by Kyle Munkittrick
Thanks to the failure of bioethics’ and billionaires going full Genghis Khan, a radical Marxist feminist’s dream is about to come true.
In her 1970 polemic The Dialectic of Sex Shulamith Firestone makes a radical argument even by radical Marxist feminist standards: Liberation from patriarchy requires liberation from biology. The cornerstone of her cybernetic communist utopia? Artificial wombs.
Now, of course, this was over fifty years ago and that other classic text of artificial wombs, Brave New World, was already forty years old when Firestone was writing. While making them a reality will require some serious capital-S Science, the problem has never, really, been one of technology. It’s that idea of artificial wombs is so repellent that, in a There is No Anti-Memetics Division kind of way, they are a self-defeating concept. Outside the most extreme thinkers like Firestone, the technology is so off-putting that little to no effort has been put into pursuing it, let alone banning it. We haven’t even made it past debating the precursors—stem cell research, animal cloning, IVF, surrogates, and designer babies.
Or we hadn’t. Ours is an era of leap-frogging. But in the few years, everything changed. It’s so early you can’t quite see it, but the market for artificial wombs is now here, without debate or discussion. Just as the once-science-fictional shot for obesity is here today, there will be push-button babies in a tomorrow closer than you think.
To understand how this has happened, you have to ask yourself not why artificial wombs now, but why don’t we have them already? And to answer that, you need to answer a stranger question still:
Why don’t billionaires have way more kids?
The Billionaire Baby Boom
When I say ‘more kids’ I mean way more. Billionaires are a good test case for fertility crisis. If you think you know what will make people have more kids, just ask yourself, “Well, is that a problem for billionaires? No, ok then that’s probably not actually it.”
Billionaires are utterly price insensitive. They are happily iconoclastic and engage in bizarre behaviors. They’re global and relocate with ease. Many are foreign and have extremely different value sets. Many already have larger than average families. They’re not worried about any opportunity costs of doing so. They can hire an army to deal with the most annoying parts. Many of them regularly get divorced and remarry, some several times, often to much younger women. Some, if not most, often seem gleefully selfish and amoral.
And, despite all this, most only have three or four kids, five or six for ‘big’ families.
Except for Elon Musk. The details are semi-private and disputed, but it’s not unreasonable to claim Musk has at least fourteen kids with four women—likely more with more. Musk is, even among billionaires, a weird guy. And no, this isn’t going where you think. Musk is not starting a new company for artificial wombs. Yes, he has posted about this being a good idea, but, for once, he didn’t immediately start another company to pursue it.
I had written off his behavior as a one-off, until the news broke that a Chinese billionaire, Xu Bo, has already had at least one-hundred children via surrogates. I also wrote this off, but then a second billionaire, Pavel Durov, said he had 106 children. This has already happened. The kids exist. Some of them are teenagers.
While Bo and Durov might be the only ones doing this, I doubt it. My intuition has flipped. It’s more plausible that they are just the first to admit having over 100 kids. Given that neither of these guys are in the top 100 wealthiest people in the world and Bo is barely in the top 1000, well… there are a lot of people who could be doing what they’re doing.
Ok, well, geeze. I guess the billionaires are starting to have way more kids. Despite this apparently being a thing for years now, it was, if not a secret, not public until about a month ago. Why? Even with lawsuits, billionaires have a way of keeping things quiet if they need to. They certainly don’t need to go on Lex Friedman’s podcast to talk about details they don’t want aired, the way Durov did. It’s simple. Now they can.
Because nobody cares if they do.
The Failure of Bioethics
Well, maybe you care.
How do you feel thinking about billionaires using surrogates to have hundreds of kids all over the planet?
Are you grossed out? Feeling the ick? Bioethicists used to think there was wisdom in that. Leon Kass, famous for heading up the Presidential Council on Bioethics that banned stem cell research, described this reaction as the “Wisdom of Repugnance.”
Kass is a conservative bioethicist, who, along with more liberal and centrist bioethicists like Art Caplan and Ezekiel Emanuel, was ascendent in the early 2000s. Stem cells, the human genome, Terri Schiavo, organ transplants, HIV, and host of other medical and biotech topics were the hot topics of debate. Every time an issue came up around a new drug or a medical breakthrough, there would be a blizzard of op-eds and think pieces. If you were about to do something spicy, you can be sure a bioethicist was there to chime in, pro or con.
And yet, here we are, years into the furious debates over mRNA vaccines and the reversal of Roe. Biohacking has reached an all time high with peptides, legal and less-so, podcasters and tech millionaires explicitly embracing extreme longevity. Add into that mix billionaires having swarms of kids via surrogates. But nary an op-ed to be seen. Certainly not from bioethicists by trade. Not even The New Atlantis, which seems tailor-made for the moment and recognizes the failure of science commentary, is rising to it.
Had anyone even suggested having over twenty kids a decade ago, we would have been drowning in bioethics opinion pieces. But not any longer. The gatekeepers and hand-wringers of academic bioethics have gone quiet.
What happened to all the bioethics?
COVID, is what. Mainstream bioethicists spent every cent of credibility on COVID, and they spent it badly. Dogmatically certain, brutally dismissive—then quietly memory-holing their prior certainty when the consensus shifted, hoping no one would notice. These were the people who rejected a simple polio-style vaccine campaign for convoluted layers of who was most deserving, creating waste and confusion, then flipped to mandates when uptake stalled. January 2021: you want the vaccine? How dare you!? June 2021: you don’t want it? How dare you!? Arguments for half doses, first doses first, challenge trials—dismissed and condemned. Bioethicists got lapped by economists and tech people willing to actually look at the numbers.
The field that should have been asking hard questions about trade-offs between distribution and efficacy was too busy policing pronoun usage in medical journals and calling skeptics dangerous. The people whose job was to be the intellectual guardrails and spear-points revealed themselves as either captured or cowards.
