In the brave new world of liberalism, women have been reduced to “uterus carriers.”
Life is created in factories. Babies can be bought and sold like merchandise.
No, this is not science fiction. It is not some dystopian image of an extreme future.
This ‘vision’ of our future is found in a legislative bill introduced in the Swedish national parliament, the Riksdag. The sponsor is Mr. Joar Forssell, a member of parliament for the liberal party. He proposes that taxpayers’ money be spent “on research about artificial uteri” for the purposes of extending “reproductive freedom” to “uterus carriers.”
In other words, Mr. Forssell wants the Swedish government to sponsor the development of machines that can grow a baby from conception to birth, so that no woman will ever have to be pregnant again.
I would have expected a member of the Swedish parliament to find somewhat more productive ways to spend taxpayers’ money. His party, which currently governs Sweden in a center-right coalition, is engaged in a frustrating, uphill battle against organized crime. The country whose legislature Forssell is a member of, is in deep trouble, plagued by high levels of violence and corruption.
Unfortunately, making budget priorities is just the beginning of the problems that Joar Forssell runs into with this bill.
His most acute problem is that the babies that would be produced by his artificial uteri, would come into this world without any human rights whatsoever. They would be the private property of whatever company owns the facility where they are conceived, grown, and ‘born.’
Those babies would be commodities that would be bought and sold on an open market, like any other piece of property.
This aspect has escaped the good Swedish liberal, who submitted his legislative bill on October 4th. So far, it has only gotten to the stage where it is assigned to one of the Riksdag’s committees. This leaves clear-minded lawmakers enough time to look at his bill in ways that he himself clearly did not.
All that Forssell seemed to care about was to beat the politically correct, ideological drum. His bill goes straight to the salient point: he depicts pregnancy as “very burdensome” and sees “research on artificial uteri” as “essential from a feminist perspective”:
By eliminating biological limitations and social norms surrounding pregnancy, this opens up opportunities for everyone to fully participate in society without sacrificing their health and well-being.
Joar Forssell goes on to claim that by spending money on developing baby-factory machines, the Swedish government would remove the exclusive burden of pregnancy from women or “uterus carriers.” This, he claims, would undermine “patriarchic structures.”
And here comes the punch line:
Natural pregnancy is one of the most dangerous things that a uterus carrier and, for that matter, unborn children can be exposed to. Civilizational evolution demands that progress be made in the direction of relieving humankind from this natural but hopelessly outdated burden.
Much like abortion propagandists do, Joar Forssell tries to suggest that a pregnancy—a bodily function as natural as life itself—is a disease or an injury.
To the common-sense minded reader, this sounds like an absurd parody. Unfortunately, it is not. This bill has already stirred up a debate in Sweden, with the liberal party’s own cabinet member, Ms. Paulina Brandberg, Deputy Minister for Labor Market and Equality, declaring that it is “obviously no equality problem” that women give birth to babies. In an editorial for the large daily Göteborgs-Posten, Mr. Håkan Boström compares Joar Forssell’s vision to the seemingly painless, care-free life that people live in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
These reactions are welcome, of course. It is noteworthy that a liberal minister of the government speaks out against his bill. This is a sign that the parliamentary committee to which the bill is assigned may end up rejecting Forssell’s bill. At the same time, his mad vision for the future will most certainly find friends among the opposition in the Swedish parliament. The left can be expected to support his bill for the same reason they propagate for abortion and ‘transgender’ surgical mutilation of children: they see life as an instrument for the furtherance of their ideology.
If Joar Forssell’s bill makes it out of committee with leftist support, it will end up on the floor of the Riksdag. Once there, it will hopefully inspire a stern debate and then be voted down. I am worried, though, that the level of arguments against this misogynistic anti-life bill are not going to go far enough. Among the arguments raised against the bill so far, those presented by Paulina Brandberg, the minister of government, and editor Håkan Boström, are among the most articulate. Yet they fall short of exposing the truly totalitarian underbelly of Joar Forssell’s bill.
The ideas embedded in this legislative initiative are not some spur-of-the-moment brainchild of a Swedish lawmaker. They represent a view of humankind that is shared widely among the global left and its political elite. As if to spearhead a legislative campaign of Godlessness, this Swedish member of parliament puts on full display his contempt for women—uterus carriers—as well as for life itself.
