cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/24230552
Just capitalism doing its thing
Submitted 3 days ago by bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de to aboringdystopia@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/a7bd02d7-514e-41ce-928b-9820159e0179.png
cross-posted from: lemmy.ml/post/24230552
Just capitalism doing its thing
Good news boys, if we’re willing to use women this way, we can actually do the same for men! This is one unique sexual reproduction horror story that can in theory be inflicted on both sexes!
Pregnancy without a uterus, impossible! You say. But ectopic pregnancies are a thing. We all start out as parasites. As an embryo develops, it looks for a surface of flesh rich in blood vessels to latch onto. The primary function of the uterus is to provide an inner lining that is sort of a “disposable surface.” The inner lining is rich in blood vessels, the ideal environment for a zygote to latch onto and grow from. The embryo can integrate its blood vessels with the uterine lining and thoroughly mess those up. Then after pregnancy the whole inner lining is just sloughed off. That in inelegant terms is the uterus - an organ that produces a nice safe surface for the zygote to latch onto that won’t harm the person carrying the pregnancy.
But, things don’t always go well. If a zygote somehow tears through the uterine wall, then ectopic pregnancy, pregnancy outside the uterus, can result. And this a serious life-threatening medical condition. The fetus as it develops will latch onto not the intended uterine surface, but the vital abdominal organs. Giving “birth” in this case is done surgically, and it’s more akin to cutting out a cancer than a healthy live birth.
But while it hasn’t been tried due to the obvious health risks and huge medical ethics issues, there’s little reason to think that ectopic pregnancies couldn’t be carried in a male admomen. DNA and chromosomes shouldn’t be a barrier. The placenta that the fetus grows is evolved to prevent the fetus from being rejected like a donor organ. It’s not like mothers and infants share their DNA.
So in theory we could use men in vegetative states as one-time use surrogates. There has been research proposed and papers written on the possibility of trans women carrying children via uterine transplant, but this method, deliberate artificial ectopic pregnancy, is in principle a lot simpler. You don’t need to transplant a delicate organ and find a way to carry a pregnancy while taking anti-rejection drugs. You just implant an embryo in the surrogate abdomen and let it go to town. Let it latch in to whatever internal organs it wants. Then after nine months, just cut open and discard the surrogate father.
It wouldn’t be as simple as just implanting an embryo. The pregnant vegetative man would likely need to have his hormone profile monitored and heavily manipulated. But this is easy enough. Testosterone production could be nuked by simple castration, and erogenous estrogen and progesterone could then be introduced as needed before and during the pregnancy. After the pregnancy, it is unlikely the man would survive. So this is a one time deal. But if we’re OK treating people in persistent vegetative states like resources to be exploited, I see no reason to throw out half of our potential surrogate population simply because they happen to be men.
No, you don’t understand, people’s lives can only be thrown away in accordance with tradition. Men die in wars, women are exploited for children. You can’t cross the beams, frogs will turn gay!
You will get this passed as soon as we have a gender neutral draft and 50-50% wartime casualties between genders.
This should be a horror movie plot
Yeah, that’s the kind of persistent vegetative state you don’t want to wake up from.
But really this kind of abuse of people in these states goes way beyond pregnancy. If we’re willing to do this to women, why not keep vegetative patients of both sexes alive for years as continuous blood donors? I could easily see someone justifying that, especially if the victim has a rare or that universal donor blood type.
Or how about organ donation? We do currently take organs from deceased donors, but usually it’s a one time deal. When it comes time, if the person is a willing donor, you pull the plug, and then harvest whatever organs you can that you have a recipient for at the moment. But you could make that a lot more efficient if you could keep the donor alive for a long time, perhaps years. Just keep them alive, waiting for someone in need. Someone needs the first kidney? Give it to them. Someone needs a second kidney? Give it to them and put the donor on permanent dialysis. Someone needs a hear or lung? Take the donor’s and keep them going via artificial means. Or maybe we could take skin graft after skin graft, growing new skin again and again. Treat them like sheep being shorn. It’s the difference between having to use a butchered animal up all at once vs being able to freeze most of it for later. Hospitals could have whole wards of these donors caught for years in a state of half-disassembled living death.
This is an ethical Pandora’s box we REALLY do not want to open.
That horror movie would make any HP Lovecraft stuff look like a children’s book.
They did a comedy with Arnold and Danny devito called JR
Basically face hugger reproduction from the Alien franchise?
