Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by The College Fix on August 30, 2024 and is crossposted here with permission.
PHOENIX — Two professors discussed dismantling capitalism and electing a female president to restore reproductive rights, and warned of a dystopian future with “cannibalism” and “forced breeding camps,” at an event held Wednesday at Arizona State University.
“Jenny Irish’s HATCH: A Speculative Future for Reproductive Rights” was held both in person and via Zoom.
It featured Irish, a poet and English professor at ASU, as well as Professor Angela Lober, director of the Academy of Lactation Programs at ASU’s Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation.
Professor Lober opened the one-hour moderated discussion by stating she “got into this space because the United States hates women and everything the female body does.”
She said she is concerned about the state of maternal healthcare in the country, citing the existence of “maternity care deserts” and the lack of comprehensive care for mothers and children.
Economic interests often override health concerns, as evidenced by the lack of financial incentives in breastfeeding and maternal-child health, Lober said.
Irish, when asked about her concerns for the future of abortion laws, said she fears the possibility of “forced breeding camps” and “cannibalism” driven by a lack of resources.
“So much of our reality points toward those futures,” Irish said.
Lober added: “The balance between hope and despair is an everyday experience for me.”
“A couple years ago I never thought Roe v. Wade would be overturned. How could we possibly do that?” Lober said.
Asked what they would do to restore reproductive rights, Lober said “dismantle capitalism” and “elect a female president.”
Irish said any time Americans have an “external entity” asserting control over women’s bodies, they should all be “terrified.” She said the country should consider how “forcing women into motherhood” affects the broader community.
Irish also talked about transgenderism and said there is an “all-out assault on the trans community and people’s ability to self-identify.”
“It is disgusting, immoral, and wrong,” she said.
The scholars also took questions from the 15 or so students in the audience as well as over Zoom. When asked about the decline in birth rates globally, Lober said it doesn’t “bother” her, as “we are overpopulated.”
She also said she encourages her children not to have children of their own.
Karina Fitzgerald, the event coordinator, said the goal of the event was “to encourage students that are following creative pursuits or other types of worldbuilding to simply explore other elements that they haven’t thought of before in their writing, or other ways to challenge themselves in creative processes.”
“It’s an element of worldbuilding that people might not think of a lot when they are creating fictional stories,” Fitzgerald told The College Fix in an interview. “It’s a good exercise for students to get in the practice of.”
The event was co-hosted by ASU Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, which hosts events that aim to design “a future keyed to human flourishing,” according to its website.
The event description states the “prose poems in Jenny Irish’s newest collection, Hatch, trace the consciousness of an artificial womb that must confront the role she has played in the continuation of the dying of the human species.”
“This apocalyptic vision engages with the most pressing concerns of this contemporary sociopolitical moment: reproductive rights, climate crises, and mass extinction; gender and racial bias in healthcare and technology; disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience; and the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence.”
Image of Arizona State University, Tempe Campus, Old Main by Beyond My Ken — Wikimedia Commons
If only men voted, Trump would win in a landslide greater than Reagan’s 1984 victory.
What no one is mentioning is that Harris’ support is largely coming not only from women but women whose sole issue is abortion. For reasons I can not fathom these women don’t care about crime, illegal immigration, the economy, foreign affairs, the deficit/debt, or the pending insolvency of Social Security — all they care about is abortion.
And worse, these purportedly intelligent women often don’t even know what their own state’s abortion laws even are, let alone the fact that the Dobbs decision merely stated that, like all other medical procedures, abortion would be regulated by state law. This actually is a position that the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg supported in speeches late in her life.
It’s so bad that Kelly Ayotte, the Republican candidate for Governor in New Hampshire, is having to run TV ads telling people that abortion actually is legal in New Hampshire, what the state’s law actually says, and that she doesn’t intend to change it. Not to mention that most of the state lives within 25 miles of Massachusetts (where many of them work) and Massachusetts would legalize fourth trimester abortions if it could.
While the word “hysteria” originates from the Greek word for uterus, “hystera” and is inevitably linked to the 19th Century medical concept of “female hysteria”, I can think of no other word that explains the totally illogical (and almost rabid) reaction of purportedly intelligent women to the Dobbs decision.
Of course they never read it, let alone read their own state’s laws, before somehow concluding that abortion has now been banned in their state. These are women with college degrees and they’ve never heard of Google? Or a public library with librarians?
So I’m really not surprised to learn that this hysteria has descended into fears of cannibalism and “forced breeding camps.” And I’m not even getting into how most adults are aware that there is a 100% effective means of avoiding pregnancy, along with others which are nearly as effective if used correctly. Or that you really want to look at morbidity and mortality as well as mere availability — that it is worth it to travel a couple hundred miles to a place where they perform *lots* of abortions because they are less likely to screw up yours, and that you really do want state regulators making sure that things are done “right.”
But what these one issue voters fail to realize is that the issues they are ignoring well could come back to bite them. If a President Harris giggles herself into a major war they are going to get drafted. Yes, women are going to get drafted, and just because there hasn’t been a draft in 53 years doesn’t mean that there won’t be one.
And who is most likely to be raped by an illegal alien? And as women live longer than men, who is going to be hurt worse by the collapse of Social Security?
But even worse than this, if women become self-centered single-issue voters, why shouldn’t men do likewise? Why shouldn’t Trump/Vance simply “write off” single women and concentrate on getting more men to the polls? And why shouldn’t a President Trump concentrate on issues of concern to the people who voted for him?
How long could such a culture, divided against itself, remain standing?