“What if we changed one of the fundamental building blocks of life?” That’s the question posed in a new short animated video by TED-Ed, one of a five-part series about revolutionizing human life. The producers explain, “This narrative follows the young library assistant Ada as she juggles two worlds: her daily mundane reality and the future she vividly imagines for all humanity. Traveling through her visions of potential futures, Ada grapples with the ethical and social implications of new technologies and how they could shape the world.”
The fundamental building block Ada wants to eliminate in this video? Pregnancy. Ada participates in a thought experiment, considering if women would have more freedom or less if they weren’t the ones physically giving birth. She begins by explaining why the artificial womb is appealing: because birth isn’t.
She says she’s not sure she wants to have children, especially given how pregnancy is sold.
“I definitely don’t want to be pregnant. If you listen to the way people casually describe pregnancy and birth! ‘Oh, nothing out of the ordinary, just puked every day for months.’ ‘It was a routine delivery, just a standard tearing of the genitals,'” she says. “‘With modern medicine, hardly anyone dies!’ How is everyone just shrugging and just saying that’s the way it is? Like, excuse me? Am I the only one who thinks that this activity is not suitable for civilians?”
Exasperated, she sighs, “It’s so unfair!”
As someone who has done it six times, I’m not going to sit here and sugarcoat pregnancy. I did, in fact, puke every day for months. I’m not a fan, and my dread about pregnancy did make me think long and hard about whether I felt like I could physically and emotionally handle it again before taking the plunge.
It was much easier to make that decision the second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth times, though, because, after my first, I realized that even though my pregnancies might not be easy, they were going to be worth it. I never realized before I had a child that for how not great pregnancy is, the child you get on the other end is going to make up for it.
This is something deeply wrong with how we’ve depicted motherhood for young people: We’re accentuating the negative and completely neglecting the positive. Women don’t hear about how empowering birth can be or how transformative the entire experience is. It’s a rite of passage, not one to be circumvented because of physical and emotional discomfort.
However, just as we’re not teaching women and girls that there’s a profound upside to pregnancy, we’re also not imbuing in them a sense of resilience or pride in resilience. “Nothing that’s worth having in life comes easy” is not a message a generation who received participation trophies often heard.
In the TED-Ed video featuring Ada, we also meet her grandmother, who reminds her she’s not getting any younger and encourages her to make the decision to have children before her biological clock makes the decision for her. Ada takes this urging as a challenge to figure out how to outsmart and circumvent Mother Nature (have none of these people seen Jurassic Park?) instead of just considering that maybe Grandma possesses some generational wisdom worth heeding.
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Unsurprisingly, the TED-Ed video then takes a turn in the direction of abortion, with Ada worrying that if artificial wombs are created, there won’t be an excuse for women to abort babies any longer. The only thing more horrible than pregnancy to Ada is the idea that someone may view an unborn baby as deserving of life and give her the ability to survive outside of her mother’s womb if her mother does not wish to carry her to term. Instead of seeing an artificial womb as a way to eliminate the supposed need for abortion, Ada is concerned that women will no longer be able to terminate the lives of their unborn children if artificial wombs are created as a viable alternative.
The video series is a reminder of how far the Left is moving away from biological reality with every passing day. For all of its protestations that “in this house we believe in science,” there’s no understanding or desire to learn about the critically important biological and emotional bonds that take place during pregnancy between mother and baby, not to mention fetal development. The future that TED-Ed’s Ada imagines of artificial wombs is truly dystopian to its core, artificial in every way.
Bethany Mandel (@bethanyshondark) is a homeschooling mother of six and a writer. She is the bestselling co-author of Stolen Youth.