Essentially yes. Again, we all start as parasites. A uterus primarily is just a way for pregnancy to be survivable. But in theory it is perfectly doable in males.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_pregnancy#Ectopic_impl…
As that article notes, pioneers in reproductive healthcare have even commented that it would likely be possible. We just don’t do it because it’s medically unconscionable to deliberately create an ectopic pregnancy. It goes against the whole, “and first, do no harm” principle. But if we’re throwing ethics to the wind and involuntarily impregnating people we consider already dead anyway, why not do the same to males?
The fact that anyone would need this amount of mental gymnastics to find reason enough to relate to the women potentially being targeted, to be against it, is pretty fucked up in its own right.
A large part of how patriarchy works is that men aren’t expected to, so often don’t, give a shit about the harm it causes until something impacts them directly, and even then, they will only actively oppose it if it harms them significantly more than what the patriarchy benefits them (toxic masculinity being a prime example of self harm many men are reluctant to fight).
Catering to this feature of the system only perpetuates it. Stop creating convoluted ways for them to relate (even “your mothers and sisters” shouldn’t be needed), and start expecting, and demanding, they simply consider and therefor treat all humans equally (which magically leads to caring about what happens to women just as much as they would if it were men under threat).
With all due respect, you seem to be actively seeking to be offended. This comes down to bodily autonomy. And providing an example of how this effects everyone is not some monstrous thing perpetuating the patriarchy. I think you’re a little too deep in the gender theory here.
I’m a trans person. I have had to fight for bodily autonomy my entire life. The fight for bodily autonomy is what ultimately connects trans rights with what are traditionally labeled “women’s issues.” Ultimate the right to abortion or contraception is about the right of everyone to bodily autonomy. To have final ownership and control of your own flesh and blood effects women’s reproductive rights, trans rights, the right to die, organ donation, etc. This goes way beyond just traditional women’s issues.
And honestly, the scenario isn’t convoluted or absurd. If the government did ever allow this kind of surrogacy, there would be no need to confine it to just one sex. Hell, I would be actively petitioning to apply it to everyone regardless of sex. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and I AM that pettty. I would absolutely demand that atrocities be applied equally. And if we’re doing this, we’re probably also doing involuntary organ donation. So again it all comes back to bodily autonomy.
What is horrifying about this proposal is not that it would be done to women. What is horrifying about it is that it would be done to human beings. And I don’t feel the need to throw up artificial barriers and get offended that someone would dare to point out the broader implications of this beyond narrowly defined and ghettoized “women’s issues.”
I don’t know, I think OP is making A Modest Proposal
I hope this doesn’t awaken anything in me…
It most certainly did.
What does this have to do with capitalism?
Capitalists are freaking out over the declining birthrate because anyone with a brainstem knows “AI” and robots won’t replace human workers for a long time, and the machine is hungry.
It seems like its just ethno-nationalists freaking out. Capitalists have been tackling this problem with immigration for a long time.
McDonalds threatened to replace their employees with machines, and when they tried it cost them millions…
“15 an hour? Meet your replacement!” was nothing but a scare tactic, if machines were viable they’d already be in use.
Lol. What? Who? Which “capitalists”?
I swear, Lemmy is sometimes just as bad as the far right talking about “antifa”.
can’t wait for the socialists to be out on the streets when other peoples money runs out
If it becomes a thing capitalists could try to implement systems that make more brain dead women than would exist naturally, so that there are more babies to become workers. Look at for profit prisons and how we have more people in prison than any other country. If they want something they can pay to get it
But came out of a public university on Colombia. Nobody ever suggested doing this for profit.
Organ donation already exist. Doctors tried to kill someone that was still alive to get their organs.
I mean why save someone if they could just let them die do they can harvest the organs. Same thing with this.
Capitalism is when bad stuff
The problem aren’t babies, its funding those babies. Raising children is fucking expensive, and in the age of infinite growth nobody is allowed to slowdown to raise children. Adoption centers and foster homes are abysmal, and having kids is too expensive for most people.
The rich dont want to pay for peoples kids, they just want to squeeze the value out them. Thats why Elon and his vice president trump wants more H-1B visas. They don’t have to pay for the childcare or education, they can just drain educated workers from another struggling country
The best way to get people to not care that you’re raping (or otherwise abusing / exploiting) their children is to make sure they have too many to keep track of.
