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April 29, 2015 - Davis Aurini
38:17
The Consequences of Artificial Wombs

My blog: http://www.staresattheworld.com/ My Twitter: http://twitter.com/Aurini Download in MP3 Format: http://www.clipconverter.cc/ Credits: I Feel You by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

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This requested video comes from Isaac, who asks that I discuss the consequences of artificial womb technology.
Now, I'm going to be breaking this video down into four main sections.
The first is the broader ethical implications of this technology.
Next is the individual moral consequences of raising of birthing a child this way.
Next, I'll address the fertility epidemic, the fact that our birth rates are so low and what effect this may or may not have on that.
And fourth and finally, I'll be discussing how this will affect men in the present climate of very anti-male, anti-marriage, throw you in prison if you don't pay child support on time.
So to start with, the broader ethical implications.
Now, the artificial womb is certainly taking reproductive technology a major step forward.
It's uncertain when we'll have this technology.
It could be as soon as five years or as long as 40.
But at that point, you can take frozen eggs and frozen sperm and make your own person out of that.
And it's not too far removed from that, to cloning, to creating vast swathes of people with the exact same DNA.
Now, of course, all of these questions, and all of reproductive technology, keeps bringing up the questions of eugenics, which is a massive topic all on its own that I don't want to delve into completely here, because it is too big.
We certainly saw what happens when the left wing controls eugenics in the past century, and thanks to that, we are very resistant to it, very suspicious of it.
At present, at least, attitudes can shift.
But even right now, the sort of questions that the artificial womb would bring up, cloning, creating people without parents, to a certain degree, these are questions we're dealing with right now.
Sex-selective abortions, for example.
It's a huge problem when in India they abort female fetuses, but for some reason not such a huge problem here in North America when feminists abort male fetuses, unfortunately.
You know, being selective about who the father is, because of sperm banks, there's cases where one individual will father 50 or even 150 different children, usually in the same area, and none of them know that they're related, causing possible accidental incest problems later on down the road.
All of this.
We're already dealing with these questions, or as the case may be, we're not dealing with them.
And the artificial womb would certainly, it would up the annie, but it wouldn't really change the nature of the game, of what's going on with all of this.
In fact, it might even be the trigger.
Realizing that we can now create a person without having a distinct mother or father beyond their genetic contribution, this might be the trigger to really make us start thinking about all of this, thinking about the ethical considerations of all of this stuff, and hopefully having an intelligent conversation about it.
But, you know, don't count on that.
So that's kind of the broader ethical things.
I don't want to delve into that too deeply because really that's a conversation about eugenics.
It's a topic unto itself.
I'm talking about the artificial womb here.
It's as if if I were talking about electric cars, obviously drunk driving is still a concern, but I'm not going to spend the entire review of an electric car talking about drunk driving.
So next, the moral concerns.
I have a very real worry about children that would be grown in an artificial womb.
That they wouldn't have that experience of bonding with their mother when they're developing inside of her.
And you see, childhood trauma can have a lot of effects down the road.
There's a terrible documentary I saw.
If I can find the link for it, I'll put it down below.
It was on YouTube.
I think it was a CNN documentary about this poor little girl that just suffered the most terrible violent molestation you can imagine.
And as she was growing up, she was a very troubled child because of all of this, with extreme violent outbursts, torturing her younger brother.
And it was so heartbreaking because when you saw this girl, when they interviewed her, you also saw a human soul that was trying to be better than what her past had been.
You know, she was turned into a monster, but she was trying not to be.
She was trying to be better than that.
But it just really goes to show you how much childhood trauma can affect somebody.
Now, that's an extreme case, but then you have cases, you know, the lesser degree, and this is something a lot of people don't like to talk about, is circumcision.
Is taking a knife to a little baby boy's foreskin and him screaming in pain to the point where he goes into shock, where he stops screaming because his brain literally overloads with pain.
