From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - Artificial Wombs: The New War On Women

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

Scientists across the globe have been experimenting with artificial wombs -- using what look like giant plastic bags to incubate premature-born animals. So far, researchers have found enough success with animals, like lambs, that they may soon try this method with human babies. But, many wonder where you draw the line when it comes to the ethics behind this. Author and Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center Noelle Mering explains why she's worried the wrong people could utilize artificial wombs for the wrong reasons and shares the dangers she fears may come with replacing a woman's role in pregnancy and childbirth. Follow Sean & Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey everyone, welcome to From the Kitchen Table. I'm Sean Duffy along with my co-host for the podcast. She's my partner in life. She's also my wife, Rachel Campos Duffy. Rachel Campo-Stuffy. Sean, it's great to be back at the kitchen table. And today we're going to talk about something. Listen, you're going to think this is futuristic, but it's happening right now. So it's basically an artificial womb is what it is. And the way these Frankenstein scientists have come up with this is they have a baby lamb. The baby lamb has now survived four months in this artificial womb. And if you see it, for those of us who are watching us on

video, I'm going to try and describe it for those who are just listening audio wise. It looks like if you had a giant vacuum sealed plastic bag, okay? And there's a little baby lamb just vacuum sealed inside of this. There's obviously tubes and things coming in and they have duplicated the womb. They believe that, you know, right now it's only survived four months. It's going to survive. They believe that humans will be able to, they'll be able to do this with humans by 2030. So we are, I mean, this is getting speeded up. No one has talked about the ethics about it. Nobody has talked about, you know, the impact on the child, on the family. And obviously you can't

have long-term studies on it until they actually do it, which is how they're going to do it. So I thought it would be really interesting to bring in somebody. We've talked to her before. Her name is Noel Merring. I'm going to tell you what her background is so that you understand that she's somebody, I think, who is the perfect person to talk about this. She's an author. She's also the fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She also co-directs Theology of the Home Project, and she's the author of that series. Noel, thank you for joining us at the kitchen table.

Great to be back with you guys. So before we get started on this, I want you to know that since the last time we spoke, but even before that, I've had a bunch of weddings. Your book, Theology of the Home, that series, is my favorite wedding gift to give, along with a check. But I always get great feedback from the bride saying, this is the best thing. And I wished I'd had this book when I had first started creating a home, um, a sacred space, a domestic church for my family. So I just want to really thank you for that. And those who are listening, um, I never get tired of, you know,

going back and reading it and I always give it as gifts. It's a fantastic, I'm not saying this to plug your book. I'm saying this with absolute sincerity. It is the best bridal gift. It is the best way to, um, to give a young woman a great start on how to start thinking about the idea of creating a home. So, Noel, just to be clear, I have not read the book and I haven't given it as a gift to any of the grooms. So I apologize for that. That's my department. book and I haven't given it as a gift to any of the room. So I apologize for that. That's my department. Just really quick again, before we get started, why don't you tell people why, why you created that series? Because I'm talking about it. People don't know what I'm talking about. You're going to give a better pitch than I am, which is that I buy it for lots of people.

Sure. Well, I started with my coauthor, Carrie Gress, who's a prolific writer. And really, Desire just came out of a need to sort of counteract so much cultural messaging that has really seeped ideology into women, a very radical feminist sort of ideology through TV shows, media, magazines, you know, pushing this narrative that women should never be mothers, they shouldn't be chased, you know, that their empowerment looks like something very destructive to themselves. And so we wanted to put out images, narratives, and real substance out there that could tell a different story about the beauty of home life, the beauty of being a faithful wife and mother,

and embracing that life with all the messes and meaning that is embedded in it. Well, it is a beautiful book. If you love design, if you love interior design like I do, then you will absolutely love this book. It gives you lots of ideas, and it's beautiful to look at and it's wonderful to see somebody putting something out, celebrating family life and celebrating motherhood and what we're called to do as mothers. And that includes creating this domestic church, creating this sacred space that everyone in the family feels wonderful being part of and that's called home. Now, Keri Grass, your co-author,