Seems like a super-nerdy medical idea that has nothing to do with capitalism.
A lot of things terminally online people claim is capitalism has nothing to do with it.
Yeah, sounds like a dumb hypothetical you’re having with your nerdy friends or a staff member of Hitlers cabinet discussing the next big thing after eugenics.
That’s an incredibly expensive bad idea. Dialysis will likely be necessary and the beating heart corpse just kind of slowly breaks down over time with multi system organ failure. 9 months would require a heroic effort at life support. Makes sense it was suggested by a philosopher. She also suggested using male bodies as incubators. Might as well use pigs if you’re going that far. Humerous that the philosopher that suggested it was a woman though.
It is a good thought experiment to gauge where people stand on brain death and personhood too I guess. I obviously think a body with a brain that is dead to the stem is just a corpse. That brain will actually end up shriveling up and drooping because it is actively necrotizing.
But like… why babies? We already have way too many of those. We need less babies.
If we’re going to delve into some seriously murky ethical water here, why not forcus on something there’s an actual need for, like organ harvesting and blood harvesting? And that would double donor pool by including men as poss-- …oh. Oh yeah. That’s why. -_-
That’s already a thing in many countries, an opt-out program for organ donating, so by default they will take my organs if I’m braindead
I mean a step or two beyond that- like keep a braindead body alive via feeding tube and ventilator so it’s just constantly generating blood that drips into donor bags. Keep just enough in the body’s circulation to keep it ticking, but bag the rest – it would produce WAY beyond the output of a mind-intact donor.
Bone marrow transplant? Done. Skin grafts? Hit it. Fucking hair for wigs? Plasma? Hell, even fecal transplants are a thing (restores GI microbiome that got wiped out… it’s gross as fuck, but it’s a thing - and it requires the donor to follow a VERY specific diet, that can now be force-fed).
Basically anything the body passively generates that we have some use for; keep a braindead-human-cattle-donor on life support and milk it for all it’s got.
…that sounded a bit bit like a sales pitch - gist is to illustrate just how far we could take this. Putting the focus on babies will just worsen the population problem, but also showcases an extreme lack of imagination!
But like… why babies? We already have way too many of those. We need fewer babies.
Capitalism has a need for unlimited growth and also most national pension systems globally take the current working generation’s money to pay for the retirement of the current retired generation - so the future working generation needs to be big enough to support the current working generation in turn.
My own country did a footgun thing here. We had a mandatory 2nd pillar system where you contribute to a fund, the gvt matches (well, doubles) your contribution, and that gets added to the normal 1st pillar national pension when you retire, either you take it out as a lump sum, or get paid a portion of it per month. You literally couldn’t take money out of it prematurely. Except the right-wing populists decided to allow taking money out of it with the caveat that you can’t rejoin it for
Cancer has a need for unlimited growth, that doesn’t mean we should coddle a tumor: cut that shit out, then put it under the microscope so we know how to stop it from happening again.
Your county’s findings that right-wing populists are trash are consistent with a myriad of similar ‘studies’ around the globe. Mine just elected an orange neonazi who loves making decisions that hurt the quality of human life, so we’ll be adding plenty of data to that pile pretty soon here too.
But governments are not willing to do the one thing that would make for higher fertility - make the country a nice place to live, with enough support for parents so having a child isn’t an economic disaster
I wonder what my country will be like with half the number of people. We’re building so many houses, my town has two new suburbs opened in the last ten years as we head toward peak population, but our fertility rate is just over 1.6, replacement rate is 2.1. many countries are worse
If we’re going to delve into some seriously murky ethical water here, why not forcus on something there’s an actual need for, like organ and blood harvesting?
Speaking of, I just watched the MST3K episode on The Clonus Horror. It didn’t end well.
It didn’t start particularly good either. And the middle was a slog.
We need fewer babies.
I don’t know who this “we” is. Circumstances vary heavily by household and neighborhood.
I don’t know who this “we” is.
The inhabitants of planet Earth. Making a baby is one of the largest carbon footprint things anyone can do. The climate is actively writing humanity’s (and plenty of other critters’) eviction notice via the heat we’re pumping into our planet.
The needs of the individual household include not being cooked to death, and I’d wager that supersedes whichever other circumstances you had in mind.
We need fewer babies.
The amount of babies isn’t the issue America, it’s the fact that we can’t afford them.
And that the government won’t do shit-all to help them. A baby born to a corpse is not going to have a good life in America.