That's the sort of thing that in all probability does have consequences down the line, does lead to an insensitivity towards others, a bruisedness, a harshness.
You know, and what about a baby that was raised in a machine, that didn't have a mother singing to it, loving it, didn't have that heartbeat, didn't have that attention?
And what about the mother that never bonded with her infant in that way?
You know, you can certainly imagine the rich Hollywood celebrity that doesn't want to get fat, by which he means pregnant, that wants the ease of having an artificial womb.
I mean, already right now, we're having issues with C-sections.
They are performing too many C-sections in hospitals.
When you do C-sections properly, when you think about them and use them only in cases of medical risk, they reduce the number of women who die during childbirth.
But because we're doing so many C-sections, more women are dying from the C-sections than would have been dying just from the birth.
We're not balancing it properly.
There's a huge push to do this, and there's also a bit of a cosmetic angle to the whole thing.
You know, I could definitely see the artificial wombs having a similar influence, that rich couples don't want to get fat, and so they have these designer babies, they grow in a machine, and they never truly bond with them.
You know, on the visceral level, a woman's hormones change when she's pregnant.
Her neurology changes, and so does the husband's.
You know, having a pregnant woman makes you that much more attentive and protective, you know, defensive of your woman, more devoted to her.
You're no longer just a couple of teenagers fooling around.
You're now actual adults.
Even with the medical technology, psychologically, we're still a million years ago.
You know, we take care of a pregnant woman in a different way.
We bond to one another in different manners.
And a mother that's never had this, that's never been able to bond with her child while raising it, is she going to be as good of a mother as she would have been had she actually become pregnant?
I don't think so.
I would doubt that personally.
And finally, there's the issue of how forming a marriage really is your first step into adulthood, forming a solid bond with a member of the other sex.
You see, the two sexes are, now they're different.
You know, despite all the propaganda nowadays that men are just as strong as women or women are just as strong as men, despite all of that nonsense, the two sexes are incredibly disparate.
But we're two halves of a single whole.
The differences in our nature balance each other out.
And marriage traditionally, at least, we're not talking about the modern joke of marriage 2.0, where the entire system tells her to divorce you at the drop of a hat.
We're talking about the original conception, what the institution was, was balancing out the competing drives of the two sexes to create a stable household and the foundation of civilization.
And this demands adulthood.
This demands maturity out of the person.
And with the artificial womb, you don't have to have that.
It seems to, once again, turning children into a lifestyle option, an accoutrement that you add to your life because you're bored or because whatever reason.
You don't have to first build a strong and stable relationship with somebody that thinks completely differently from you.
No, you can just have them.
You know, at the end of the day, children require both mothers and fathers.
That is the ideal circumstances for raising a child.
A child needs to know that it was wanted.
That even if, God forbid, one of the parents dies, you know, the mother dies in childbirth or one of them dies while the child is still very young, even then without that role model present, they still have that metaphorical role model.
They have that image of their father or their mother that they can think of.
And the remaining parent can say, you know, they loved you very much.
And they can tell you stories and they can, you know, you still have an image for how to be.
And see, a mother that lost a devoted husband or a father that lost a devoted wife is still going to be that mature person that formed a relationship, that deeply loved the other sex.
And even with only the ghost of the person still there, there's still going to be that implication of how men and women are supposed to relate to each other.
Of, you know, if you're a daughter, what you should look for in a good husband, and if you're a son, what you should look for in a good wife.
With the artificial womb, the single parents, you're simply not going to have that.
The gay couples, you're, again, with the gay couples, you don't have those two halves of the human race.
You've got two men or two women who are both agree on everything.
They don't have that major disagreement that requires maturity to overcome.
They can simply be romantically inclined friends.
And it's not the same thing for a child to grow up without both parents.
And this, of course, we already have this.
This is already going on all over the place.
The artificial womb just seems to exacerbate the entire thing.
Next, let's talk about the fertility crisis right now.