also wrote a book on basically the end of women. And we're starting to see this in real time. And I think no story, and that's her latest book, End of Women, another fantastic book that I've read and highly recommend. But, you know, all these messages end up just not sitting in a women's studies department, or they end up actually seeping, as you say, into the culture. And one of those ways is into science. And so now we're doing these freakish experiments, where, again, you look at how, if you could see the image, I encourage people to Google it, if you're on audio listening, you should Google it. It's grotesque. What was your first reaction when you heard this story, Noelle? You know, the first thing, my first reaction was that how dystopian

this sounds, which I think, you know, most people's reaction is that an artificial womb just sounds like something in The Matrix or Brave New World or something, you know, that you picture these warehouses of babies that are detached from any sort of family or human being, you know, that you picture these warehouses of babies that are detached from any sort of family or human being. You know, so I think that it's hard not to go to that dystopian place. Now, the case that they're making for this is one that is ostensibly, you know, sounds really good and I think actually could be in theory defensible. So the case that most people are making for the scientists and ethicists are that

is that, you know, the greatest cause of death of children under five is being born prematurely. And so, you know, when their lungs and brain are not developed enough to breathe air in an incubator, you could transfer them in theory into this sort of vacuum sealed bag, as you described it, which is very much what it looks like, and then sustain them while they develop those organs so they wouldn't have permanent brain damage or lung damage and would be able to actually get to a point of viability. And so, you know, I've had, I lost twins at 20 weeks. If somebody had offered me an artificial womb at that point, I think I probably would have jumped on it. So, you know, I understand that human draw. And I do think in theory that could be ethical.

But the moral hazard potential that surrounds this is so awful that, you know, and I don't trust our current sort of expert class of medical ethicists to really grapple with the potential moral hazards surrounding this issue in a serious manner. I actually listened to a medical ethicist at NYU talking about the potential downsides. He entertained two potential downsides. The first one was once this technology is available, if there are two women who need it, because maybe they can't carry their baby to term, for example, are you going to give it to the one with greater privilege? This is the first moral hazard he identified. The second one was, will this cause women who want to have an abortion to have to rethink that abortion and possibly not get it because you're shifting the date of viability potentially earlier by offering them this technology? And don't we want women to be able

to get those abortions who want to get them? I mean, if you presented to me 10 options of moral hazard about artificial wombs, those two would not even be anywhere near the top 10. There's so many worse things to consider. For one thing, there's no human attachment. You know, there's something that's really important about a baby growing in the mother's body and that even the suffering that she experiences, the hardships, the pain, the discomfort, the way that everyone else in her family has to step up and care for her, that reminds us that we are human beings who need to be cared for. That's just one example. But obviously, there's a whole host of ways that you could exploit this technology for really nefarious ends, designer babies, commodification of children.

You know, the list goes on and on. So I don't know that we have an expert class that we can trust to navigate this technology well. So, you know, Noel, it's interesting you talk about the human connection between a mother and her baby in her belly. And there's going to be so many things that happen. Obviously, I've never had that experience, but whether it's the emotion, the feelings, the sounds of laughter and crying, hopefully more laughter than crying,

but also the very simple thing of the mother's heartbeat that the baby feels and what happens that at the stage of life, this human connection that takes place that you don't have. And the consequences of what kind of people come out, what kind of mental and emotional issues happen to a little baby that was raised in an artificial womb was, I think, really troubling. That's right. I think we know how much human touch matters in infancy. We shouldn't assume that that doesn't matter deeply while the baby is gestating as well.

As you say, the sounds, the laughter, the hearing, the voice. I mean, most babies, you can tell they sort of recognize their father's voice and their mother's voice when they're born. You've seen videos of babies who are just apoplectic crying after they're born, and then they're put on their mother's skin, and they, it's a familiarity. You know, there's a bond there that science can't necessarily put its finger on, but we know as mothers and fathers, and the baby knows it himself. So, you know, there's so many unforeseen consequences of things that will be lost if we start down this road that I think that, you know, we're not, we need to take seriously if we're going to even entertain

any possibility of this, which I really would rather we not because it is so hazardous. Well, it is. They're on the road to do it. My suspicion, Noelle, is that in China, they're much further along. They're just not saying it. They don't even have the moral guard rails, the ethical, bioethical guard rails that we have that are actually pretty weak that we've even gone this far in this. There are no guardrails there. I suspect they're much further along. We just don't know it yet. We're going to wake up probably in a couple of years and find out that they've already done that. It is interesting you referred to this abortion connection between this story.

