Below is an edited version of remarks that Mary Harrington originally delivered in Rochester on September 18th as part of a panel on “The Particular Threat of Technological Acceleration to Women and Children” at the 2026 Women’s Convention. We will be publishing the remarks from Jennifer Lahl and Kristen Collier later this week. A full, unedited video of the panel discussion can be viewed here.
Our theme today is “Technological Acceleration,” and specifically how this relates to, addresses, or impacts us as women. You’re probably expecting something dystopian. But I’m going to do something I don’t usually do when I speak in public: begin with a picture.
This is a statue of the moment in the Gospel of Luke when Mary, pregnant with the infant Jesus, visits her kinswoman, Elizabeth. Elizabeth is pregnant too, with the child who will grow up to be John the Baptist. The statue is of German origin, created in the fourteenth century, and attributed to Heinrich of Constance. If you want to see the real thing, it’s at the Met Gallery on Fifth Avenue in New York City.
I’m starting here because this encounter in the Gospel describes a kind of meeting, and a kind of personhood, that many of us at this gathering have experienced first-hand—but which is foreclosed by the type of “technological acceleration” that is our theme today. It’s rendered so completely invisible, in fact, that it’s quicker to resort to photos of fourteenth-century statuary than start from scratch using words.
Many of you will be familiar with the story of the Visitation. But to recap: this is the moment when, already pregnant, Mary visits her pregnant kinswoman Elizabeth. As she enters the house, Elizabeth’s unborn baby—who, as an adult, will baptize Jesus—leaps for joy in her womb.
It’s an extraordinarily tender moment. Mary clasps one of Elizabeth’s hands and rests her other hand gently on Elizabeth’s shoulder. Elizabeth’s other hand is on her breast, referring to the words she utters: “And who am I, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” Both figures have a crystal inset in their torsos, over a cavity in which (though they aren’t there any more) it’s thought that, at the time of the statue’s creation, the infants Jesus and John would have been visible through the translucent jewel.
The carvings capture something we no longer really have words for, even though it’s an everyday experience for mothers: the experience of socializing while pregnant or nursing. Mary and Elizabeth meet in this moment both as themselves, and fully themselves, and also more than themselves: mothers of two holy people, who are both entirely themselves and also still becoming.
So much has changed in the world since 1310, when this carving was created, gilded, and venerated. But I’m sure all of us can recognize that gesture, and what is passing between these two women. It’s a moment of meeting not just of two adult women who are friends and cousins, but of joyful anticipation at the widening of their circle.
But what we don’t see there are individuals. At least not in precisely the sense required and presupposed by the technological mindset. We see a set of relationships; two women, relatives and friends. We see potentialities, too—in metaphysical terms, powers. Specifically, we see the power inherent in the bodies of women to house, nourish, and facilitate the development of new human lives, during their most vulnerable moments of becoming. In the women’s crystal midsections, those originally venerating the statue would have seen the macrocosm contained in the microcosm: the Theotokos, the God-bearer, and the God she bears, both fully human and fully divine. He is greeted for the first time by the infant who would, in time, call down the Holy Spirit upon him, but who is, at this moment, still contained within his own mother.
Having started with this extraordinarily rich and beautiful depiction of our creation in God’s image, of God’s gestation within the body of a human mother, and of our intricate interconnectedness and mutual dependence, it’s time for the record scratch moment.
The Dystopian Bit
Let’s set aside Mary and Elizabeth for a moment, and contrast their embodiment of porous, relational, loving personhood, and care for the pregnant other and the growing baby, with this recent story.
In July 2026, the Canadian National Post reported that a Canadian couple, both men, procured a baby two years ago via gestational surrogacy. When a scan revealed that the baby was developing a cleft palate, the men demanded that the mother procure an abortion. She refused and carried the child to term. The men are now suing her, claiming she didn’t adequately keep them informed about the baby’s health, put the child at risk, violated confidentiality, and caused them emotional distress.