Now, at present, the birth rates in Western nations are somewhere around 1.4 per couple.
You know, I don't know what the latest stats are.
That's a few years older, a few years old.
It might have gone up a hair, it might have gone down a bit.
But at the end of the day, you need 2.1 children per couple to replace the population.
And we don't have that.
So the question is, will these artificial wombs help with this?
Is this the reproductive technology that will increase our birth rate to a sustainable level?
And I don't see it.
If anything, I could see this causing the birth rate to actually go down.
Now, first of all, we already have a lot of this technology.
We already have in vitro fertilization.
We already have donor eggs and donor sperm.
We already have hormone treatment.
We have a lot of this stuff.
Now, trying to find accurate information on this is extremely difficult.
I was trying to look up just how many children are produced through IVF or how many couples use reproductive therapy to successfully conceive when the woman's 35, 40, etc.
And I don't know if anybody knows the answer to these questions.
I could not find any information on this.
And I think there's two reasons for that.
The first is that the industry is extremely profitable.
It's a very large industry.
It's not as big as the tech sector, but there's a lot of money involved in this, and it's very lightly regulated.
And I don't think there's any interest in finding the accurate information.
There's no market that you can sell consumer reports to.
The auto industry obviously doesn't want you to know that their car sucks, but there's enough people buying cars that you have auto magazines.
You shouldn't expect Ford or Chevy to advertise anything but what they want to advertise about their car.
You go to the car magazine to learn if it's a good car or not.
You don't get this with the reproductive industry just because of the nature of it.
Nobody thinks they're going to need it until they need it.
And once they need it, they're too focused on getting the treatment to do a lot of research.
They're not going to subscribe to a monthly magazine.
So there's simply no market for finding out this information.
But there's a second reason I think there's not much information on this is because all of this, this entire conversation that we're having right now in this video, this undermines the standard lifestyle that women are expected to live.
Right now, the societal script for women is spend your 20s going to university and, you know, play around with a bunch of different guys.
Then spend your late 20s getting a career and being established and wearing a power suit.
Then finally, you know, once your partying days are done, around 27, you find a guy that you kind of like and you start to get serious with him.
Settle down with him by the time you're 30.
And then maybe once you're 33, 35, and you're married and you own a house finally, this is when you start having children.
This is a standard lifestyle script that's sold to everybody, and most people are at least trying to live it.
You know, as George Carlin said, they call it the American dream because you must be asleep to believe in it.
The reality is that women's fertility starts to drop precipitously by their late 20s.
Teenage girls are incredibly fertile.
From about 16 to 24 is the peak fertility years.
You know, this is also, there's this myth about women hitting their sexual peak in their 30s.
Absolute nonsense.
Women are in their sexual peak in their 20s.
It's just in their 30s, they're more desperate for attention because they aren't getting approached all the time.
And they also have far fewer hang-ups.
The thing is, a 20-year-old woman is going to be a little minx in the bed that no 35-year-old woman can compete with.
You know, women's ovaries are screaming at them to reproduce at that age, but the whole society has indoctrinated them against it because we want women getting those useless degrees and paying taxes with their corporate jobs, of course.
And that makes feminists happy, that women are equal, apparently, because making the same income is what makes you an equal human being, not the worth of your internal soul.
Furthermore, there's health benefits for women reproducing when they're young.
Women that have children when they're young bounce back a lot faster from the pregnancies, and they also have fewer problems later in life with osteoporosis.
Again, I'm not a medical expert.
You can look this up.
But evolution designed us to reproduce in our teens and 20s, and we're holding that off until the age of 30.
And as a consequence, a lot of couples are finding that they're having trouble reproducing.
If you sleep with a 20-year-old woman and you don't use a condom, it's what, a 50-50 chance she's going to get knocked up.
It's very high probability.
You know, women that age are incredibly fertile.
By the time you get to 30, you start having major problems, not just with maintaining the pregnancy and not losing it, but also with raising a healthy baby.
