Is pregnancy barbaric?

[mindstalk]

Thread at Feministe, on comments by radical feminist Shulamith Firestone in 1970. Comments spend a fair amount of time discussing Bujold, which warms my heart. One poster wonders if one's gut reaction toward uterine replicators (Bujold) or exowombs (Transhuman Space) is governed by prior exposure to Brave New World vs. Bujold.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Interesting thread, but somewhat disappointing at how many people seemed to think that exowombs would be more barbaric or in some other technophobic way worse than normal pregnancy. OTOH, I am equally certain that once exowombs are developed (and from what I've read they are both inevitable and the very first models are likely to exist in the next decade or so, and someone puts a good ad campaign behind popularizing them, natural pregnancy will become an option chosen only by eccentrics and the poor.

[mlc23.livejournal.com]

I didn't read everything, but I find it odd that pregnancy specifically would be singled out as barbaric - what about other biological functions like eating, urinating, having sex, etc.

It reminds me of the anti-breastfeeding rhetoric though in terms of being "unfair" to women, "gross" and "animalistic" (which I find odd, because of course, we are animals).

Lots of women find it empowering to let their bodies do what they are supposed to do, and to do things that men can't do with them. And of course its the one time in a woman's life where her body is about _her_ (and her child) and she has some freedom from conformity to standard beauty images.

I don't know how popular an exowomb would be, but having fun imagining some of the repercussions. Right now there is a small but strong movement towards more natural childbirth and child rearing practices - less doctors, more midwives, more homebirths - and in some cases for the really harcore: unassisted childbirth with no help at all. I lean more in that direction myself, but then I'm someone who loved being pregnant and had a fairly easy time with it.