Are Children Another Kind Of Eternity?
All this bending of our bodies to our will — IVF, surrogates, egg freezing — are we not divining our own future ? Are we not our own Gods?
I just finished Patti Smith’s M Train (I know, I know, I’m beastly delayed in getting on board) and it’s gotten my gears turning on the idea of replication. Especially of the body.
Especially in regards to making humans. Children. Bodily or otherwise.
“Nothing can be truly replicated,” she writes. “Not a love, not a jewel, not a single line.”
But can an idea be replicated? The idea of a child? Performed again — recreated, repeated — but this time, in the flesh?
I spend a lot of time wandering through burgeoning bodily science — it’s a sometimes morbid fascination of mine to spin out on the ethics of creating life.
If someone can’t have children should they let that ship sail? And if the notion of “can’t” is evolving all the time — if we’re redefining what the limitations of our biology are, are we not redefining what it means to be mortal, to be human?
I recently learned that we’re not so far away from deriving entire embryos from skin cells.