That's the script.
And any accurate information about how many people are using reproductive technology right now, that would threaten to undermine the script.
Would expose the lie that is feminism and all the big money behind it.
And it certainly wouldn't help the big money that's being made in these industries.
No conspiracy, just lots of individual actors, their own interest.
Nobody at the New York Times wants to upset women.
It's the majority of their readership.
So nobody's going to report on it.
Nobody's going to look at it because there's no money to be made in discussing the accurate figures.
So with that said, we have to guess at how many people are using reproductive technology.
And it does seem to be, it's fairly common.
There does seem to be a lot of it going on.
And it's not helping our birth rate.
You know, look, we've got all this stuff.
We've got some amazing reproductive technologies.
And women are having children, you know, in their 50s, for God's sakes.
You know, good luck raising a baby, waking up at midnight when you're 50 years old to take care of an infant.
Yeah, you know how it's so easy to bounce back from a hangover from your 20s?
That's because you're supposed to be raising babies during that stage of your life.
Although, good luck doing that nowadays.
No, we already have this technology.
And, you know, these artificial wombs, yes, this would make it easier.
This is one more piece.
But it's not going to be a game changer by any means.
In fact, I would predict that ultimately this is going to reduce the birth rate.
Because nobody wants to hear the true information on any of this.
Nobody actually wants to hear that, yeah, we can give you IVF, yeah, we can do some fertility treatment, but you're 40 years old.
It's still, you know, very low chance it's going to work, and it's going to cost you a few hundred thousand dollars.
This sort of opportunity, the idea that you can just wait until you're your late 30s or 40s to have children is going to cause people to put off having children when they're younger.
It's going to get people set in their ways.
Even if you've been married since 25, if you've been married for 10 years and you're 35, you've adapted to the basically you're a bachelor and a bachelorette living with each other on a permanent basis.
You're not really a married couple.
You're set in your ways.
You know, you like going out with your friends on Friday night.
You have everything sorted out.
The likelihood of you throwing your whole life up in the air at that age to have a child, you know, it gets less and less likely by the year.
So the more people we condition to have, to stave off having children in their 20s, because you can always use the artificial womb, the fewer people will want to have children.
Or even if they want to, they'll just say, you know, I'm way too old.
I could not deal with kids at this point.
And let's not forget the costs involved with this stuff.
Reproductive technology costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You know, kids are already pretty bloody expensive to begin with.
Now that you're putting it off for so long, you're adding this huge cost that doesn't need to be there.
And every economic cost, if you add a cost of $100,000 just to having a child, the market responds to incentives.
People are going to elect not to have children because of that cost.
Ultimately, I don't see this helping the reproductive crisis at all.
If anything, it will be, well, it'll probably be neutral for the most part, but it might have a slightly negative effect, as it encourages people to go against their natural instincts.
And now the final point.
How will this affect men?
Because in the present climate, getting married, period, is extremely dangerous.
There's a 50% divorce rate, higher depending where you're looking, and 75 to 85% of the time, it's initiated by the woman.
And I don't think I need to go into the domestic violence stats with you guys.
For the record, it's about 50-50, equal male on female violence.
But the majority of these divorces aren't because of any legitimate cause.
These are not for-cause divorces.
They are no-fault divorces.
So getting married is a huge, risky settlement.
Having children doubles up on the amount of risk because now you can be sued for child support.
And we have reinvented the debt prisons, debtors' prisons, throughout the West, where if you're late on your child support payments, you could go to prison for that.
How exactly you're supposed to make money in prison to pay off the debts, I'm not quite sure, but I'm sure a bunch of people make a lot of money prosecuting you when it happens.
So having children right now is such a huge risky proposition.
And not to mention the fact that the fact that these laws exist also alter the dynamics of the marriage.
It's basically one person, you know, the woman, has a nuclear button that she can hit at any point.