We’ve all realized this. No one wonders what they think anymore. We don’t even remember to ask.
Normative Collapse
But even without bioethics, artificial wombs are one of the rare topics where left and right agree: gross! Not cool! Do not do that!
The religious right hate the idea of artificial wombs for violating something ineffable about the soul. They are already uncomfortable with IVF and hostile to preimplantation genetic testing. Artificial wombs are obviously DOA. The progressive left see them as degrading capitalist behavior—bodies for rent, babies as outputs. They already make similar claims about surrogates. Both sides find the “productization of the person” and the “optimization of life” viscerally offensive.
But I don’t think even this matters anymore. The utter non-reaction to those billionaire stories is, to me, telling. You’ve probably already moved on yourself.
Stigma doesn’t really work anymore. The Trump/Musk era has unleashed a very weird set of behaviors. Grok generating nudes. Bryan Johnson publicly posting what amounts to an erotic journal entry. All the canceled are uncanceled. All the cancelers are inept and toothless.
The conservative Christians who might have objected now tolerate Trump’s behavior because the alternative is political exile. JD Vance subtweets the Pope. The moral high ground has eroded because to take a stand is to become an instant hypocrite. Pearl clutching is now something that is done in rage so as to mask just how unbelievably cringe it is to be offended by anything. Only seething, tribal, moral outrage is tolerated, and only then as a kind of not even vice-signaling, but psycho-signaling, proving you’re loyal to the cause by saying something so un-retractable and belligerent as to finally trigger a response; only to then retreat to a motte so obviously non-sequitor that the cravenness stuns one’s opponents into a gobsmacked kind of silence.
With this, American moral hegemony has largely evaporated. Have you ever stopped to think how weird it is that if something isn’t allowed in the US, it’s basically not allowed anywhere? When the US bans or de-funds some promising or potent branch of science, it’s almost a global death sentence. For all of Europe’s back-patting on their liberalism, they’re rarely more than five years ahead or behind of the US on any given regulation. India, China, Russia, and other countries could wantonly thumb their nose at many American norms should they so choose. They do not so choose.
Or did not. What shreds of influence we have left we are not interested in wielding—neither Trump nor congress nor our various peddlers of soft power. It’s okay to be profane and sacrilegious in ways that would have ended careers even a few years ago.
Into this world, people are doing what they’ve always wanted to do. They’re going full Genghis Khan.
Status Markets in Everything
So here we are: Billionaires from China, Russia, and America, are creating shah-style throngs of progeny via surrogacy harems. There is no longer even the mask of serial-wives or hushed mistresses. Just blatant use of dozens of surrogates, all impregnated with eggs of various sources, some wives, some donor, some who knows. Industrial reproduction is here not as a dystopia, but a luxury for the wealthy and powerful.
Too many children is now a status symbol; one harder to get than the latest hypercar.
The problem, even for billionaires, is that surrogates are bottlenecked. Sure, hundreds of millions of women could be surrogates, but the ones who are willing, sufficiently healthy, the right age, trustworthy, and who meet every criterion a hyper-wealthy person would want for carrying one of their heirs? Vanishingly rare. Even the “good” ones are massive risks. They might want to keep the baby. They might get sick. They expose your carefully PGT-screened embryo to an epigenetic environment you can’t control.
Surrogates are human. Humans are expensive, risky, and don’t scale.
The moment you have cost-insensitive buyers who encounter a symbol of wealth and power they cannot easily attain and are unashamed of openly pursuing, well, now you have a market. Get the billionaires their babies! Artificial wombs become the obvious solution. A market opportunity now exists that wasn’t there even this time last year.
Build a Better Surrogate, Birth a Better Baby
And once you let yourself not think of artificial wombs as horrific and you start wondering ‘what would the world be like if these were real?’, you have a second realization: Firestone was more than right. Artificial wombs won’t just make things better for women, they make things better for everyone.
Consider: The fourth trimester could finally happen inside the womb.
Human babies are born too early because evolution had to compromise between large heads and narrow birth canals. Eleven to thirteen months of gestation would produce babies who are dramatically more developed at “birth.” Vaccines could be introduced with no needles, all before the baby is born. Peak SIDs risk skipped over. No more premies, ever.
The womb could be transparent, constantly monitored, allowing assessment and intervention within minutes, or hours. Nutrient control, environment standardization, early detection of problems—all become trivial.
Of course, the tech isn’t here yet. That’s why the unleashing of the market is such a big deal. As with so many technologies, not much seems to change in a year, but everything can change in a decade. In the last ten years alone we’ve proliferation of EVs, drone warfare, AI that shreds the Turing test, a vaccine created in six months and a shot that fixes not just obesity, but almost everything else as well. This is not the era in which to bet against an exponential progress curve.
The first artificial womb baby might cost tens of millions. Then the next few, just millions. But within a decade and some change, artificial wombs could be high quality, cost effective, and easily accessed. They could become the default.
The Coming Ironies
The fertility discourse isn’t ready for this.
Ross Douthat wants everyone to have more kids, but is he willing to accept artificial wombs if they’re safer for babies, better for mothers, and more affordable than natural gestation? The MAHA movement is afraid of seed oils and vaccines—can you imagine their response to growing babies in machines?
Meanwhile, the progressive left thinks degrowth is good and GMOs are evil. But recall, the radical Marxist feminist who wrote The Dialectic of Sex, argued that artificial wombs were required for true gender equality. No policy could overcome the biological differences between the sexes. Only by defeating biology could women be free.
In the strangest twist, the capitalist oligarchical patriarchy may be about to invent the means of feminist liberation. Firestone may just have her utopia delivered by the very forces she despised.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.