• bobs_monkey@lemm.ee
      2·
      2 months ago

      Capitalists are freaking out over the declining birthrate because anyone with a brainstem knows “AI” and robots won’t replace human workers for a long time, and the machine is hungry.

  • LovableSidekick@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    Seems like a super-nerdy medical idea that would work without capitalism and has nothing to do with capitalism.

    • stupidcasey@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      Yeah, sounds like a dumb hypothetical you’re having with your nerdy friends or a staff member of Hitlers cabinet discussing the next big thing after eugenics.

  • Ashralien@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    there are far too many fucked up hentai plots that have the same lines

    either way dude needs the nsa as his isp for a good bit

  • Ashralien@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    that paper has GOT to be a thinly veiled gruesome fetish manuscript, involving at least a couple corpses.

  • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    That’s an incredibly expensive bad idea. Dialysis will likely be necessary and the beating heart corpse just kind of slowly breaks down over time with multi system organ failure. 9 months would require a heroic effort at life support. Makes sense it was suggested by a philosopher. She also suggested using male bodies as incubators. Might as well use pigs if you’re going that far. Humerous that the philosopher that suggested it was a woman though.

    It is a good thought experiment to gauge where people stand on brain death and personhood too I guess. I obviously think a body with a brain that is dead to the stem is just a corpse. That brain will actually end up liquefying because it is actively necrotizing.

    In reality, I also agree with the premise that actual surrogacy is worse. An economic trade where someone rich buys someone else’s health is no different than buying a kidney. So that point they made is absolutely not wrong. Surrogacy should be abolished, though this obviously has no chance of taking it’s place.

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    But like… why babies? We already have way too many of those. We need fewer babies.

    If we’re going to delve into some seriously murky ethical water here, why not forcus on something there’s an actual need for, like organ and blood harvesting? And that would double donor pool by including men as poss-- …oh. Oh yeah. That’s why. -_-

  • mojofrododojo@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 months ago

    we need the original author’s names.

    they need to be on a list somewhere for… additional oversight.

    just saying you don’t come to this ‘scientific conclusion’ in a vacuum, someone needs to check the rest of their… social circle.

    • ✺roguetrick✺@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 months ago

      Well it was a woman philosopher and likely written with the dichotomy in mind that we accept brain dead organ donation while reviling paying people to sell one their kidneys/part of their livers/one of their lungs and also accept surrogacy while reviling this modest proposal.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      Okay, but imagine if you could have one really rich guy impregnate a thousand captive comatose women at once, to improve efficiency.

      From a Lomgtermist perspective, this would be great for the future of our Brave New World

      • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 months ago

        What I really hate about longtermism is that it actually tells us nothing about what policies are best, as we don’t know what paths will lead to the best future.

        You could argue that low taxes on billionaires will give them the resources needed to do space colonisation. Thus, in the long term, not taxing billionaires now is good. Or you could argue that a robust social safety net and UBI is the best path to a long term best future. How many Einsteins throughout history died illiterate peasants? By providing resources for everyone, we maximize our chances of the truly talented having a shot at elevating us all through new science and discoveries.

        Hell, I could even justify a nuclear war through longtermism. Economies grow more worn-in and sclerotic over time. Every so often you need a historical arsonist like Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan to run through an area, burn the existing order to ashes, and give people a chance to start again. Existing elites prevent necessary change. And often the only way to remove them is to burn everything down. On the next attempt at civilization, they can learn from their predecessor’s mistakes. For example, destroying the fossil fuel industry now is effectively impossible; they’re simply far too entrenched and powerful. By voluntarily starting a global thermonuclear war, we will smash their power. Civilization can then rebuild powered entirely by solar and wind. Yes, we lose 90% of the human population today, but we prevent total human extinction via complete biosphere collapse, which appears to be the road we are on now. From the long term perspective, deliberately starting a global thermonuclear war is the only rational choice.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Climate Change is good for humanity because killing off the bulk of life on earth will give us a fresh slate to build on.