This is actually the first time I heard about this was an article in Wired magazine. So this was a tech a tech magazine. And their concern in Wired magazine was that abortion would decline because if you could if you could no longer as a woman claim that the pregnancy was a hardship because you could just put it in this vacuum sealed bag, right? You could, they could, you know, it could survive, it has viability, you know, it keeps pushing back

the viability rate. So like, you know, you wouldn't have the moral justification for abortion because you technically could have that baby, you know, removed and put in somewhere else in this vacuum sealed bag. And some other person could go and take this baby, which then speaks to the commodification of children, which we already have a problem of that through surrogacy and other things that are happening. I think about

the biggest moral hazard. Immediately, my mind went to spare parts. We already know that there's a black market for baby organs, child organs. I know it's a really gruesome thing to think about, but it does exist in the child's trafficking space. There's a black market for organs. I could just see this, as as you said a factory lined up and we're creating these these babies and they'll become the spare parts for for the babies that we decide should should should live um this is a a huge problem but then it goes back also noel and this is the part i'm i'm intrigued by your your your co-authors book the of Woman, what does this do to the relationship between the sexes? Because the one thing that makes me different than Sean, the most important thing that makes

me different than Sean is that I am a woman and I can procreate. That's my purpose, right? In life. I always think of that saying, you know, women just are men become we just are because our whole who we are is our, you know, our ability to procreate, we were sort of as soon as we get our first period, we understand what we're made for. And so I just wonder what that does. It sort of is the fruition of the title of that book. It's the end of women, because if I'm not needed for that, what is my purpose? That's right. I mean, there was a feminist in 1970 named Shulamith Firestone, who wrote a book called The Dialectic of Sex, The Case for a Feminist Revolution. And in it, she references the possibility of artificial wombs, saying that the true liberation of the woman will be when we finally have such technology to totally help them transcend their bodies.

And I think you're exactly right that there is embedded in that ideology a real hatred of not only our womanhood, but also the human form, the body itself, the incarnational understanding of a human being. And this is an old Gnostic heresy that goes back into the, and is also picked up in occult ways, as Carrie details in her book. But yeah, I think that what it does to the human relationship is it does something similar to transgenderism, something similar to the sexual revolution, which is it undefines us, it unmakes us. It wants to define us into nothing. And I think that that signifies some really anti-human element to this that is kind of picked up in transhumanist ideology, the technocratic view of the human person. And the result of it really is that it weakens every member of the

human family. And this is one of the things I talk about in Awake Not Woke. Men become soft and weak because they're called to be protectors and strong. Women become hardened and calloused, right, because they have a nature that's valuable and too vulnerable to endure the traumas of sexual revolution and all this anti-woman, anti-bodiness. And children become unprotected. You know, their innocence becomes targeted. And I think we're seeing all three of those, that dismantling of every member of the human family happened in a very targeted way now. And this to me seems like the natural outgrowth of that same ideology that wants to undefine and unmake each of us.

We'll be back with much more after this. From the Fox News Podcast Network. Stay on top of the latest news and information from Fox News. Listen and download the Fox News hourly update on your time. The trending stories you need anytime you want it. Listen and download now by going to foxnewspodcast.com. You know, Noel, before you went to the point of the family, that was going to be my next question to you

because if you look, again, so we can sit and say, well, this could be a really wonderful technology. If I could, you know, save a baby in the womb, you had twins. And it's like if I had an option to save my twins and put them in this artificial womb, I would have done it. And so you can talk about some of the benefits of this technology. But if you look at there's a lot of weird anti-humanist elites and leaders in this country. And if you if you look at what they're trying to do and they start at a very young age, they want to get kids into preschool. But it starts in kindergarten. They have an effort.

