PLANET PARENT HOOD

—The C-of-C-C Newsletter column dealing with issues relating to the bearing and raising of children—

The Coming Age of the Test Tube Folk

“Sex is too important to be free and openly allowed in all of its possible polymorphous variations. It must be under strict taboo to preserve its delight. Too much of a good thing will have the result of lessening and demeaning the wonder of sex.

Putting procreation in the hands of the experts and technicians would be a profanation if done solely for the convenience of those who don’t choose the natural route. Making a business out of reproduction is part of the end game of the modern world. They will commodify reproduction and childbearing if we let them.

Think of how vulnerable a society would be if it required technology to maintain laboratories for reproduction as the article below suggests for the future.

The production of the next generation is best left up to the amateurs, who, in the original meaning of the word amateur, do it for the love of it.”

—Libby D’Innous

(“Is the editrix for this dormant column. She is also a part-time sex worker who performs gratis so she knows the wherefore and the why of which she speaks.”—the editors)

Below, we present Exhibit A from the frontline of hypermodernity: a recent BBC article forecasting a new sexual revolution driven not by liberation, but by lab work and algorithmic logistics.

Read the full article here: Are we set for a new sexual revolution?

As the Council gathered to consider the implications, Peter R. Mossback reminded us:

“The Beaker Folk left their vessels behind. Will the Test Tube Folk leave theirs? Future archaeologists won’t puzzle over pottery shards, but over the empty plastic cradles of the unborn.”[1], [2]

Council Commentary & Marginalia:

“If the next generation must be grown in jars, it will inherit glass souls.”

—John St. Evola, Notes Toward a Vitro-Culture Critique

“Laboratory reproduction may someday save endangered species—but must it also endanger the species called ‘human’?”

—Dr. Faye C. Schüß, Mental Hygiene Advisory No. 22: On the Perils of Over-Sterilization

“We used to sing lullabies. Now they’re replacing mothers with incubators that beep.”

—Black Cloud, Gone Awry column

In a special roundtable convened last week at the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists, members debated the fate of amateur love in an age of professionalized reproduction:

Reynard Pierre-DeWitt, Chaos Coordinator, proposed that “perhaps the real threat isn’t artificial wombs but artificially cold hearts.” Mrs. Begonia Contretemp, in a rare moment of solemnity, concluded: “No laboratory will ever invent the blush.”

Libby D’Innous will continue to report on the encroaching technocratic management of reproduction in this newly revived column. Readers are invited to send correspondence, reflections, and amateur testaments to the editors.

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FOOTNOTES:

[1]: The Beaker Folk were an archaeological culture of late Neolithic and early Bronze Age Europe (c. 2800–1800 BC), known for their distinctive pottery vessels buried alongside the dead. Much of what we know about them comes from these characteristic artifacts.

[2]: Fragment from “Archaeology of the Anthropocene,” Vol. IV (c. 2400 AD): “It is widely believed that the civilization known as the Test Tube Folk derived their name from the polycarbonate vessels unearthed across former medical-industrial zones, thought to have functioned as both cradle and crypt for their genetically programmed progeny.”