Below is an edited version of remarks that Kristin Collier 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. Mary Harrington’s remarks are available here and Jennifer Lahl’s remarks are available here. A full, unedited video of the panel discussion can be viewed here.
I remember the afternoon in February when I opened the email from Erika asking me to be on a panel at this conference giving a response to my intellectual hero Mary Harrington. I went through my own version of screaming, crying, throwing up in the line to get coffee at the med school cafe. My immediate thought was this: how can I give a response to one of my favorite writers that isn’t anything but “well of course I agree with everything you said so perfectly and so beautifully, the end,” which I am so tempted to do right now.
Because Mary is absolutely correct in her diagnosis of what currently ails us: the technological acceleration at work in our culture today has left us, as she has written, with “a mother-shaped blind spot” in our cultural purview. This includes a paucity of language to describe who or what a mother is and what she is for, leading to a desecration of mothers and therefore babies in our society. While I believe she is right in her overall diagnosis, in the spirit of intellectual friendship, I will gently challenge some of her particular claims and expand upon others, as I have been asked to do in the next 15 minutes. But let me say at the outset: big picture, Mary is right.
In her remarks, I see Mary arguing three main points. Let’s start with the first one: that the technological acceleration has manifested itself very acutely in the domain of what we call in medicine “women’s health.” I’ll never forget the moment when I had, as Mary calls it, an “I seeeeee” moment about my own vocation of medicine. It was 2023, and I was on the journey of trying to understand my own vocation’s cooperation with emerging biotechnologies that seemed to be coming at us at an unprecedented velocity and in doing so trying to have a framework that makes sense of what a coherent workable definition of health is.
And then I came to the point in Feminism Against Progress where Mary writes about the birth control pill. I was stunned and shocked when I read that she believes my own vocation of medicine has been involved in, and cooperating with, the transhumanist movement for decades now. How? Because, as she writes, the birth control pill was the first transhumanist technology. Why is that? Well, she writes that up until the birth control pill, medicine was mostly directed at fixing what was wrong in the body, but for the first time, with the pill used as elective contraception, physicians interrupted normal female physiology in the pursuit of other things, like choice and freedom. And she said that the fact that most physicians and women believe that full female personhood is structurally dependent on a technology that interrupts normal female fertility makes all of us transhumanists.
Explosion sound. My mind was blown open! What? I thought transhumanism was about the merging of humans and robots into cyborgs, but what she was telling me was that transhumanism has been around for decades and that in my own vocation, I have been a willing participant? In my normal human defensiveness, I recoiled against this claim at first, but as I chewed it over and took off my own blinders, I realized that she might be right.
So transhumanism and what we call “women’s health” in the profession of medicine go hand in hand, and they are doing everything possible in medicine to endorse the widespread use of contraception, which puts infertility into women and calls that “healthcare.” I’ve seen the looks on my colleagues’ faces (especially my female colleagues) when women come into the healthcare system with several children and about to have their next—like they believe these women who choose to have large families are at best somewhat sloppy or at worst wildly irresponsible.
There is a spirit of anti-natalism that is alive and well in medicine, and it is—paradoxically—especially strong in the field of women’s health! And what I therefore have come to realize is that anti-natalism and transhumanism are intimately related. Anti-natalism is a nesting doll within the transhumanism movement.
If transhumanism is to achieve its ultimate goal, that we will live forever and no one will die, as Time magazine promises us will happen soon, then guess what: in that framework, birth will no longer be necessary. The abolition of death would require the abolition of birth. And if birth will soon be unnecessary, then we had better start inculcating the idea that birth and motherhood are bad and that babies and kids are bad: bad for you, bad for the environment, bad for the economy. We had better start convincing people that babies aren’t even babies.
But of course, this isn’t new. In a 1976 interview with John Gerassi, Simone de Beauvoir stated, “To change the whole value system of society, to destroy the concept of motherhood: that is revolutionary.”
On these points, I think Mary and I agree. What I take minor issue with, however, is the way that she may assume that the profession of medicine captivated by the technological acceleration isn’t also operating under its own version of a restorative paradigm.
She writes that after the adoption of the birth control pill, “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.” But technological medicine would claim that it also is operating under what they consider too to be a restorative paradigm. For example, I’ve heard at medical conferences that abortion is healthcare, because it restores a woman’s body to its original state: not being pregnant. Or that IVF is healthcare because it restores a couple’s ability to have children because of the disease of infertility. I’ve heard the argument that because fertility can impose significant biological and social consequences, contraception can be understood as restoring a woman’s ability to participate in social life without those consequences.
But modern medicine often isn’t honest and tells things on the slant. As Chesterton says, “if you’re not going to argue over words, what are you going to argue about?”
The problem with the “restoration” paradigm, as Mary defines it, is that it doesn’t automatically tell us what ought to be done. It doesn’t necessarily take into consideration two things: one, the fitness of the means by which we restore, and two, the consequences of transcending the given limits in our bodies. For example, if we decide that a normative woman’s body has a uterus, and a patient was born without one, would we say, in order to restore her body, that it would be appropriate to grow a uterus in a clone of her in order to transplant it into her, because that is considered restoration? Even though the means by which we got there are ethically suspect? Should testosterone and hormone replacement be given to aging people because these treatments restore people’s hormones they have lost with age?
Restoration isn’t self-defining. The deeper question is: restoration toward what? Enhancement toward what end, and according to what conception of human flourishing?