And whether it's through their sexual teachings, they're trying to separate children from their family. And I think the leftist Marxist understands that the family is the strongest unit. And you have to break down the family, break down faith to get people to be subservient to the state. And in this situation, there's no better plan. If that's your mission, no better plan than, I mean, you automatically remove the family if we're having the next generation in an artificial womb, raised by the state, maybe designated raisers, as opposed to a mom and a dad and a family and a brother and a sister,

which is a beautiful human unit, they want that to go away. And so when you go, maybe there's some really good purposes behind what they're doing, maybe. But if you look at what they're doing in our culture and society today, I'd go, I don't trust them for a second. They actually want to undermine the strongest opposition to their takeover of society. What say you? That's right. I mean, I think one of the greatest obstacles to understanding what you're talking about, which I agree with, is that it's hard for average people to believe that there's such a sinister movement happening, that people think in such a sinister

manner. But we need to start understanding and facing that reality because it is clearly what is happening. If you want to control people, you want them to be detached from any human connection, right? And the family is the thing that attaches you the most. I just watched this video the other day of this compilation of little siblings waiting for their older sibling to come home from school and the joy of a toddler running up to their six-year-old brother or sister and grabbing them and hugging them and holding them like they're the most important person in the universe. And I thought, you know, the family is the best way to make every human person understand that they are irreplaceably loved, that they're significant, that they have human dignity.

The family delivers that, communicates that to human beings. You lose that. Well, what are you going to leave a person with? They're desperate to find some sort of tribe that they're deprived of. So they're going to seek out political tribalism, you know, the tribalism of the state, a father who is a dictator or an authoritarian. You know, they're going to try to replace what they lost in some dystopian way that is very in the advantage of people who want to control, at least who want to control society. Yeah, you know, I saw that compilation too, Noelle. It's so beautiful. I think oftentimes, you know, I hear people go, I need to just leave this town and find myself. And I always say, when I hear that, I'm like, you find yourself in a family. That's where you find out who you

really are. And I think about those bonds, you know, even in, in the difficult times of being in a family. So I think about like, when I'm angry at my kids, you know, and I'm like, there's, there's some, there's an authority that I have and a, and a, a sense of the proper order of things in the family, because I can hold over them that I suffered for nine months carrying them, right? There's something about that bond that even children who become estranged from their family feel terrible about it. And hopefully many of them end up coming back home because there is something about the actual process of creating a human being inside of your body and that bond. One of my favorite things that somebody gave me, Noel, when I had a baby, my friend Caroline gave it to me, was a card.

And it said, the front of the card said, OMG, you made a baby human. A tiny human or baby human, tiny human. And it's a miracle. It's a remarkable thing. It's like the thing I'm the most proud of. And now science wants to take that away and in the process, break these bonds that we have with our children and that unite us as as a family and you're right it really makes us very susceptible to all these other um forces the state dictators um uh you know the occult um you you name it we're gonna we're this is this i don't understand how these things keep proceeding and who are these ethicists i know you're you're one of those people that's thinking about this. But who is out there thinking about this and willing to put the brakes on these kinds of experiments?

Or do they just say, well, we better do it because China's not China's going to do it? Yeah, well, I mean, I think there's certainly a lot of people who are thinking about the ways to stop it now. Right. You know, part of the problem with the ideology is that a lot of people buy into it without realizing the full ramifications of it. So, you know, when you say science is trying to, you know, end the family, you know, it's actually scientism, as I know, you know, you know, and scientism is something that we've been experiencing pretty intensely, which is a materialist worldview with no concept that there is any sort of transcendental meaning behind things. And I think ultimately, which is a materialist worldview with no concept that there is any sort of transcendental meaning behind things.

And I think ultimately that is the ideology that is, you know, targeting ultimately God, because if you think about it, we should approach the mystery of new life with a sort of reverence, right? We should prompt a sort of reverence out of us. And if we demand it purely as a right for anyone, for any couple, you know, to be able to engineer a child or abort a child if they're not wanted, you know, then we lose that sort of reverence that's born out of gratitude for things that cannot be bought and the things for which at times we're meant to endure their deprivation. You know, that that's the part of the mystery of life is that sometimes we don't get what we want

and sometimes we do, and it's very difficult um and this materialist scientism sort of worldview i think is uh trying to collapse what should be done into what can be done we can do it so we should go ahead and push forward and do it without the ethical concerns that you rightly point out we ought to be considering because of the depth and beauty and meaning that family life gives us. And I think we move forward down this path, you know, with very, we should be very wary of moving forward down this path because of all of these hazards. So just because we can doesn't mean we should. Well, it's, it's, it's, there's been, there's been conflict between science and morality. This is not the first time we've had this conversation about science and morality.