I just threw up in my mouth a little when you pointed that out. Yes the article says that too, but this accurate re-wording kinda really makes it “click”
What if they are a rich corpse?
Okay, but imagine if you could have one really rich guy impregnate a thousand captive comatose women at once, to improve efficiency.
What I really hate about longtermism is that it actually tells us nothing about what policies are best, as we don’t know what paths will lead to the best future.
You could argue that low taxes on billionaires will give them the resources needed to do space colonisation. Thus, in the long term, not taxing billionaires now is good. Or you could argue that a robust social safety net and UBI is the best path to a long term best future. How many Einsteins throughout history died illiterate peasants? By providing resources for everyone, we maximize our chances of the truly talented having a shot at elevating us all through new science and discoveries.
Hell, I could even justify a nuclear war through longtermism. Economies grow more worn-in and sclerotic over time. Every so often you need a historical arsonist like Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan to run through an area, burn the existing order to ashes, and give people a chance to start again. Existing elites prevent necessary change. And often the only way to remove them is to burn everything down. On the next attempt at civilization, they can learn from their predecessor’s mistakes. For example, destroying the fossil fuel industry now is effectively impossible; they’re simply far too entrenched and powerful. By voluntarily starting a global thermonuclear war, we will smash their power. Civilization can then rebuild powered entirely by solar and wind. Yes, we lose 90% of the human population today, but we prevent total human extinction via complete biosphere collapse, which appears to be the road we are on now. From the long term perspective, deliberately starting a global thermonuclear war is the only rational choice.
What if they are a rich corpse?
What does this have to do with capitalism? Did we just switch from “everything bad is communism” to “everything bad is capitalism”?
I don’t know what this has to do with capitalism. This sounds like a shitty lab experiment which can happen under any form of government or economy. Oh wait I checked and it’s from .ML. I am posting this in the hopes to get banned from that entire instance because blocking didn’t seem to work.
Nah bro, just read more theory bro. You just haven’t had dialectical materialism explained to you the right way bro. Don’t worry bro, give me like a quick 4 hours and it’ll all make sense.
Marx was right about so many things it’s wild considering he was writing about this shit in the late 1800s. He wasn’t perfect but the fact that so much of it rings true in 2024 is impressive.
But like Jesus, it’s his fucking followers that are so goddamn annoying.
And the whole read more theory bro shit is fucking ableist and classist. I had a brain injury as a teenager and I struggle with longer reads especially stuff written in a version of English that isn’t current (sure it’s not Shakespeare which is impossible to me even before the TBI but it’s also not 2024 English) and also very dense. Most Americans can’t read beyond a sixth grade level, good luck getting them to read theory when they won’t even read simple novels for pleasure.
And no amount of theory reading is going to make this anarchist support an authoritarian system. I don’t trust people in power even if they’re people I agree with. There’s something fundamentally wrong with people who seek power regardless of ideology…
WHAT THE FUCK!
The spice must flow. The Tlielaxu will have their Axolotl Tanks.
My brother in christ, this is not OG sleeping beauty, wtf. How did they expect that conversation to go down?
“Yes, I know your daughter is brain dead, but good news, she will be able to breed for the nation! What? You don’t like the idea of state sanctioned rape and forced breeding?” It baffles me that some people really just see women as a vessal. No thoughts on how horrific that would be for any woman going into the hospital (if something goes wrong, I don’t even get a respectful death), and for their families should one of the worse case scenarios occur (“You can bury her after we’ve popped out a few wave slaves”). Not even thoughts on the children that would be produced by such horrors.
Literally anything than make the world a better place for people to raise children in.
No one sees Women as a Vassal buddy, but you do see Unborn Children as a “Cluster of cells” that can be murdered at a whim
Unborn children get the fuck out of here. You don’t even care about the born children so get off your pious high horse of bullshit.
When you start supporting social welfare benefits maybe you can have a leg to stand on, but instead your insane ideology kills women and forces the birth of unwanted children who are the products of rape or incest, or who would not be viable for long in the world while risking the lives of the already living (mothers).
If they’re suggesting the brain dead body of a woman be kept alive solely to breed, that’s very vassal like to me.
