Flesh of My Flesh-Eating FleshA new form of birth control would teach the female body to attack itself, in pursuit of egalitarianism.
Carmel Richardson
May 12, 2023
Anew form of birth control would teach the female body to attack itself, in pursuit of egalitarianism.
“Let me be a woman.” The famed words of Elisabeth Elliot became the title of a book of essays she offered her only daughter, Valerie, on the day of the daughter’s marriage. Elisabeth, wife of the evangelical missionary Jim Elliot, used the phrase and stories of women in the Bible to respond to a growing sect of Christian egalitarians in the American mid-century, arguing that this movement made a “caricature” of womanhood. Egalitarianism, she advised her daughter, is not a thing to be desired but “a dehumanizing distortion.”
Elliot’s ideas have been echoed by numerous writers since then, but the dehumanizing distortions have continued apace. One recent distortion is the pursuit of a new form of birth control, which would work by attacking the female body itself, teaching it to produce antibodies to fight its own pregnancy-supporting processes. You read that right: The tech optimists are pursuing a birth control vaccine.
According to a piece in the Atlantic last week, the vaccine would work by teaching the female body to produce antibodies to a hormone that is present exclusively during pregnancy to stimulate the production of progesterone: human chorionic gonadotropin, or hCG. Such an idea seems far-fetched and barbaric—“to immunize an animal against itself.” But that hasn’t stopped Indian doctor Gursaran Pran Talwar from finding a way to generate a “set it and forget it” shot to guarantee months, and perhaps even years, of infertility.
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In order to coerce a living organism to attack its own reproductive tissues, to combat its very nature, the immune system has to be especially riled up. This is of special note in the case of birth control, due to the demand for near-perfect effectiveness: Standard forms of hormonal birth control boast up to 99 percent pregnancy prevention. In order to match that, a vaccine would have to evoke a powerful attack from the female body against its own pregnancy-supporting processes. Unsurprisingly, side effects in clinical trials of Talwar’s vaccine already consisted of “painless but prominent nodules,” or hard, cyst-like bumps on the skin, which may be related to a hyperactive immune response.
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But what comes of immunizing a woman against herself? For this is precisely what a birth control vaccine would do. Where other forms of contraceptives attack the female body’s natural cycles, a vaccine would deputize the work of pregnancy prevention to her own flesh, teaching her cells to become belligerents against their own. It would bring the war on womanhood right down to the cellular level, teaching her body to strip itself of the very thing that makes it female, as though the loss of her feminine appearance and natural modesty in the public square already were not enough.
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To strip a woman of her fertility intentionally, to teach her body to wage war against herself and the babies she was made to home, is to preach empowerment by becoming "unwoman." The logic of the birth control vaccine says fertility, and thus being a woman, is antithetical to full personhood, insofar as childbearing hinders self-actualization. In the name of progress will women be uncreated.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/flesh-of-my-flesh-eating-flesh/
