Spare the woman's body || Acharya Prashant, with MMMUT (2023)
Questioner (Q): Sir, my question to you is regarding the fertility clinics. In India, it is a huge business and around the globe it is booming, and many rich people tend to go for it. We have seen that women are often forced to go through multiple IVF cycles, leading to diseases like cancer and then even death in some cases, and arguably a large number of women are also committing suicide annually throughout the globe because of the physical and mental trauma that this process entails on them. So, like the technology which initially promised that it is going to give something good to the human society and a positive thing. It turns out later in the part the technology itself becomes a problem for us. So, how do we uproot this evil from society?
Acharya Prashant (AP): You see, if you want a headshot—answer in one line—the answer is, it is abused to the human body to be treated as a machine for reproduction. That's the last thing the human body should be used for. The function of reproduction must move out of the female body. I strongly hold that if women are to attain the rightful purpose of life, then they cannot squander their life energy on things like pregnancy.
Our body centricity and the historical urge to increase and maintain a population have made us venerate fertility. We have goddesses of fertility, in cultures across the globe we have had them, and why was that needed? It was needed because populations were small, and disease was rife. People were dying all the time, kids were dying all the time, so a fertile womb was a great asset and wars were fought on manpower. The bigger army would frequently win so you needed populations and wars were savage. If you were defeated, you were decimated.
So, that's the reason why in our culture and in all cultures motherhood and fertility and pregnancy have become such hallowed things. We talk so fondly and so respectfully of motherhood, don't we? But please, look at it without bias, look at it neatly, cleanly, and what is all that? A woman is in her prime at the time of pregnancy, what are you taking away her prime time for? And keep the emotional arguments apart please, your emotions are a product of your conditioning. Your emotions have all been bred out of your cultural upbringing.
Please tell me why a human body should be used as a machine to produce nutrition for another body and that too for long periods, and sometimes more than a year. You're using one body as a machine to produce nutrition for another body. I know what I am saying will be pretty much unhearable to a lot of people. They will abuse me as being insensitive, inhumane, and everything, but I am speaking out of a certain sensitivity.
Women constitute 50 percent of humanity. Let's not destroy them. We've already done enough of that in history. I mean, think of yourself – you will have a career and being a bright student, you'll probably roam continents and you will have exposure and you will do this and you will do that and you will have a wife and your wife too will be probably as educated as you are and when you will be doing all the things you will be doing, she'll be sitting at home nursing the baby, how fair is that? Please tell me. And can she really grow as a human being if our existence is tied to a baby and not one baby, several babies!
So, science can take care of all this. Babies can be born in special facilities, and they must be conceived, incubated, and raised there. The mother's job must be to elevate the consciousness of the child. The mother should be a rightful teacher, not a birth giver. The task of giving birth must be according to Science, because that's a mechanical function, and whatsoever is mechanical must be done by machines.
But educating a child is not something a machine can do. Invoking discretion and wisdom in a child is not something a machine can do and that's where the mother's role starts. She should provide nutrition to the baby, but not through breastfeeding, through education; she must be the teacher. Are you getting it? The relationship between mother and child has to be one of consciousness, not of the bodies.
You see what the situation is currently like, the mother's body gives birth to the child's body, so physical relationship. Then the mother is nursing the child – physical, breastfeeding is physical, and in all this, the mother hardly has any concern for the kid's consciousness. She never could have any concern for her own consciousness, how will she have concern for the kid's consciousness? The result is a largely unconscious population on the planet that is destroying the planet itself.
If you take the cultural aggrandization out of the picture, I assure you no woman enjoys the time of pregnancy. It's just that that time has been glorified in fairy tales and cultural symbols. So the woman thinks she is going through something noble, something sublime, something worth it. The thing is, keep all the cultural praise aside, no woman enjoys that. Even those who claim they are enjoying it greatly, are actually enjoying only the psychological gratification that comes from the culture they belong to. Nobody enjoys it. And the risk to her own life at the time of delivery! So many women die, even if they don't die, they have to bear so much on their bodies.
