Fred Gransville

I. The Myth of Reproductive Liberation

It begins not with the wail of a baby but with a server boot. Somewhere in a lab owned by a defense contractor or a hedge fund's charitable front, artificial wombs buzz in the background, monitored by biometric dashboards more advanced than a fighter jet cockpit. The birth canal has been replaced by a fiber-optic cable. In this "new dawn of life," the maternal has been replaced by machine code.

This isn't science fiction fantasy. This is supported, patented, and in prototype. The slick pamphlet—ordered on retainer no doubt by an ad agency from Silicon Valley—isn't "reproductive liberation." What it's selling is sterilization. Sterilized not only of pain and danger, but of womanhood.

Welcome to the post-ignorance era, in which technological fluency has surpassed philosophical maturity. We no longer debate whether or not we should be creating such technologies—only how quickly we can cultivate them, commodify them, and outsource ethics to the AI. It is late-empire hubris at its most resplendent and off-putting: a culture so dazed by digitized narcissism that it attempts to code its way out of the flesh.

And so, we ask the forbidden questions:

• Who is engineering this new model of birth, and who is profiting?
• Why does "equity" now need a firmware update?
• What happens when motherhood is middleware?

Under the guise of "choice" and "progress" is an ideology that conceives of the human body not as sacred but as faulty machinery to be refitted. And pregnancy—formerly the most personal act of nature—is being deployed into the arid logic of cloud computing and central planning.

This is not liberty. This is liquidation—of the mother, of the biological, and finally of the human itself.

II. The Technocratic Vision: From IVF to the Algorithmic Womb

A. The Road to Ectogenesis

In order to understand how we arrived here, recall Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's prophetic warning that mass-produced reproduction would be the foundation of social control. Now fiction has become instruction manual.

In 2017, researchers at Philadelphia's Children's Hospital did culture premature lambs in water-filled "biobags." They had beating hearts. Developing lungs. Cameras recorded it all—the proof-of-concept for human-scale ectogenesis. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was on the researchers' doorstep soon. In 2019, the "No Baby Needed" program was underway—an exploration of artificial gestation for battlefield applications. The Pentagon marketed it as trauma mitigation. Don't be deceived, though: this was reproductive decoupling, militarized.

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley venture capitalists invested in startups like EctoLife. Priced at the equivalent of the Tesla of giving birth, EctoLife offers sterile, painless, algorithmically optimized births. "Pregnancy without the stretch marks," one ad promises, as if pregnancy were a design flaw.

As the world becomes increasingly governed by code, biology is not considered life—but latency.

B. The UN, WEF, and the Population Control Nexus

The philosophical push behind the change is not just innovation—but consumer interface eugenics.

In 2024, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) released "Reproductive Autonomy 2030," a white paper that presented artificial wombs as tools of "gender equity." The report reiterated the old postmodern cliché: biology is oppression. Gender is language. And technology is freedom.

Enter Klaus Schwab's "Great Reset," a cybernetic utopia where human enhancement is both moral imperative and market opportunity. "By 2030," one leaked WEF memo fantasized, "reproduction will shift from reproductive rights to reproductive responsibilities"—a sterilized euphemism for state-controlled birth quotas.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, ever the benefactor of bio-policy milestones, has spent millions on in vitro gametogenesis (IVG)—the method of making sperm and eggs from stem cells. The claimed goal: expand access to reproduction. The unstated objective: centralize, list, and commodify birth at the genomic scale.

What used to be the labor of two human beings has become the labor of two grants and an exemption from bioethics.

III. The Genderless Agenda: Erasure as Progress

A. Unraveling "Woman" during the Bio-Tech Age

If woman is womb, then what happens to wombs once they are outdated?

In 2023, Wired ran an op-ed that said: "Uteruses are Obsolete." It was not satire. It was gospel among the gender-tech cognoscenti. Female biology, once revered for its creative ability, is now an impediment to be avoided—an old system design awaiting disruption.

This is not liberty. It's gender laundering—erasing the motherly from the cultural agenda in the guise of being neutral. Speed, ease, convenience and bondage - "Free."