I regards to abortion, I absolutely believe that people start as a cluster of cells and would choose the mother’s life, livelihood, and happiness before the cluster. I think people that are “pro-life” are virtue signaling sycophants that are more concerned with being “right” over actually doing anything to help people. Imagine how many less abortions there would be if they put half of that energy into sex education, better access to contraception, and accessible education and extra curriculars. Imagine some of that energy pointed to the kids already here and needing support and care. But nah. Let’s all stand outside of a medical facility and scare the patients and be assholes online. For the cluster. 🙄
but you do see Unborn Children as a “Cluster of cells” that can be murdered at a whim
Do you consider acorns to be trees?
You’ll be pleased to know that it would be perfectly possible to use men in persistent vegetative states as well. In theory, it’s perfectly possible for a male to carry a pregnancy ectopically. It just hasn’t been done, because as the embryo grows, it latches onto and messes up the internal organs. The placenta has to be cut out like a cancer afterwards.
But if we’re using people in vegetative states like this, there’s no reason to throw out half of our potential surrogates. Males in vegetative states could easily be used as one time use surrogates. You first castrate the male to nuke testosterone production. Then you introduce estrogen and progesterone. Finally you implant an embryo in the abdominal cavity. After it grows to term, you remove it surgically and let the surrogate father die.
Axlotl tanks?
The more I learn about the Frank Herbert novels, the more I realize how prescient and relevant they are to this day.
Literally the plot of Shinsekai Yori (don’t watch Shinsekai Yori, it will fuck you up)
To be fair to them, when the rat queen was fully conscious, she freely killed / maimed / raped her own kind.
I don’t want to excuse Squealer’s actions, any more than I would Hitler’s, but I will say that he rightfully upset a horrific “natural order”
Also around Season 3 of Handmaid’s Tale, with Janine.
The Bene Tleilaxu approve this plan.
Those tanks were based on amphibian genetic engineering. You’re just repeating Missionaria Protectiva superstition.
Damn it is can never come up with an original quip.
I know forced sterilization is bad, but people that come up with opinions this psychotic…should not be allowed to procreate.
Nominate them for the Darwin Award
I’ve been watching too many medical dramas and think that this would make a neat episode if done correctly. Like if a woman had agreed to be a surrogate for her gay brother and made it explicitly clear that she wanted it to occur even if she was in an accident and brain dead. There’s a lot of moral issues and it would be interesting to see them play out in a fantasy universe.
I can’t imagine a situation where this would be OK in real life, to be clear.
This was an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. A pregnant woman is in a car crash and is brain dead, and her parents want to keep her on life support until the baby is born. I think in the end, they decided to let them both go.
Oh neat, ironically Grey’s is what I’ve been binging - I must not be to that episode yet. I do think there’s a difference, though, between keeping a pregnant woman’s body alive to allow her baby to be born vs. impregnating a brain dead woman.
we need the original author’s names.
they need to be on a list somewhere for… additional oversight.
just saying you don’t come to this ‘scientific conclusion’ in a vacuum, someone needs to check the rest of their… social circle.
Well it was a woman philosopher and likely written with the dichotomy in mind that we accept organ donation while reviling paying people to sell one their kidneys/part of their livers/one of their lungs and also accept surrogacy while reviling this simple proposal.
Lois Lowry. Wasn’t this a thing in The Giver?
man I read that so long ago, but I don’t remember this…
One of the benefits of living and working in a liberal society is that stuff like this can get publicly published, discussed and rejected if deemed bad. Under totalitarian regimes that public forum is absent, which is why some of the worst ideas/atrocities of the Soviet Union only came to light years after they had happened (instead of being rejected before they could happen). When it comes to human rights, liberalism > communism, and it’s not even close.
that paper has GOT to be a thinly veiled gruesome fetish manuscript, involving at least a couple corpses.
Oh hey capitalism wants to create the Daemonculaba.
Literally the plot of Shin Sekai Yori (2008).
Nice try Hideo Kojima. You won’t be making the death stranding reality!
id love to keep it “boring”
the “interesting” parts of a dystopia arent usually very healthy for us…
Gotta get that birthrate back up somehow, and having an equitable society obviously isn’t an option
Oh, Brave New World!
This is seriously fucked up, but I don’t get the capitalism part of it?
IMO
We don’t need more people in the world right now. We should be concentrating on figuring out how to agree on having and applying the best support for the ones we already have first.
One step closer to a Brave New World
winterayars@sh.itjust.works 2 days ago
Jesus fucking Christ i want to schedule a hysterectomy and i don’t even have one of those.
HowManyNimons@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Donate one.