There are plenty of other stories in a similar vein. What distinguishes this scenario from the one depicted by Heinrich, and replicated countless times every day the world over in the lives of ordinary mothers, is a radically different understanding of personhood, and of the moral meaning of development and dependence.
Readers of Fairer Disputations will be familiar with the critique of this liberal version of personhood, one whose shortcomings for mothers have been eloquently set out by Leah Libresco and others. It’s one that sees individuals as separate, separable, and autonomous.
On this model, it’s possible to see the two men procuring a baby as free agents, contracting with another free agent—the gestational surrogate—to provide a service whose end product is a healthy baby. To the extent that this baby was not healthy, in this case the (for modern medicine) extremely minor birth defect of a cleft palate, she was in breach of contract.
But that’s not how this actually works. In reality, we are all always interdependent with others. Care is always owed us and called forth from us. That duty, and the calls it makes, is the real ground of our ability to be, to become, and to flourish, long before we attain the state that allows us to pretend to autonomy.
We all know this. The mother of the baby in question did too, for all that she framed this in the pro-choice terms that are morally normative today. The National Post reports that, on being told to abort the child at 22 weeks, the mother said “she would have agreed to an abortion if the baby had no chance of survival after birth, but was not comfortable terminating a 22-week fetus with what she considered a largely cosmetic defect.”
The mother, that is, viewed the child she was carrying along the lines depicted by Heinrich: as already a living person in potential, as well as in utero. Not a lump of tissue; not a product discarded mid-manufacture because of an assembly fault. The commissioning couple, by contrast, now allege that the emotional distress to which they were subjected, the reason for their lawsuit, was a consequence of her refusing to kill the perfectly healthy unborn baby she was gestating on their behalf.
Technologizing Ourselves
Many of you will be familiar with the argument I’ve made over the past several years that the story of the women’s movement is fundamentally one of tech transitions: specifically, of the way large-scale technological transformations impact and are responded to by women in particular, in the context of our embodied reality and sex-specific needs, especially concerning pregnancy and motherhood.
As such, feminism kicks off with modernity proper, and its first notable figure is the thinker so eloquently characterized by Erika Bachiochi, amid England’s eighteenth-century industrial upheavals: Mary Wollstonecraft. The historic cultural and material specifics of that response to industrialization is a frequent theme at Fairer Disputations and eloquently explored by many of you here. Time’s short, so here I’ll just focus on the philosophical kernel of the mindset that produced those innovations.
Very crudely: the foundational move that produces the technological mindset requires setting aside contemplation of the world in its fullness, in favor of a relation to its physical affordances that prioritizes instrumental mastery and control. You can tell this story through Heidegger, as “enframing,” or from a Catholic frame, as discarding Thomist/Aristotelian metaphysics. Those accounts entail slightly different things, but the core elision is broadly the same. Beginning with Bacon, we first bracketed, and in time discarded, the idea that things have a nature (a form) and purpose (ends or directedness).
This was (with some caveats) all well and good, or it was for a long time. It had a great many real-world consequences, including radically disrupting the settled forms of agrarian family life through industrialization, prompting the social responses that in aggregate we now call the women’s movement.
But I argued in Feminism Against Progress that this technological mindset reached a new, important inflection-point in the twentieth century, which I dated to the contraceptive pill. At that point, we pivoted from seeking instrumental mastery over the world beyond ourselves and turned that quest for control back upon ourselves. This is the core of the transhumanist project, and the pill was the first transhumanist technology.
To be clear, by “transhumanist” I don’t mean necessarily any of the more baroque visions associated with that term: human/machine hybrids, living forever, brains in vats, and so on. I mean the basic philosophical move that underpins the Pill as a technology. Where previous medical innovations had been sometimes quite invasive, all had implicitly centered man as a substance in the scholastic sense, even if no one would have said so out loud.