And I would feel very good, Noelle, with a culture that was moral, that was good to confront the advancing science. But I look at a culture that says, no, actually, we want to talk about really graphic, you know, sexual content with little kids. I'm like, well, that's kind of weird. That's not that's not moral. That's not good. I want to sexually mutilate, you know, young boys and young girls for my my weird ideology. That's not moral. Or your big pharma profit, too.

That's not moral. Or you're a big pharma prophet, too. So, yeah, I look at this and go, I wish I had more faith in our society, in our country, in our leaders to really take a hard look and go, what is the moral answer? What is the moral good? How do we grapple with this? I mean, we're doing this with AI right now, which obviously far less, may have far greater consequences, but on the human body and spirit, far less consequences. But I don't feel confident that I have good moral leaders in this country in a good moral society right now, that it would say, you know what, this we have to take a step back and go, what are the what are the actual consequences for the human being for the family, and for the children. And I don't know. What do you think?

Yeah, no, I don't think that our elites have any sort of moral seriousness that we can really trust in any way whatsoever. There's the issue with trusting, you know, I think we were seeing this a lot in our institutions, right, with Claudine Gay at Harvard, and, you know, so many of our institutions exposing themselves as being corrupt at their core. And I think one of the things we need to push back on is that oftentimes the rejoinder to our position will be something like, you guys are moralizing about society. That's a private matter. You know, you're, you know, Pollyannish or do-gooders or something. And we have to realize that they are promoting their own vision of what the moral life is, which is a totally autonomous moral life that can justify any any means are justified for the sake of any end.

They're consequentialist materialists. They have a worldview of what a human being is and that it's just extremely contrary to what our worldview is. And it's one that I think is ultimately utterly destructive. And it's been tried time and time again in various countries at various points. And it always ends with a million corpses at the end of the road. You know, it's very anti-human. So I think the more we can help people see that, see what the stakes are, that this is really a clash of two different understandings of what a person is, then we can help them see, okay, we have to fight against this. We have to fight against this. You know, you brought up Brave New World. I bet

there's a generation of children right now who have no idea what we're talking about. They didn't read it. There were so many great classic pieces of literature that sort of spoke to this dehumanization, the problem with transhumanism that I believe we are. I mean, I don't think any organization embodies transhumanism more than the World Economic Forum, which is meeting right now in Davos. These are weirdos. They're very strange people. They're soulless. And as you said, they want to create a world for us

and be certain of that. They have a vision, and it's very different from the vision I see in, say, your book, Theology of the Home. And if given a choice, if we were all to sit down and look at Theology of the Home and these beautiful images of family life in its natural state, and then we look at what these people want to create, these transhumanists at the World Economic Forum with all their control and their baby lambs in Ziploc bags, and now they're going to put baby humans in Ziploc bags and factories. I mean, if we all sat down and voted on it, you know, 99% of the population would pick, you know, the theology of the home idea of, you know, a natural family and that, you know, what we've always been, right? But these people

have a different, they have a different vision. If they never had a healthy home, a healthy family, well, then it's not something that you're driven to protect. And I think maybe that's why it becomes so weird. Well, yeah, I mean, George Soros is a sociopath. There's no question about it. And if you look at his childhood, you're right about that. Yeah, if you had this experience in a family and you saw technology or policies that would undermine the family itself, you'd go like, listen, the family is the greatest thing.

I love my family, whether it's the one I was raised in or the one I've created with, you know, someone else. We have kids. We want to protect that because it's so beautiful and so wonderful. And they may not express it, but they feel it in their bones. their bones. But here, I think you have a bunch, to your point, Rachel, a bunch of weirdos who are completely fine throwing the family away because it probably wasn't a very good experience for them. Well, and half of them, by the way, were on, you know, Epstein's Island on the WEF. That's right. I think that pathologies, you know, harm being used, instrumentalized in your life or abuse, all that stuff perpetuates itself, right? It gives you a definition of the human person that's very broken, you know?