So anytime you're having a disagreement on anything, that possibility, even if it doesn't get brought up, is going to affect the dynamic of the argument.
So yes, getting married is a terrible, terrible prospect for men.
Will this make a difference?
Once again, no.
No, and we already have a perfect example of why this won't make a significant difference.
There might be a few men that would choose to do it, but not to any appreciable degree.
You know, we're talking like maybe one out of a thousand here.
It's, yeah, in theory, this would be good for men.
Like, it does give men another option.
We don't have to get married to have children.
And certainly having options is always a good thing.
But I don't really see it as a game changer to any degree.
Simply because feminists don't use sperm banks all that often.
Now here's the thing.
Of the two sexes, I don't think it's controversial to state that women tend to be the sex that's more focused on having children.
I mean, guys want to have children too.
But for us, partly, you know, as part of our sex, we can have children well up into our 50s or 60s without any issues whatsoever.
So it's just not a priority for us.
We don't get baby rabies.
We can be very nurturing, but we aren't as drawn to being nurturing as women are.
It's not as much of a high priority.
We can be very nurturing, or we could work on our car.
It's, I could do it or not.
It's not, I need to be doing this.
So women are The more drawn to nurturing sex, the more drawn to motherhood sex.
And we've had feminists screaming about how reproductive technology will help us get rid of men.
You know, we don't need these evil, vile, hairy, sweaty men all over the place anymore.
We only need a stable full of them, and they can donate sperm all day.
And yet, the feminists aren't really taking advantage of this, are they?
The vast majority of people having children, the vast, vast majority are married couples.
It seems that no matter what the technology is, the technology can kind of undermine our instincts, it can divert them, it can, you know, twist them a bit, but the instincts always win over.
And people that want to have children typically do it by getting married and having children with one another.
Sperm banks haven't drastically changed how couples reproduce.
Now, again, it is very hard to find statistics on any of this stuff, but just common sense looking around.
How many people do you know that were created from in vitro fertilization?
You know, that were raised by a single mom, you know, who didn't, even the single moms, most of them just had casual sex.
And heck, feminists don't even really need in vitro fertilization to do any of this stuff.
I mean, like, that way you get to have a doctor as the father, but realistically, she could just go to a bar and find the first person there and use them to get pregnant if that's what she wanted.
You know, you hear feminists talking about getting rid of men and using sperm banks, but they don't seem to actually do it, which suggests it suggests that they're just venting emotionally.
They're not actually serious.
You know, and this kind of leads up to the next problem.
Now, that's what women have to deal with to get to it.
They just have to go to a sperm bank and they pay $500, $1,000, and they, you know, have sex with a turkey baster.
And there you go, you have a baby now.
With men, with men using artificial wounds, it'd be a very different scenario.
Because even in the biological sciences, sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive.
Most men that donate sperm view it as a job.
You know, it's something, listen, I get 100 bucks a month for donating sperm.
You know, I get whatever.
It's something I do.
And ironically, they're more likely to acknowledge that they are the father of the child.
Whereas women that donate eggs view it as a gift and completely deny any connection with the children whatsoever.
Which kind of goes back to my moral point earlier about actually having the child in your womb is a different experience from merely genetically reproducing for the female of the sex, the species.
But yeah, they tend to view it as gifts, and any financial compensation is just a gift they're getting in return.
It's not a business, it's not something they're selling, it's something they're giving away.
And this is because it is an invasive procedure to get an egg from a woman.
And so sperm banks, you just, you know, you jerk off in the cup.
The women actually have to go through mildly dangerous surgery to do this.
So they're not just going to do it willy-nilly as a career, not the vast majority of them at least.
So women already have this really easy time finding sperm.
Just pay some money, not even that much.
Or just go to a bar and find a guy.
Whereas for men, even with artificial wombs, you would still have to find an egg donor.
It might be easier to find that than a kidney donor, but it's still going to be extremely challenging.
