The Tale That Misleads
@sam In popular culture, The Handmaid’s Tale has become the dominant metaphor for fears about the future of gender and reproduction. The story is invoked whenever debates arise about reproductive rights, state control over women’s bodies, or the erosion of gender equality. For many, it serves as a warning that the dystopia of enforced childbirth could become reality. But this fixation on a literary dystopia may obscure the real forces shaping our reproductive future—forces not of repression, but of radical technological transformation.
While Western societies debate over reproductive rights in cultural and political arenas, China is quietly making strides in artificial womb technology. Researchers there have already demonstrated ectogenesis in animal models, pushing forward a technology that Western countries often resist due to legal, ethical, and cultural constraints. The irony is that while the West invokes The Handmaid’s Tale as a cautionary tale, it is leveraging China to build technologies that will in fact dissolve the very conditions that make such a dystopia possible. Artificial wombs represent the coming decoupling of reproduction from women’s bodies—a shift that Western science and politics are too constrained to initiate themselves.
The implications are staggering. Once artificial wombs become viable for humans, gender as we know it—rooted in the biological division of reproductive labor—will lose its material basis. Women will no longer be defined by or burdened with childbirth, and men will no longer be excluded from the experience of gestation. Instead of a Handmaid’s Tale future of enforced reproductive servitude, what lies ahead is a post-gender society shaped by class.
The powers that be would rather keep us locked in endless battles over gender, race, and identity—fractured along lines that distract us from the deeper truth. These divisions serve as smoke screens while technology and wealth consolidate in the hands of a few. The only fight that truly matters, and the one that cuts across every other boundary, is the class struggle. Because in a future where reproduction itself is reengineered, the defining question won’t be about gender—it will be about who holds power and who is forced to serve it.
Human 2.0
The United States, despite its dominance in aerospace, advanced weaponry, and global power, will not unleash its full advantage in WWIII. Instead, it will allow China to prevail—not through military genius, but because China has been permitted to develop technologies deemed culturally unfit for the West. China’s ascent in this arena has not come without Western awareness.
For years, Chinese intelligence has operated in plain sight, embedding spies within the U.S. and harvesting data from giants like Lockheed Martin and other defense contractors—a reality I can personally attest to. These operations have often been conducted knowingly under the eye of American authorities, tolerated as part of a larger geopolitical bargain. In this sense, the transfer of knowledge has not been a matter of theft alone, but of selective permission—an acknowledgment that China would be allowed to develop technologies the West could not pursue openly due to cultural, legal, or ethical constraints.
Artificial wombs will be at the center of the world’s transformation. While the U.S., Spain, and the Netherlands focus on “biobags” for premature infants (partial ectogenesis), China is pushing toward full ectogenesis—conceiving, implanting, and gestating a baby entirely in an artificial womb, with no woman’s pregnancy involved. Through the aftermath of war, China’s “human 2.0” would become the global standard, with ectogenesis implemented into law across the West. Natural reproduction, once the bedrock of humanity, will be outlawed—ushering in a new era where birth itself is industrialized, standardized, and stripped from the body.
As liberating as this technology may be for women worldwide, it emerges against a backdrop of unprecedented wealth inequality, mass automation displacing labor, and a widening uncertainty about what kind of future humanity is truly building.