It is astounding, frankly, that someone who has been democratically elected to a legislative body in a civilized European country can propose that babies be robbed of any ability to be humans and be protected by human rights. To see why Forssell’s bill does this, let us go back to the nature of human reproduction. A woman giving birth to a baby is the most sacred moment in human existence. It is the epitome of the process that God assigned for the creation of life. There is a reason why He did this: to articulate in every way possible that life, the greatest gift He has given us, is sacrosanct and held above the judgment and management of us humans. Our moral duty is to respect the holiness of the life created, and to support and respect life to the best of our ability.
If God had meant for humans to be produced in factories, He would have made us hatch from eggs. But humans do not lay eggs.
In a way, Joar Forssell tries to go there, but his bill really leaps farther into anti-life territory. He wants to separate the creation of human life from humanity itself. He spells out his vision of a world where no “uterus carrier”—in his misogynistic language—has babies the natural way. Human reproduction has instead been relocated to factories with row after row of uteri, where babies are grown like cell samples in a laboratory.
In Sweden alone, Forssell would need factories capable of churning out 100-150,000 lab-made babies each year.
Perhaps Mr. Forssell has watched Star Wars: Attack of the Clones one time too many. This is the episode of the Star Wars saga where Obi-Wan Kenobi visits Kamino, a planet where a large factory produces cloned humanoids. The clones are created, gestated, and trained to be soldiers in the federal army.
One aspect of the story in the movie is the legal status of the clones: they are the property of their Kaminoan manufacturer until the federal government pays for them.
In short, they are merchandise, produced for the sole purpose of profit. They manifest the degradation of life itself to a tradable commodity.
Joar Forssell wants to do exactly that. His vision is an industry where new human life is produced like toasters or fried beans in a can. If Forssell gets it his way, anyone who would like a baby would be able to sign a contract with a baby factory, pay monthly installments, and pick up the final product when the gestation period is complete.
Apart from the morally repulsive nature of this idea, Forssell completely disregards the grave implications of his proposal for human rights and individual freedom. At no point does he even pretend to consider that the babies churned out by his baby mills would by necessity be exempt from human rights.
Regardless of why he is absent from that discussion, his unwillingness to consider the legal and moral status of a manufactured baby is typical of someone who wishes to launch a frontal attack on the very foundation of human life.
The fundamental human rights problem is centered around the fact that babies manufactured for profit in an industrial facility cannot possess personhood. This may seem counterintuitive, given that there is medical assistance available to couples who have problems conceiving a baby, and those babies are definitely persons.
However, the idea here is distinctly different: instead of assisting the natural process, the baby factory represents a new process for creating a human being.
The difference breaks down to one simple question: who has legal custody of the baby? In the natural process, the mother is the indisputable custodian. In the artificial process, it would be the owner of the manufactured uterus. This, however, creates an essential moral problem. The purpose of a man and a woman conceiving a child the natural way is to form a family; the purpose of a business manufacturing a baby in an artificial uterus, is to dispose of the baby for money. Since the baby is not part of a family, but a piece of merchandise, it cannot have human rights like the baby that is born into a family.
Why? Simple. You cannot sell a human being. Slavery is illegal. Yet the very purpose of a baby factory of the kind that Joar Forssell envisions, is to sell babies for profit.
In this way, the movie Attack of the Clones was eerily ahead of its time by depicting a business—the clone factory on the planet Kamino—that produces a large number of human beings to be sold for profit. When the federal government in the story paid for the clones, custody of the clones was transferred from the factory to the government.
The clones became the property of the government.
The main difference between this fictional story and the reality that our Swedish liberal friend looks forward to, is that the Star Wars clone factory was limited to producing soldiers for an army. What Mr. Forssell has in mind is something far bigger in scale: every baby in a country—not just those needed for the military—would be grown in an artificial uterus, in a factory.
Not a single one of these babies could be a human being. They would all be sellable on the open market. To see what this means, consider what happens if a couple signs a contract with a baby factory and pays for the product, either in cash upon ‘birth’ or in the form of monthly installments.
Suppose they do not write that check at the end of the gestation period. Suppose they fall behind on their monthly payments, and eventually default.
What does the baby factory do now? Obviously, it withholds the baby until the prospective parents pay what they owe the factory. But it cannot wait forever: at some point, the baby is ‘born’ and the factory has to start caring for it ex utero. Eventually, it needs to recover its costs, and the only way it can do so is by selling the baby on the open market.
From a liberal, free-market viewpoint this is no more complicated than a bank seizing someone’s house because they defaulted on their mortgage.
From a moral, conservative viewpoint, this is of course an abominable degradation of human life.
A sharp-eyed liberal would object that this problem is easily solved if all babies are paid for in advance, before the laboratory at the baby factory begins conceiving the baby. However, this misses the point that the manufactured baby remains a piece of merchandise; who is to stop Joar Forssell from opening a baby factory and selling them for profit, on the open market?