And so then you think, well, it is, we are meant to use other people. I do need to, you know, keep myself as number one and try to make other people instruments to my ends. And that feeds really a broken revolutionary ideology, but you're right, Rachel, when you describe the vision, there really is no vision that they have that's positive. It's all about breaking things down. It's a vision of negation. Whereas we really have a vision of something positive that we can build that's beautiful. And that's deeply connected to our humanity. And I think that that's a power that

this vision has that, you know, more human vision that they do not. And so I think that playing into that, really highlighting that, I think is important to help people see. You know, they are about, in part of when you talk about the kids in school, how they've not read A Brave New World, it's because this ideology is very anti-history. It wants to unmoor us from anything that would root us or in common cultural stories and narratives that bind us. And so that's why they're breaking down statues. That's why they're throwing out the Western canon as white colonialism. You know, this is why they're patricidal, they're anti-fatherhood,

you know, because an anti-motherhood, because they don't want us rooted in things that unite us and bond us as human beings. They want us unmoored, floating around as little aggregates that they can then assemble and engineer into a new society of their envisioning. So this path, this path that we were on, Noel, is so there's that side, right? There's these like, you know, crazy, you know, masters of the universe who are trying to get us into this, you know, centralized, you know, surveillance culture, similar to China's, um, surveillance culture. They have their own, like sort of, you know, weird oligarch stuff, but on a very human and, and basic level, you know, you talked about the twins that, that you lost and how you would have done anything to save them. I've seen, you know, the pain of infertility for a lot of women. And it is painful. And it is a cross.

I think it must be the hardest thing in the world. But that has led to a lot of other technologies being normalized that I think have been sort of the building blocks of separating us have been sort of the building blocks of separating us from our human nature in many ways. And so I've been really intrigued by this idea, and I've heard people talk about it, that, you know, a lot of this technology around infertility, and of course, I think this is true with this, you know, extreme grotesque, you know, artificial womb idea is the needs of the adults over the needs of the children. So can you break that down a little bit for us? Sure. No, I think that's exactly right. You know, well, with surrogacy, for example, you know, it's hard with everything going on in the world to think, well, what's wrong with some the wholesome desire to become parents to people who have suffered. It's very understandable.

However, there is a real there are real effects. For one thing, before that, before the children, there is the woman who's the surrogate, you know, especially in the United States. There's a woman at Heritage, Emma Waters, who's done great research on this. 98% of surrogacies are for profit. There's only about 2% that are altruistic, you know, it's doing something for a family member. Most of them are meeting women who are poor, who are in hard circumstances, who are desperate to make money. And this is a lucrative way for them to, you know, rent out their wombs and talk about commodification of persons. But then there's a whole host of moral hazards

that happen then. So for example, oftentimes in the contracts, the surrogate parents can demand that the surrogate mother have an abortion. If it emerges that the child has some abnormalities and then the mother carrying, the surrogate mother, then has to enter into an abortion or experience an abortion. But then as you say, for the children, you know, there's,

again, there's just not a, there's not a, the approach of motherhood and of family that it is a right that we can demand creates a philosophy of family life that I think is really the antithesis of what a family life ought to be. I think it's utterly understandable that women want to do this, but it also causes a host of moral hazard if they impregnate you with multiple babies, and then you start to eliminate, right? Because all of a sudden, the woman has three, has triplets, and so maybe one or two have to be eliminated. That's another, more abortions, more deaths. Noelle, to that point, I met a young woman.

She was a Colombian girl studying. She was of Colombian descent. I met her at a university. And she talked to me about the pain that she was going through, that she went through when she realized that she came to find out when she was a teenager that she was the child of IVF and that her mother had been pregnant with two other infants and embryos, I guess, and that they aborted the other two cause they only wanted one. They had her and it, she had a very deep set. She, she, when she came to learn that she was like traumatized, she was like, I, I, it caused me so much trauma. I acted out in weird ways. I

finally went to therapy and figured out what it was. And she said, I came to the conclusion that, you know, it was really difficult for me to come to terms with the fact that my parents killed my siblings. That's right. I think it's different if the sibling had just died, right? Right. Such a different psychological experience. It's a different thing to deal with. Yes, Yes. And actually the, the, the, the nice

part about the story is she said that as she came to that realization, she ended up obviously, you know, talking to her parents about it and they actually had a conversion spiritually, you know, faith wise and, and, and came to regret what they had done in terms of eliminating or aborting the other babies. But it was interesting. It's like, whoever thought about that? And I think, again, going back to the artificial womb story, I think we're going to find out that there are going to be traumas