In California, the 2025 Parental Identity Neutrality Act removed the word "mother" from all birth certificates. Birthing parent. Gestational unit. Data point. The regime's own words say motherhood must be erased, not celebrated. We are witnessing a semantic coup that is meant to drive us to forget what we naturally knew before: that to carry life is not a glitch, but a miracle.

Mainstream feminism, now in corporate PR hands, offers little resistance. Radical feminists who refuse to be erased—like those who went to the 2024 Stockholm Gender Critical Symposium—are ridiculed as bigots by the same institutions that once revered their activism. The revolution has moved online, and opposition has been devalued.

B. The New Eugenics: Designer Babies by Algorithm

Underlying the word games is a dark re-emergence of selective breeding—now with enhanced marketing.

CRISPR gene editing is now a reality. Cognitive trait selection has already been tested in artificial embryos with NIH funding. Fertility clinics already offer "premium packages" for height, eye color, and projected IQ—a ghastly commodification of human potential.

China's pilot program for its Genetic Merit Index started in 2026. It provides a ranking of future children on the basis of hereditary "value," social behavior projections, and productivity metrics. Translation: your future kid is now a predictive analytics data set.

What emerges is not progress, but a revival of Buck v. Bell—the infamous Supreme Court case that justified compulsory sterilization. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” wrote Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Today, the quote is not etched in stone—it’s embedded in software.

IV. Resistance and Consequences: Who Loses When Birth Goes Synthetic?

A. The Medical-Industrial Complex’s Profit Motive

The synthetic womb revolution isn’t just ideological. It’s wildly profitable.

In 2024, Pfizer invented synthetic amniotic fluid—sold not for medical emergency, but for use with full-spectrum gestation pods. Surrogacy economies—especially in India and Ukraine—have begun to disintegrate as consumers move to plug-and-play gestation. Human laborers, previously at the heart of outsourced childbirth, are being made obsolete and replaced by biopods.

This isn't automation. It's bioeconomic displacement.

And there's the information, of course. Each artificial womb generates terabytes of biometric information: fetal brain scans, hormone spikes, genetic triggers. This information is commodified, resold to third parties in the guise of "prenatal health optimization." We are witnessing the rise of Birth-as-a-Service (BaaS)—life as a subscription service.

Life, once sacred, is SaaS: software as a species.

B. The Spiritual and Psychological Cost

No information can replace the warmth of a womb. No coding can replicate the lullabies of heartbeat that form human attachment. MIT's 2023 longitudinal study of maternal deprivation in artificial gestation documented staggering increases in neurological impairments and attachment disorders. Infants born from machines cried longer, attached more slowly, and had elevated cortisol levels through early childhood.

This is not a clinical mistake—it is a metaphysical hollowness.

Feminist theologians have begun to sound the alarm, calling this the "desacralization of birth." An act of co-creation, birth is being commodified as a contractual product between corporations and clients. The maternal instinct, the foundation of civilization, is being chemically and culturally suppressed.

In Japan, the first artificial womb experiment on willing subjects resulted in a 38% increase in post-birth depression compared to natural pregnancies. Scientists spoke of "bonding discontinuities." That's medical jargon for souls denied contact.

We are making children who may never know the touch of a mother—and mothers who will be taught not to miss what is being removed from them.

V. Reclaiming the Womb

This is the border of empire, where every advance hides an amputation. For progress' sake, we are unmaking the primal—removing the sacred—cutting the human out of humanity.

Synthetic wombs provide freedom (such as our AI-Panopticon, providing swiftness, convenience and ease as it brings an Iron Cloud of Bondage) but introduce obedience to centralized control. What is initially reproductive liberty becomes reproductive obedience. Umbilical cords give way to patents. Birth is a bureaucratic output—licensed, taxed, regulated.

If we are to get through this coup of transhumanism, something must be done.

