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Time of the Pig-Man

From the 'Ye shall be as gods' file
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It’s a new world:

It would require a grueling series of operations, but transgender women now see hope that they could one day become pregnant — despite having been born biological males — thanks to pioneering uterus transplant surgery.

“I hope it becomes a reality,” said Chastity Bowick, 30, a medical case manager in Worcester, Mass. “I absolutely would be willing to do it.”

Bowick began her gender transition at 19, but she knew she wanted to be a mom long before that. “Ever since I was old enough to understand the concept of parenting, I wanted to be a mother,” she said. “I didn’t know how that would ever happen, but that’s what I wanted.”

Surgeons at the Cleveland Clinic on Monday introduced the recipient of the nation’s first uterus transplant, performed late last month. The 26-year-old patient, identified only as Lindsey, said she has adopted three boys through foster care but has always dreamed of the opportunity to carry a child. The Cleveland Clinic team plans to do at least nine more transplants as part of a clinical trial.

A psychologist weighs in:

“If you’re a trans woman, this is a way of completing the dream,” she said. “Looking like a woman, feeling like a woman, and being able to bear a child like a woman. The whole notion of being like anyone else who wants to carry a baby — the opportunity for that is blowing people’s minds, in a good way.”

Livin’ the dream. News today that the uterine transplant has failed. But of course they will keep trying. Until they make a man pregnant with another woman’s uterus that they have transplanted.

Fifteen years ago, J. Bottum wrote:

On Thursday October 5, it was revealed that biotechnology researchers had successfully created a hybrid of a human being and a pig. A man-pig. A pig-man. The reality is so unspeakable, the words themselves don’t want to go together.

Extracting the nuclei of cells from a human fetus and inserting them into a pig’s egg cells, scientists from an Australian company called Stem Cell Sciences and an American company called Biotransplant grew two of the pig-men to 32-cell embryos before destroying them. The embryos would have grown further, the scientists admitted, if they had been implanted in the womb of either a sow or a woman. Either a sow or a woman. A woman or a sow.

There has been some suggestion from the creators that their purpose in designing this human pig is to build a new race of subhuman creatures for scientific and medical use. The only intended use is to make animals, the head of Stem Cell Sciences, Peter Mountford, claimed last week, backpedaling furiously once news of the pig-man leaked out of the European Union’s patent office. Since the creatures are 3 percent pig, laws against the use of people as research subjects would not apply. But since they are 97 percent human, experiments could be profitably undertaken upon them and they could be used as living meat-lockers for transplantable organs and tissue.

But then, too, there has been some suggestion that the creators’ purpose is not so much to corrupt humanity as to elevate it. The creation of the pig-man is proof that we can overcome the genetic barriers that once prevented cross-breeding between humans and other species. At last, then, we may begin to design a new race of beings with perfections that the mere human species lacks: increased strength, enhanced beauty, extended range of life, immunity from disease. “In the extreme theoretical sense,” Mountford admitted, the embryos could have been implanted into a woman to become a new kind of human — though, of course, he reassured the Australian media, something like that would be “ethically immoral, and it’s not something that our company or any respectable scientist would pursue.”

But what difference does it make whether the researchers’ intention is to create subhumans or superhumans? Either they want to make a race of slaves, or they want to make a race of masters. And either way, it means the end of our humanity.

It’s all of a piece. Here is philosopher Michael Allen Gillespie, from his book The Theological Origins of Modernity, on the failures of the radical Hegelians of the 19th century, and beyond:

In place of the existing order they imagined a world in which everyone would be able to do whatever they wished, to “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and be a critical critic in the evening.” However, such universal freedom and prosperity could only be achieved if nature were completely mastered. To achieve this goal, they believed it would thus be necessary to free human productive forces by means of a revolutionary overthrow of the existing social and political order.

It wasn’t Marxism, but market capitalism and bourgeois individualism that would be far more effective at overthrowing the social and moral order that stood in the way of the revolution. More Gillespie, on what events of the first half of the 20th century did to the revolutionary dream:

Modernity, which had seemed on the verge of providing universal security, liberating human beings from all forms of oppression, and producing an unprecedented human thriving, had in fact ended in a barbarism almost unknown in previous human experience. The tools that had been universally regarded as the source of human flourishing had been the source of unparalleled human destruction. And finally, the politics of human liberation had proved to be the means to human enslavement and degradation. The horror evoked by these cataclysmic events was so overwhelming that it called into question not merely the idea of progress and enlightenment but also the idea of modernity and the conception of Western civilization itself.

We never learn. The world that came into being when the 14th century nominalists decided that matter has no intrinsic meaning, and we humans can do with it whatever we will “for the relief of man’s estate” (as Francis Bacon said in the 16th century) is reaching its ripeness. And people who think things like this are not only normal, but a moral advance, dare to speak of Trump’s “depravity.” Yeah, I agree that he is depraved. But we lived in twisted, depraved times. The time of the pig-man, and the man who thinks he’s a woman who wants to have a uterus implanted so he can bear a child. No limits. None.

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