A Case of Anti-Life Liberalism
In the brave new world of liberalism, women have been reduced to “uterus carriers.”
Life is created in factories. Babies can be bought and sold like merchandise.
No, this is not science fiction. It is not some dystopian image of an extreme future.
This ‘vision’ of our future is found in a legislative bill introduced in the Swedish national parliament, the Riksdag. The sponsor is Mr. Joar Forssell, a member of parliament for the liberal party. He proposes that taxpayers’ money be spent “on research about artificial uteri” for the purposes of extending “reproductive freedom” to “uterus carriers.”
In other words, Mr. Forssell wants the Swedish government to sponsor the development of machines that can grow a baby from conception to birth, so that no woman will ever have to be pregnant again.
I would have expected a member of the Swedish parliament to find somewhat more productive ways to spend taxpayers’ money. His party, which currently governs Sweden in a center-right coalition, is engaged in a frustrating, uphill battle against organized crime. The country whose legislature Forssell is a member of, is in deep trouble, plagued by high levels of violence and corruption.
Unfortunately, making budget priorities is just the beginning of the problems that Joar Forssell runs into with this bill.
His most acute problem is that the babies that would be produced by his artificial uteri, would come into this world without any human rights whatsoever. They would be the private property of whatever company owns the facility where they are conceived, grown, and ‘born.’
Those babies would be commodities that would be bought and sold on an open market, like any other piece of property.
This aspect has escaped the good Swedish liberal, who submitted his legislative bill on October 4th. So far, it has only gotten to the stage where it is assigned to one of the Riksdag’s committees. This leaves clear-minded lawmakers enough time to look at his bill in ways that he himself clearly did not.
All that Forssell seemed to care about was to beat the politically correct, ideological drum. His bill goes straight to the salient point: he depicts pregnancy as “very burdensome” and sees “research on artificial uteri” as “essential from a feminist perspective”:
Joar Forssell goes on to claim that by spending money on developing baby-factory machines, the Swedish government would remove the exclusive burden of pregnancy from women or “uterus carriers.” This, he claims, would undermine “patriarchic structures.”
And here comes the punch line:
Much like abortion propagandists do, Joar Forssell tries to suggest that a pregnancy—a bodily function as natural as life itself—is a disease or an injury.
To the common-sense minded reader, this sounds like an absurd parody. Unfortunately, it is not. This bill has already stirred up a debate in Sweden, with the liberal party’s own cabinet member, Ms. Paulina Brandberg, Deputy Minister for Labor Market and Equality, declaring that it is “obviously no equality problem” that women give birth to babies. In an editorial for the large daily Göteborgs-Posten, Mr. Håkan Boström compares Joar Forssell’s vision to the seemingly painless, care-free life that people live in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
These reactions are welcome, of course. It is noteworthy that a liberal minister of the government speaks out against his bill. This is a sign that the parliamentary committee to which the bill is assigned may end up rejecting Forssell’s bill. At the same time, his mad vision for the future will most certainly find friends among the opposition in the Swedish parliament. The left can be expected to support his bill for the same reason they propagate for abortion and ‘transgender’ surgical mutilation of children: they see life as an instrument for the furtherance of their ideology.
If Joar Forssell’s bill makes it out of committee with leftist support, it will end up on the floor of the Riksdag. Once there, it will hopefully inspire a stern debate and then be voted down. I am worried, though, that the level of arguments against this misogynistic anti-life bill are not going to go far enough. Among the arguments raised against the bill so far, those presented by Paulina Brandberg, the minister of government, and editor Håkan Boström, are among the most articulate. Yet they fall short of exposing the truly totalitarian underbelly of Joar Forssell’s bill.
The ideas embedded in this legislative initiative are not some spur-of-the-moment brainchild of a Swedish lawmaker. They represent a view of humankind that is shared widely among the global left and its political elite. As if to spearhead a legislative campaign of Godlessness, this Swedish member of parliament puts on full display his contempt for women—uterus carriers—as well as for life itself.
It is astounding, frankly, that someone who has been democratically elected to a legislative body in a civilized European country can propose that babies be robbed of any ability to be humans and be protected by human rights. To see why Forssell’s bill does this, let us go back to the nature of human reproduction. A woman giving birth to a baby is the most sacred moment in human existence. It is the epitome of the process that God assigned for the creation of life. There is a reason why He did this: to articulate in every way possible that life, the greatest gift He has given us, is sacrosanct and held above the judgment and management of us humans. Our moral duty is to respect the holiness of the life created, and to support and respect life to the best of our ability.