That’s why I think that, while the restoration paradigm is necessary, it is insufficient by itself. It cannot be the sole filter through which we sort the acceptability of the uses of various technologies, because it doesn’t get at the need for limits or take into consideration means and ends. Calling one technological therapeutic “restoration” and the other “enhancement” doesn’t tell you why one is good and the other questionable. You’ve still got to do the moral work.
As physician and bioethicist Leon Kass writes in an essay titled “Ageless Bodies, Happy Souls: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Perfection,” “needless arguments about whether or not something is or is not an ‘enhancement’ or is restorative gets in the way of the proper question: What are the good and bad uses of biotechnical power?” When it comes to human biotechnical engineering, he states, “Only if there is something inherently good or dignified about, say, natural procreation, human finitude, the human life cycle (with its rhythm of rise and fall), only then can we begin to see why those aspects of our nature need to be defended.” Clearly Kass sees the use of biotechnology with limits and finitude.
In the same vein, Mary states that “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 non-existence of such normative categories?” But alas, it is incorrect to say that modern Baconian medicine does not have its own, albeit misguided, distorted concept of normative human physiology and categories.
Consider the absurdity of the manuscript in the Journal of Medical Ethics by Anna Smajdor and Joona Räsänen titled “Is pregnancy a disease? A normative approach,” in which the authors argue that pregnancy is not normative and that pregnancy is a disease state caused by a pathogen. If we consider babies pathogens, then abortion is healthcare, and contraception is preventative health.
This shows how medicine distorts normative concepts toward its own deceptive ends. In doing so, it highlights what we’ve been talking about: how anti-natalism and transhumanism are bedfellows. We must be aware of the anti-human thread that runs through the entire project of techno-natalism and transhumanism. I’ll never forget a Q&A that I heard Leah Libresco Sargent run expertly. When she was asked if eyeglasses were restorative or enhancement, she said, “All I know is, I don’t want to get eyeglasses from someone who hates my eyes.”
The second point I hear Mary arguing is that we miss the personhood of the mother and baby in our technological mindset. Mary uses the phrase “that the in utero baby is already a living person in potential.” I do not think she is saying that the baby is a potential person but instead a person who has potential. It is important that we all here get this right and do not confuse the two. There are bioethicists, like Alberto Giubilini and Francesca Minerva in the piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics, “After-birth abortion: why should the baby live?,” who argue for the moral permissibility of infanticide based on the premise that the prenatal child is a “potential person,” which makes them morally “irrelevant.”
Mary uses the phrase that the babies and mothers are already “entirely themselves and also becoming.” I love this phrasing. This reminds me of language I’ve heard regarding human dignity in the Scriptures, where we are told we have dignity because we are made in the image and likeness of God. The image of God gives us our inherent inviolable dignity, which can never be taken away, and the likeness means we can grow to live up to that dignity. This is sometimes referred to as our moral dignity, which may be akin to Mary’s word of “becoming.”
However, when discussing the case of the surrogate for the two Canadian men, Mary writes: “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.” She goes on to write that “we all know this. The mother of the baby in question did too,” but then goes on to quote the mother saying while she would not terminate the baby for a cosmetic defect, she would have if the baby had had a life-limiting condition. What I would say here in response is that if the mother truly believed the beautiful reality that care is ALWAYS owed to us and that the obligation of that care is directly proportional to how dependent or sick or ill we are, then the mother would never have agreed, even in theory, to abort the baby with the life-limiting condition either.
The last point I will touch on today is the focus on acceleration. The tech revolution has brought with it a certain velocity and, as Carl Trueman has written, with that velocity comes a particular opportunity for desecration of human beings. I think about the tech bros. Mark Zuckerberg is known for coining the phrase, “move fast and break things.” The idea is that for you to be an innovator, you have to move fast and in doing so disrupt and break things. If things aren’t breaking, you aren’t being creative enough.
I’m worried about what they are breaking.
Trueman writes that it is this rapid pace that allows for desecration of human beings. At the heart of the transhumanism movement is a spirit that is anti-God and specifically anti-creator God. We have lost a sense that our dignity comes from being made by God in his image. After creating man, God saw that “it was good.” When we have lost a sense of what is good, C.S. Lewis says, “I want” is the only thing that remains.
In the Book of Revelation, we are told that at the end of days, “the merchants of the earth weep and mourn for her, since no one buys their cargo anymore, cargo of gold, silver, precious stones and pearls… and human bodies and souls.” We are in a time when women and babies are being bought and sold in the business of sex trafficking, IVF, and commercial surrogacy. We cannot stand by and allow the image of God to be desecrated and put up for sale.
I’ll leave us with a few brief solutions before we get into our panel discussion. This summer, I read Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine. Kingsnorth talks about what to do when a false story has captured society. Modern medicine has a false story, and society has bought into a false story too: about who women and babies are, and about what medicine is for. Kingsnorth says that when a false story has captured society, this is what you need to do.
Number one: you yourself need to stop believing the false story.
Number two: you need to stop telling the false story to others.
And number three: you need to start telling a new story.
Collectively, here, and with this movement going forward, we have a beautiful story to tell. These efforts should not just be directed toward a re-enhancement, but a reconsecration. And I think this consecration has a specific shape.
What if—just what if—that shape fits exactly into the mother-shaped blind spot?