and psychological ramifications for separating the baby from the mother. I will say this. I've done this nine times. Actually, I had two miscarriages myself. And one of the things that I tell Sean all the time is how, you know, you would think it would get, you know, more like, all right, been there, done that. You know, it's the opposite. The last child I had, which by the way, was a, was also a preemie, um, uh, born a month early and had to go to the NICU. I am more in awe of what Sean and I created of what my body could do. Um, and also of that connection that I had in utero that, you know, that's the other part that's missing, Noel, is, you know, when you have a nine month pregnancy, that baby's sort of

in the family before it's even born, right? We're all talking about it. And we're beginning the process of integrating this child into the family because I'm visually carrying this child. And you can see it and feel it. And everyone's sort of, you know, getting excited about it. And that baby is hearing my voice. And we're sharing, you know, if I have spicy food, that baby's a little uncomfortable inside. That sort of connection that we have, I can't imagine what happens when we remove that.

We'll be right back with much more after this. Give us your last thoughts on that as a mom, as an ethicist. Yeah, I think that's beautiful. I mean, I think the thing we're shifting to is treating ourselves as though we're machines. And the machines really can be very clean. It can be anesthetized. There's not bodily messes. There's not the human sort of mishaps

and maybe discomfort and impatience and the children being noisy and all this stuff. But there's also not any sort of wonder in a machine, right? It's something you can analyze and you can dissect and that's it. Well, human beings are not meant to be machines. And there are all sorts of hidden meanings and importance that come with all those things you're talking about. There's discomfort, the spicy food, the little things that happen when you live an embodied life that are actually really important. Even if they're messy, even if they cause you discomfort or hardship, they allow for actual love. They allow for improvement in our souls. They allow for

generosity. They allow for care. And we cannot, if we lose all those things, we might become a machine that's efficient, but we won't really be human and we can lose our humanity in the midst of it. Oh, gosh. Yeah. Well said. We do not want to lose our humanity in this brave new world that we're entering into. Noel, thanks for joining us. Always so great to have you. Again, I recommend End of Woman, your co-author's book. I think it's fantastic. And the whole Theology of the Home series, they're beautiful table books. I love all of them. And they make for great, great gifts as well.

So I just really want to thank you for joining us. It's always insightful. Thank you, Noelle. Great talking to you guys. You got it. Take care. I can tell you what, Rachel, this is an interesting topic. I didn't know until you brought the picture and video to me that they're actually growing a baby lamb in a man-engineered...

Ziploc bag. Ziploc bag. I had no idea. So, and then we decided to do this topic. And it's interesting because you can say there are a lot of situations where this could be really useful. It could be pain reducing, human building, family building. Again, whether it's, you know, I can save a child, you know, that I'm going to, like Noelle mentioned, in my womb itself, I can save that child. Or I can't have children and I'm not going to have to, you know, fertilize five eggs.

I could maybe fertilize one and have one child, you know, fertilize five eggs. I could maybe fertilize one and have one child, you know, it could decrease the moral hazard of IVF because you don't, because with IVF, so people understand what they do is because they're not sure if it's going to take, they fertilize a bunch of eggs because to get the, to get this whole process going, fertilize a bunch of eggs because to get this whole process going, they have to pump so many hormones into these women. And it's very difficult. And so they want to get as many as they can because they're not sure which increases your chances of one of them. Yeah. But sometimes you can be pregnant with, as you mentioned, with three. And then someone's like, well, I can't have triplets or quadruplets.

With the octagon mom, they had like eight. Yeah. I mean, so those are the situations. Octomom, I think is what they call her. Anyway, but then you look at the flip side. And again, we talk about this a lot, how weird, weirdos these people are at the world economic forum um the elites whether it's john kerry or or bill gates um uh al gore really weird dudes klaus schwab i mean that guy

looks like he's out of i mean he looks talk sounds thinks like a bond villain there's no i mean it's just if you haven't if you haven't seen it, I mean, like Google Klaus Schwab with a K as Klaus. And I'm telling you, this guy is creepy and he's kind of running the world right now in a way. Now, hopefully we'll all wake up from this, you know, crazy spell that, you know, every corporate, you know, CEO is under by the World Economic Forum. But this is really dangerous stuff. And this artificial womb thing plays right into it. This is this transhumanism that they want.