If God had meant for humans to be produced in factories, He would have made us hatch from eggs. But humans do not lay eggs.
In a way, Joar Forssell tries to go there, but his bill really leaps farther into anti-life territory. He wants to separate the creation of human life from humanity itself. He spells out his vision of a world where no “uterus carrier”—in his misogynistic language—has babies the natural way. Human reproduction has instead been relocated to factories with row after row of uteri, where babies are grown like cell samples in a laboratory.
In Sweden alone, Forssell would need factories capable of churning out 100-150,000 lab-made babies each year.
Perhaps Mr. Forssell has watched Star Wars: Attack of the Clones one time too many. This is the episode of the Star Wars saga where Obi-Wan Kenobi visits Kamino, a planet where a large factory produces cloned humanoids. The clones are created, gestated, and trained to be soldiers in the federal army.
One aspect of the story in the movie is the legal status of the clones: they are the property of their Kaminoan manufacturer until the federal government pays for them.
In short, they are merchandise, produced for the sole purpose of profit. They manifest the degradation of life itself to a tradable commodity.
Joar Forssell wants to do exactly that. His vision is an industry where new human life is produced like toasters or fried beans in a can. If Forssell gets it his way, anyone who would like a baby would be able to sign a contract with a baby factory, pay monthly installments, and pick up the final product when the gestation period is complete.
Apart from the morally repulsive nature of this idea, Forssell completely disregards the grave implications of his proposal for human rights and individual freedom. At no point does he even pretend to consider that the babies churned out by his baby mills would by necessity be exempt from human rights.
Regardless of why he is absent from that discussion, his unwillingness to consider the legal and moral status of a manufactured baby is typical of someone who wishes to launch a frontal attack on the very foundation of human life.
The fundamental human rights problem is centered around the fact that babies manufactured for profit in an industrial facility cannot possess personhood. This may seem counterintuitive, given that there is medical assistance available to couples who have problems conceiving a baby, and those babies are definitely persons.
However, the idea here is distinctly different: instead of assisting the natural process, the baby factory represents a new process for creating a human being.
The difference breaks down to one simple question: who has legal custody of the baby? In the natural process, the mother is the indisputable custodian. In the artificial process, it would be the owner of the manufactured uterus. This, however, creates an essential moral problem. The purpose of a man and a woman conceiving a child the natural way is to form a family; the purpose of a business manufacturing a baby in an artificial uterus, is to dispose of the baby for money. Since the baby is not part of a family, but a piece of merchandise, it cannot have human rights like the baby that is born into a family.
Why? Simple. You cannot sell a human being. Slavery is illegal. Yet the very purpose of a baby factory of the kind that Joar Forssell envisions, is to sell babies for profit.
In this way, the movie Attack of the Clones was eerily ahead of its time by depicting a business—the clone factory on the planet Kamino—that produces a large number of human beings to be sold for profit. When the federal government in the story paid for the clones, custody of the clones was transferred from the factory to the government.
The clones became the property of the government.
The main difference between this fictional story and the reality that our Swedish liberal friend looks forward to, is that the Star Wars clone factory was limited to producing soldiers for an army. What Mr. Forssell has in mind is something far bigger in scale: every baby in a country—not just those needed for the military—would be grown in an artificial uterus, in a factory.
Not a single one of these babies could be a human being. They would all be sellable on the open market. To see what this means, consider what happens if a couple signs a contract with a baby factory and pays for the product, either in cash upon ‘birth’ or in the form of monthly installments.
Suppose they do not write that check at the end of the gestation period. Suppose they fall behind on their monthly payments, and eventually default.
What does the baby factory do now? Obviously, it withholds the baby until the prospective parents pay what they owe the factory. But it cannot wait forever: at some point, the baby is ‘born’ and the factory has to start caring for it ex utero. Eventually, it needs to recover its costs, and the only way it can do so is by selling the baby on the open market.
From a liberal, free-market viewpoint this is no more complicated than a bank seizing someone’s house because they defaulted on their mortgage.
From a moral, conservative viewpoint, this is of course an abominable degradation of human life.
A sharp-eyed liberal would object that this problem is easily solved if all babies are paid for in advance, before the laboratory at the baby factory begins conceiving the baby. However, this misses the point that the manufactured baby remains a piece of merchandise; who is to stop Joar Forssell from opening a baby factory and selling them for profit, on the open market?
READ NEXT
Our New Year Message: No Surrender
Free Speech: What Are They Afraid Of?
The Virtue That Enables All Others: A Conversation with Ayaan Hirsi Ali