Usually I like his pieces, in National Review and in Slate; they’re thoughtful and well-written. But his piece in Slate.com yesterday, “The End of Pregnancy, and the inevitable rise of the artificial womb” just felt a little flat. Perhaps he drew the short straw and was assigned the task of writing clickbait, but isn’t as practiced at it as Amanda Marcotte.
The core idea of his article is that, as technology progresses, the artificial womb will be seen by top professionals as the solution to work-family balance — not because women will use this to defer having a child until they’ve reached a point in their careers that they can coast (which is, basically, never, or at least not until you’re at early retirement age and/or don’t care about that next promotion), but because the reason why women don’t push themselves to great career success to the same degree as men do, is because they become, not just parents but mothers, and that the very act of gestating a child and giving birth to that child binds a mother to that child, with a bond that fathers don’t experience, and compels them to make career decisions that enable them to spend more time with that child. Hence, artificial womb = the more detached feeling toward parenting that fathers feel = more drive to spend extra time at the office = gender equality.
Of course, he’s attempting a Swiftian satire (wikipedia article here, and actual text here), though no one among the Slate commenters seems to recognize it. But I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s really hard to do well, and here it doesn’t work well. Besides, he only received 124 comments, though this appeared last night, and it’s still early today.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In