          ~ Op-Ed at the Atlantic or WSJ or some other smug contrarian navel gazers warehouse

  • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    Good news boys, if we’re willing to use women this way, we can actually do the same for men! This is one unique sexual reproduction horror story that can in theory be inflicted on both sexes!

    Pregnancy without a uterus, impossible! You say. But ectopic pregnancies are a thing. We all start out as parasites. As an embryo develops, it looks for a surface of flesh rich in blood vessels to latch onto. The primary function of the uterus is to provide an inner lining that is sort of a “disposable surface.” The inner lining is rich in blood vessels, the ideal environment for a zygote to latch onto and grow from. The embryo can integrate its blood vessels with the uterine lining and thoroughly mess those up. Then after pregnancy the whole inner lining is just sloughed off. That in inelegant terms is the uterus - an organ that produces a nice safe surface for the zygote to latch onto that won’t harm the person carrying the pregnancy.

    But, things don’t always go well. If a zygote somehow tears through the uterine wall, then ectopic pregnancy, pregnancy outside the uterus, can result. And this a serious life-threatening medical condition. The fetus as it develops will latch onto not the intended uterine surface, but the vital abdominal organs. Giving “birth” in this case is done surgically, and it’s more akin to cutting out a cancer than a healthy live birth.

    But while it hasn’t been tried due to the obvious health risks and huge medical ethics issues, there’s little reason to think that ectopic pregnancies couldn’t be carried in a male admomen. DNA and chromosomes shouldn’t be a barrier. The placenta that the fetus grows is evolved to prevent the fetus from being rejected like a donor organ. It’s not like mothers and infants share their DNA.

    So in theory we could use men in vegetative states as one-time use surrogates. There has been research proposed and papers written on the possibility of trans women carrying children via uterine transplant, but this method, deliberate artificial ectopic pregnancy, is in principle a lot simpler. You don’t need to transplant a delicate organ and find a way to carry a pregnancy while taking anti-rejection drugs. You just implant an embryo in the surrogate abdomen and let it go to town. Let it latch in to whatever internal organs it wants. Then after nine months, just cut open and discard the surrogate father.

    It wouldn’t be as simple as just implanting an embryo. The pregnant vegetative man would likely need to have his hormone profile monitored and heavily manipulated. But this is easy enough. Testosterone production could be nuked by simple castration, and erogenous estrogen and progesterone could then be introduced as needed before and during the pregnancy. After the pregnancy, it is unlikely the man would survive. So this is a one time deal. But if we’re OK treating people in persistent vegetative states like resources to be exploited, I see no reason to throw out half of our potential surrogate population simply because they happen to be men.

      • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 months ago

        Yeah, that’s the kind of persistent vegetative state you don’t want to wake up from.

        But really this kind of abuse of people in these states goes way beyond pregnancy. If we’re willing to do this to women, why not keep vegetative patients of both sexes alive for years as continuous blood donors? I could easily see someone justifying that, especially if the victim has a rare or that universal donor blood type.

        Or how about organ donation? We do currently take organs from deceased donors, but usually it’s a one time deal. When it comes time, if the person is a willing donor, you pull the plug, and then harvest whatever organs you can that you have a recipient for at the moment. But you could make that a lot more efficient if you could keep the donor alive for a long time, perhaps years. Just keep them alive, waiting for someone in need. Someone needs the first kidney? Give it to them. Someone needs a second kidney? Give it to them and put the donor on permanent dialysis. Someone needs a hear or lung? Take the donor’s and keep them going via artificial means. Or maybe we could take skin graft after skin graft, growing new skin again and again. Treat them like sheep being shorn. It’s the difference between having to use a butchered animal up all at once vs being able to freeze most of it for later. Hospitals could have whole wards of these donors caught for years in a state of half-disassembled living death.

        This is an ethical Pandora’s box we REALLY do not want to open.

  • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
    0·
    2 months ago

    One of the benefits of living and working in a liberal society is that stuff like this can get publicly published, discussed and rejected if deemed bad. Under totalitarian regimes that public forum is absent, which is why some of the worst ideas/atrocities of the Soviet Union only came to light years after they had happened (instead of being rejected before they could happen). When it comes to human rights, liberalism > communism, and it’s not even close.