that cyborg morality doesn’t care about the wellbeing of those it purports to “emancipate”. Hormonal birth control is too important to this order, for anyone to think hard about the great many side-effects on young women’s physiology, on aquatic life, or on our sexual ecologies. And you only have to compare the lionisation that greets “trans youth” on their way down the well of expensive and irreversible body-dissociation, with the wall of indifference (and sometimes also social ostracism) that faces the same youth should they later regret the irreversible medical interventions this can involve, to see that this holds more broadly too.

Transhumanist “healthcare” is a one-way ratchet. Whether we’re talking about reframing a woman’s youth, beauty and fertility as “sexual market value”, underwritten by chemical neutering, or turning adolescent body distress into a lifetime as a paying customer for artificial hormones, the order of “more things and more freedom” takes an interest in individual well-being only so long as doing so is a vector for the greater penetration of tech and the market into our bodies. Dare to suggest that well-being might be served by even slightly fewer things, or by more beneficial constraints, and watch the order of Progress - woke and anti-woke alike - denounce you from the rafters.

None of this is to say there are no upsides to tech, though O’Neill declines to note the great many references I’ve made to these, in Feminism Against Progress. Specifically where birth control is concerned, for example, natural fertility tracking has made great advances that offer women new ways to using tech in support not less but more attunement to our physiology and its cycles. Similarly I’ve made the case (in the book, and also in the interview linked above) for internet-enabled flexible working as one way of rebalancing ‘work’ and ‘home’ with upsides for fathers as well as mothers.

But I advocate, if we can, setting aside both pessimistic and utopian forms of tech determinism in favour of a more considered and critical relation to our innovations. And that means a willingness to count their costs where necessary. In other words, being willing to question the value of “more things and more freedom” - even when this is voiced by those wearing a paper-thin veneer of contrarianism over a bone(r)-deep commitment to Progress Theology.

In other, cheerier news:

***PANEL EVENT TODAY*** The Institute for Human Ecology is hosting me today, Friday 24 March, 2pm ET / 6pm UK for a virtual event to celebrate the forthcoming 25 April publication of Feminism Against Progress in the USA. I’m honoured to be joined by theologians Angela Franks and Rachel Coleman, and philosophers Nina Power and Adrian Walker, for the discussion. Register here if you’d like to join us.

***BOOK GIVEAWAY*** Also to mark the US publication, Regnery Books has organised a Goodreads giveaway. There are free 100 copies of the book up for grabs. If you’d like one of them, sign up here.

***MARY ON TOUR*** And! I’ll be in the USA for a few days at the end of April, to mark the US launch, with events in Washington DC, NYC and Harvard. For any of my readers who live in those parts, stay tuned: I’ll have dates and locations for public events to share very soon.