And ultimately, I think we need to look at this and say, why would this help men?
What is the problem?
that this would supposedly help.
Why do men need these artificial wombs to have children safely?
And the answer is that we live in a very misandric society.
You know, the modern version of feminist equality means that women are equal whenever they want to be, but that men still have to hold their side of the bargain from the 1950s.
So women can do whatever they want.
They can never be held accountable.
They can never be criticized.
Men still have to work hard.
We still have to do dangerous jobs where we might die.
And no matter how badly our wife treats us, we have to keep paying her spousal allowance and child support.
So in this system, in this system, if you as a single man decided to go use an artificial womb because you can't trust women, what do you think is going to happen on a social level if that occurs?
You know, not too long ago, well, actually ongoing, the male birth control is looking like a very probable reality in the near future.
The feminists are screaming that men are going to use this to knock women up.
They're going to claim that they were on the birth control to knock women up because we all know that the sex that lies about being on birth control, the sex that wants to have an oops baby, is the male sex and not the female one.
Even something as simple as the male birth control pill is generating massive amounts of controversy that is just not there with any form of female reproductive control, up to and including sex selective abortions amongst Western women.
That's perfectly fine, but guys having birth control, we might need to legislate that.
If this technology were a reality, it would be legislated out of reality immediately.
There would be so many laws put on it saying under what circumstances are you allowed to do this?
They would paint all the men that want to have, that want to use an artificial womb.
They'd paint them all as child molesters just looking for a baby to groom.
There'd be news reports about the suspicious men.
People would look at them funny.
Gay couples raising kids?
Oh, that's wonderful.
Father raising a child that's 50% his and 50% from a donor?
Oh, now that's creepy.
You see, ultimately, this does not solve the fundamental problem, which is that the two sexes are completely out of balance right now.
There's a lot of equality between the sexes, but there's no equity.
There's no fair dealings.
Instead of the double standard, which is appropriate when you have two groups that are statistically distinct, there's a reason why they say don't hit a girl.
Instead of having double standards that are appropriate, and likewise, 50 years ago, little girls would be told, you know, that boys are a lot stronger than you.
So, you know, don't try and fist fight the boy.
You'll get your ass handed to you.
Instead of those healthy double standards that recognized differences between people and used a double standard for equity's sake, we have one standard, which is ultimately, as the male sex, we suffer all the overt consequences of it, but women suffer the spinsterhood and the meaninglessness and the burnout of trying to act like men.
So both sexes are being subverted and destroyed by the current standard, and that's the problem.
And when it comes to reproductive technology, when it comes to parental rights, when it comes to all of this, as a rule of thumb, you can just ask yourself, what would be the worst thing for the children?
What would hurt, what sort of policy, what sort of social policy would hurt children more?
And that's probably going to be the policy that's made legal.
So no, technology is not going to solve what is fundamentally a social problem.
This is a sort of problem that needs to be fixed by improving the caliber of people we have in this society.
And ultimately, that comes down to each and every one of us as individuals.
If you want better women in the world, demand better women.
Don't put up with low-quality women, with dishonest women, with irresponsible women, etc.
Demand more out of the women in your life.
And if you can't find them, boycott them.
You know, if you can't find a single burger joint in town that doesn't put a whole ton of MSG and corn syrup into their meat, don't need at any of the burger joints.
Boycotts work.
But if you do meet, you know, the unicorn, and again, this is not a girl that acts like a man.
The problem is we have too many girls acting like a man.
If this is a woman that acts like a woman, remember, all women are like that, but one that acts like the way a woman should work, that acts like a virtuous woman.
Not a Virago, not a virtuous man, but a virtuous woman.
And there you go.
Try and be the man that earns her.
And it's through these individual choices that we all make that we change society, not by hoping for some piece of technology that will completely reset the playing field.
Anyway, this has been my video on the consequences of artificial wombs.
Long story short, it's not a paradigm changer.
It's just more of what we already have.
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