Many of you may be unfamiliar with the term “substance.” This isn’t surprising. Pierre Manent wrote in The City of Man that the idea of man, humans, as “a substance, and one substance” is “the carthago delenda of the new philosophy.” All of modern analytic philosophy, science, and political theory is premised on the erasure of this premise: that we are., like other living beings, a kind of living being with our own nature, potential, and directedness. There are more and less Christian versions of this account, and this isn’t the place to litigate that argument. But as an idea, modernity has both presupposed and formally denied this principle: that we’re not just atoms arranged human-wise. Rather, we have an intrinsic, coherent, and stable nature, that organizes what every individual human person is—all the way from the moment of conception.
The area this contradiction was fudged for the longest was medicine. It’s not possible to distinguish “sickness” from “health” unless you have some concept of normative human physiology and wellness. But what if your science is premised on the nonexistence of such normative categories, but instead insists that things could be otherwise, if we can only work out the mechanism for making them so?
This is the question that medical science has come, by degrees, to ask of the human body. For a long time, medicine presupposed the existence and intrinsic value of normal human form, physiology, and development. That totality, encompassing both sexes and our normal maturational arc and reproductive cycle, was referred to in aggregate as “health.” It still is, for the most part. But eventually, people began to ask: what if we can “fix” features of normal human physiology that are inconvenient?
The first mainstream medical technology to propose this metaphysical shift—an absolutely fundamental one—was the pill. Now the restorative paradigm had to compete with a second, mutually exclusive picture of what medicine can do: one whose object is the human substantial form itself. Consider: if I have a broken leg, healthcare is ordered to supporting my body to heal, with reference to “health” understood as a body whose bones are all unbroken and whose legs work normally. If my doctor prescribes the pill, “healthcare” in this context is ordered to breaking my normal menstrual cycle, by synthesizing pregnancy-like symptoms, such that I can have sex without getting pregnant, because my uterus thinks (as it were) it’s already pregnant.
Having accepted in principle, in the pill, the idea of turning our technological ingenuity on the human substance itself, a great many further innovations have followed in a similar vein. All of these in some fashion or other set out to dismantle, to hijack, to alter, to modify, or simply to enclose and profit from some aspect of human nature.
Subsequent “waves” of feminism are, arguably, more like subsets of the same “wave,” encompassing women’s responses to this more recent iteration of industrial revolution: the one in which we began industrializing ourselves. In that dialectic, you could say we find ourselves toggling with sometimes dizzying speed between the picture of what it is to be a woman, and a mother, as encapsulated by the Visitation, and the one encapsulated by contracts, agency, independence, and autonomy.
The entire discourse about “having it all,” about sexual liberation, about childcare, about the moral valence of “sex work” and pornography and much else besides, all happens in this space. Are women’s interests better served by conceiving of ourselves as autonomous agents in market society, on the same terms as men, with our differences technologically flattened? Or are women’s interests better served by conceiving of ourselves as distinct in terms of our normative, sexed capabilities and needs, but equally imbued with dignity and capable of excellence?
By and large, the upsides of the pill meant that, for a very long time, the worldview that seemed more consonant with women’s being able to be our best selves seemed the first: the autonomous one, that leans in at work while leaning on the power of tech (and sometimes staff) to make up any disparities. Inasmuch as the trade-offs have been externalized, either to poorer women or to machines, or both, for the bourgeois women who have (let’s be real) always driven feminism, this has allowed the balance of preference to lie with the alliance between tech, freedom, and the liberation of those women best-placed to enjoy the upside of that convergence.
The Rubber Meets the Road
Today, we’re approaching the outermost limit of that settlement. Inevitably, in directing its attention to the human substantial form, technological acceleration directs its attention particularly to women’s fertile bodies. The ultimate inconveniences of embodiment all have to do with the beginning and end of life: the arduousness of creating new people; the need to find willing mothers; the inevitability of death. Our female bodies are still, ultimately, where new human life is created. So, inasmuch, as we’re treating “life” as a seam to be studied, explored, and mastered, our female bodies are where the rubber meets the road, in human biotech.