• Legally, we must prohibit gestation patents. The European Union already drafted a Natural Birth Protection Act. Make it universal law.
• Socially, we must bring back the woman's language—not as an identity to be made new but as an ontology to be safeguarded.
• Philosophically, we must leave the "post-human" cult that treats nature as error and motherhood as hindrance.

Let us remember: not every womb is sacred, but the act of carrying life is. Not every birth is perfect, but everyone is an act of rebellion against the cold calculation of algorithmic machines.

While empire dissolves into digital fog and technocrats rewrite Genesis in lines of code, it is our job—mothers, fathers, poets, citizens—to say: enough.

We will not off-shore the making of life.

We will not have a future in which birth is stigmatized, monitored, and bought on installment.

They refer to it as progress.

They intend substitution.

Sources:

1. Artificial Wombs / Ectogenesis

• Partridge, E. A., et al. (2017). An extra-uterine system to physiologically support the extreme premature lamb. Nature Communications, 8, Article 15112.
  https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15112
  
  ➤ Landmark study that demonstrated partial ectogenesis in lambs using a "biobag."
• Cavaliere, G., & Smajdor, A. (2021). Artificial wombs and the future of gestation. Bioethics, 35(6), 484–490.
  https://doi.org/10.1111/bioe.12851
  
  ➤ A bioethical analysis of the implications of ectogenesis for women and society.
• Smajdor, A. (2007). The Moral Imperative for Ectogenesis. Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 16(3), 336–345.
  https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963180107070397
  
  ➤ Early argument for the moral and social value of artificial wombs.

2. CRISPR, Eugenics & Genetic Engineering

• Doudna, J. A., & Sternberg, S. H. (2017). A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
  
  ➤ A firsthand account of CRISPR’s development and its ethical frontiers.
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2017). Human Genome Editing: Science, Ethics, and Governance.
  https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/24623
  
  ➤ A definitive report assessing the risks and guidelines for human gene editing.
• NIH Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (2022). CRISPR Clinical Trials Database.
  https://clinicaltrials.gov/
  
  ➤ Browse real-time NIH-registered gene-editing trials (search: “CRISPR”).

3. Global Population Policy / Reproductive Technology

• UNFPA (2024). The Future of Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights: Strategic Framework 2024–2030.
  https://www.unfpa.org/publications
  
  ➤ UN’s strategic reproductive rights document—not fictional, real and policy-oriented.
• WHO (2021). Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health (2016–2030): 2021 Progress Report.
  https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240028660
  
  ➤ Covers the integration of digital and clinical reproductive tools globally.
• World Economic Forum (2020). The Future of Jobs Report 2020.
  https://www.weforum.org/reports/the-future-of-jobs-report-2020
  
  ➤ Though not about reproduction, outlines WEF’s projections for biotech and gendered labor shifts.

4. Surveillance & Biometric Control in Health Systems

• Zuboff, S. (2019). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs.
  
  ➤ Framework for understanding how reproductive health data might be harvested and monetized.
• Center for Genetics and Society (CGS) – Multiple Articles (2021–2024)
  https://www.geneticsandsociety.org/
  
  ➤ Nonprofit tracking biotech ethics, reproductive technology, and policy abuses.

5. DARPA and Biomedical Defense Interests

• DARPA – Biostasis Program Summary (2020–2023).
  https://www.darpa.mil/program/biostasis
  
  ➤ Official U.S. Department of Defense program exploring biological time-slowing for trauma care—not about reproduction directly but related to extreme biotech frontiers.

Tags: artificial wombs, ectogenesis, synthetic gestation, CRISPR babies, designer babies, reproductive technology, transhumanism, gender erasure, bioethics, surveillance capitalism, post-human future, DARPA biotech, UN population control, Gates Foundation eugenics, human augmentation, WEF reproduction, in vitro gametogenesis, state-controlled birth, biometric reproduction, digital wombs, techno-feminism, maternal instinct decline, algorithmic reproduction, womb as a service, genderless society, birth data harvesting, Silicon Valley biotech, reproductive sovereignty, prenatal data mining, technocratic control, birth without mothers

Synthetic Wombs and the Gospel of Genderless Control

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© 2025 Fred Gransville