Parable of the Talents - Octavia E Butler Page 0,34
Squatter settlements are as big and as nasty as ever. As a country, we’ve given up our birthright for even less than bread and pottage. We’ve given it up for nothing—although I’m sure some people somewhere are richer now.
Consider, though: a brand-new form of life has been discovered on Mars, and it got less time on the news disk than the runaway Texas boy. We’re becoming more and more isolated as a people. We’re sliding into undirected negative change, and what’s worse, we’re getting used to it. All too often, we shape ourselves and our futures in such stupid ways.
More news. Scientists in Australia have managed to bring a human infant to term in an artificial womb. The child was conceived in a petri dish. Nine months later, it was taken, alive and healthy, from the last in a series of complex, computer-controlled containers. The child is the normal son of parents who could not have conceived or borne a child without a great deal of medical help.
Reporters are already calling the womb containers “eggs,” and there’s some foolish popular argument over whether a “hatched” person is as human as a “normally born” person. There are ministers and priests arguing that this tampering with human reproduction is wrong, of course. I doubt that they’ll have much to worry about for a while. The whole process is still experimental and would be available only to the very rich if it were being marketed to anyone—which it isn’t, yet. I wonder whether it will catch on at all in this world where so many poor women are willing to serve as surrogate mothers, carrying to term the child of wealthier people even when the wealthy people are able to have a child in the normal way. If you’re rich, you can have a surrogate for not much more than the price of feeding and housing her for nine months. If she’s smart and you’re generous, you might also wind up agreeing to feed, house, and help educate her children. And you might give her husband a job. Channa Ryan’s mother did this kind of work. According to Channa, her mother bore 13 surrogate children, none of them genetically related to her. Her marriage didn’t survive, but her two genetic daughters were given a chance to learn to read and write, cook, garden, and sew. That isn’t enough to know in this world, of course, but it’s more than most poor people learn.
It will be a long while—years, decades perhaps—before human surrogates are replaced by computerized eggs. Consider, though: eggs combined with cloning technology (another toy of the rich) would give men the ability to have a child without the genetic or the gestational help of a woman. Such men would still need a woman’s ovum, stripped of its genetic contents, but that would be all. If the idea caught on, they might be willing to use the ovum of some animal species.
And, of course, women will be free to do without men completely, since women can provide their own ova. I wonder what this will mean for humanity in the future. Radical change or just one more option among the many?
I can see artificial wombs being useful when we travel into extrasolar space—useful for gestating our first animals once they’re transported as frozen embryos and useful for gestating children if the nonreproductive work of women settlers is needed to keep the colony going. In that way, perhaps the eggs may be good for us—for Earthseed—in the long run. But what they’ll do to human societies in the meantime, I wonder.
I’ve saved the worst news item for last. The election was on Tuesday, November 2. Jarret won. When Bankole heard the news, he said, “May God have mercy on our souls.” I find that I’m more worried about our bodies. Before the election I told myself that people had more sense than to elect a man whose supporters burn people alive as “witches,” and torch the churches and homes of people they don’t like.
We all voted—all of us who were old enough—and most of us voted for Vice President Edward Jay Smith. None of us wanted an empty man like Smith in the White House, but even a man without an idea in his head is better than a man who means to lash us all back to his particular God the way Jesus lashed the money changers out of the temple. He used that analogy more than once.