In fact, the guy right under Klaus Schwab talked about how with AI and with computers, I have it on my Twitter account. You can search through it and find it. He talks about how, what do we need humans for? Or why do we need so many? Those are the kinds of conversations that happen at these very high level Davos World Economic Forum meetings. And, and so this idea, I mean, Sean, I just think about, you know, the first pregnancy I had, it was kind of a blur. But when you have nine, what happens is, you're able to really appreciate the process, you're really able to really start to wrap your hands around a little bit more of what this miracle is and how your body is being affected and that connection the connection i had with my last few babies or my awareness of the connection because a lot of this is subconscious right but my awareness of

the connection between me and the child was much greater with the later ones because I was older and wiser and had been through it. And I'm going to tell you, it's so incredible that we would in any way try to sever that bond that happens in utero, that miracle between a child and a mother. There's a reason why the relationship between a child and a mom is different than a child and a mother. There's a reason why the relationship between a child and a mom is different than a dad and a child. It's not to diminish the necessity of men in the lives of children, but there is some... No, we definitely don't want to do that. But there is something really, really incredible about that

and about nursing a child and about just that that that can that i mean literally what i ate affected that child um we were sharing a food supply um and it's it's transcendental it's spiritual and and this is this is what i think they're at they want to turn us into machines and our babies into widgets. And that's not what we are. That's not human. But I think if I think if we're honest, this is happening, it's happening, it's going to happen. It's going to be normalized. And it's going to be a part of our future, which I hate to say that. And I can be hopeful that we would have brave, strong people in society that fight back and push back. But if you look at how powerful the media and the left and they're so good at messaging,

they want to empower you to not have to, you know, have, you know, a body that gets contorted with a baby, you know, in the womb. They want to make sure that you don't get more in sickness. It would be a corporate bonus, wouldn't it, Sean? All of these benefits get to come from this technology. Why do you hate women so much that you don't want to let them have a baby in a bag as opposed to their womb? Why do you hate them? That's what they do really well.

And people are like, oh, yeah, wouldn't that be wonderful? And the thought process doesn't happen about what it means for the human spirit, the human connection, the human family. And that's why I think it's important to have these conversations before the technology is here to talk about the ethics, to talk about the morality, to make sure we're thinking about that before the tech and the technology arise because just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should do it I love that you brought up that corporate side of it because just think about it so first of all there's a lot of people there's a lot of corporations that now they'll pay for your abortion right and there's a reason why I can work your get back to work right so not so generous when it comes to, you know, maternity leave, but definitely on that.

There's a corporate interest in removing, you know, you can no longer say I'm slowed down because I'm pregnant. Because, hey, you could have had this in the bag. I'm curious about how this actually changed. Will we have a new type of human? Will we have a new type of human if we have a generation of humans who are born outside of the womb? What does that mean for humanity? And that's the questions that we're raising. I'm glad we're talking about it. I don't know if we can slow it down. China is definitely not slowing down because in their world, everybody's just a number anyway, in the in the eyes of the Communist Party, not the people. One of the one of the great

stories I appreciate that you bring up in the time you probably spend on Twitter that I give you a hard time about. She scrolls through Twitter. I'm like, how about me? Come on out of the phone. It's true. It's true. But you find interesting stories like this, and I appreciate it. So, listen, I want to thank Noelle. I want to thank you all for joining us at the kitchen table. We appreciate it. We love this conversation where we get to sit around and have a cup of coffee and talk about issues that are going on in the world.

If you like our podcast, you can rate, review, subscribe. Wherever you get your podcasts, you can always find us at foxnewspodcast.com. As Rachel says, please subscribe. What do you get if you subscribe, Rachel? You'll get an alert and they'll alert your phone. They'll let you know what the topic is. So you can decide whether that's the topic you want to talk about or listen to. But we love having you around the kitchen table. I'm drinking from the kitchen table cup. If you can see, it's a white Yeti. It's not a Stanley. With my name on it, Rachel has one, too.

I'm going to do swag at some point here. Kitchen table swag. Yeah. By the way, he's not selling the cup. It's just his cup. I'm just trying to sound like, no, it's not a cup. It's just mine. Anyway, until next time, thanks for joining us.

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