So where, with the pill, we might toggle back and forth between the relational and the instrumental understandings of embodiment in a relatively abstract way, now the dissonance is up close and personal. Campaigners push for legal frameworks that treat a woman’s body, and the baby it carries, as raw material for mastery and perhaps profit: automatic rights to the “commissioning parents,” for example. At the same time, this body isn’t just meat. We’re talking about a living human woman. And we’re talking about the child she carries. This conceptualization, so richly pictured by Heinrich in the 1400s, is radically incompatible with the contractual one.
I’m focusing here on surrogacy, because this is one of the most clear-cut instances of how the autonomous, technological view conflicts with the relational one of forms, ends, and personhood in the image of God. But there are many more. I explored the antifeminist implications of transgender ideology at length, in Feminism Against Progress, and won’t rehash that here. Not least because to my eye, the noises are now coming as much if not more from inside the Right-wing house as from the goblin Left.
IVF as standard; genetic testing and optimization of babies; living forever; replacement organs; artificial wombs: surely these all aim at the telos of technological mastery, the complete capture and control of women’s unique life-giving power.
I have yet to find a counter-example to the general principle that every technological intervention in life-creation hailed as “eugenic” in theory turns out to be dysgenic in practice. More plainly: I don’t think we are going to master the human substance. But I also don’t think people will accept this in the abstract, and we’re going to have to find out the hard way. And I anticipate that women will be at the sharp end of the experimentation this will involve.
So, to the extent that the women’s movement is a response to technological transformation, we must respond to the contemporary technological moment first and foremost by restating, centering, and defending what it is about mothering that is not captured by the technological mindset; that is not seen; that is endangered; and that is in fact core to who and what we are.
That can take the form of (for example) the superb work done by the fierce campaigning women here, to meet women in their moment of pregnancy crisis and offer support: to be, as it were, an Elizabeth greeting not just Mary but also the child she carries. To speak up for the babies made motherless, and sometimes worse, by the trafficking of children through surrogacy. To agitate for their legal defense. To speak up for their mothers, as mothers, and not mere fleshy manufacturing units, and to agitate for their protection and (God willing) eventually for a global ban on surrogacy. To speak up for the humanity of every child, and not just those deemed genetically perfect or else discarded from the petri dish. It can also simply mean seeing mothers as both mothers, which is to say entangled in a deeply embodied, relational, sex-specific work of care, and also as fully human.
I’d like to propose that the core of the women’s movement should rest in this call. To ask the question: what would it take to create a world in which every baby is welcome, without this coming at the cost of his or her mother’s personhood? How should we expand personhood to make this possible? How should we re-imagine the institutions we build? How could we re-arrange our lives, and circles of care, to make this more true?
How, too, could we re-orient the intent of our technological innovation toward this vision? For I should emphasize that I’m not a tech hater. There are a great many things I’m able to do, and ways I’m able to participate in public life, that depend on technological infrastructures: most obviously digital networks, but also more banally the washing machine, and so on. There are a great many ways we can direct our ingenuity to serving and facilitating family life. If we place Mary and Elizabeth back at the heart of our understanding of what people are, and what we’re doing all this for, there could be many more.
Mary sees Elizabeth; Elizabeth sees Mary. Both feel their own babies within them and see the outward signs of each other’s developing motherhood. And the babies also recognize one another: John leaps for joy, in the womb. Each of these four individuals is always already fully themselves, and also becoming, in relation to one another.
The technological mindset is only able to see those individuals who have already become, who are “agentic,” as they like to say in Silicon Valley. Everything else is raw material to be instrumentalized. But the truth is that we’re all always becoming, in relation to one another. The task of our re-founded women’s movement should be to give voice to this becoming. To defend its reality, and its centrality to who and what we are. To shield its most vulnerable, and speak up for maturation, and dependence, and relationship, as the ground of our capacity to become “agentic” at all.