Why must all that be necessary? How is that contributing to the kid's quality of life, please tell me. How is the kid going to have a better life, if the kid emerges by tearing the mother's womb apart as happens in a cesarean delivery? All that is largely unnecessary. The kid might as well have been brought home from a high-tech dedicated state-of-the-art medical facility, and the mother in a healthy way without having gone through the needless pains of pregnancy would have received the child and now the mother is in better shape to nurture the child. Better shape and a better mental condition and the child too coming from a medical facility is more sound of health.
You see we used to utilize human muscle to run vehicles, didn't we? That was not too long back. We said human muscle is to be used for energy. You wanted to do your laundry, what did you use for it? – the human body. In fact, India developed a special cast just to do your laundry. You wanted to do your shoes, you used again energy from human muscles to do your shoes. Anything you wanted to do you utilized the human body, right? Today you don't do that.
So all the make all the mechanical functions have moved out of the human body, have they not? So, if all the mechanical functions can move out of the human body, why must childbirth not move out of the human body? And if you say what is to be done through the human body must be done only through the human body, then let there be no machines, no solar energy or wind energy or nuclear energy, and only muscular energy.
Why do you burn fossil fuels? Run and carry all the load on your back because what has been traditionally done through the human body must be done through the human body. Traditionally, human beings have carried all the load on their backs, don't even use animals just carry it on your own back, because traditionally that's what has happened.
No tradition is sacred, traditions exist for our sake. If one day we were using muscular energy and now we have freed our muscles, no? Similarly, till today we have been using the woman's womb, Let's liberate her of the womb. Just as you have liberated your muscles, liberate her womb as well. Let her be, please. There are so many other examples where you were traditionally using the human body and no more, no more.
Q: Sir, on the same line I have a follow-up question. I have recently read somewhere like, this is the possible thing that the baby can be conceived totally out of the human body, it is possible maybe five to ten years down the line. So, they also will get the ability and capacity to change the characteristic of the child before birth, where they can genetically modify characteristics like physical strength or height and eye/hair color and intelligence also, and maybe gender also. So obviously, rich people will be using these products, so will this not create a gap between the rich and poor and create a totally different race of rich people? Will this be a good thing for human civilization or not?
AP: No, not really. You see, by doing all this you can at most give certain resources to the child – you can ensure the child is tall. Now what is height? It's a resource, it does not guarantee anything. The purpose of life is the elevation of consciousness, right? Machines cannot give high consciousness to the newborn. Using machines or using genetic engineering, you can at most modify or exaggerate the physical attributes of the child, right? But just because the child has been provided certain physical attributes in plenty, that does not mean the child will be special in consciousness.
Consciousness is something that the child has to develop on his own after birth, right? It's a choice, right? Consciousness means Choice. You can have the best of bodies, and the best of health, your parents choose your color with great caution, and you were given a body that would never fall sick, you can have all those things and still lead a very wretched life.
So, it's not that the rich will have some kind of an unfair advantage or something. Nobody is going to get a head start just because the kid is fair or tall or more muscular or more handsome or whatever, no? You can choose the color of the hair, so what? What else? What do you mean by physical attributes? You can have a child who will have strong lungs, strong hearts, and all those things, none of that matters beyond a point.
What matters ultimately is consciousness, and to the consciousness, all these things are mere resources. It's a choice to put these resources to the right use, and history is replete with instances where people who were extraordinarily blessed at the time of birth, lived utterly miserable lives because they did not know what to do with their gifts, and at the same time people who were born in pretty ordinary situations, not really gifted people, not people of high IQ either, they really impacted the very flow of human history because that's what they chose and that choice is independent of the body you carry. That choice is something very mysterious.
Somebody with great resources might still not dare to exercise his choice rightly and somebody with very feeble resources might still have the faith to make the right choice. So, it's just a thing of choice, there is no reason behind it. Why did that happen that way? It was a choice. And I'm not talking of influence choices. I'm not talking about condition choices. Consciousness has the ability to make a free choice. It may not make a free choice and it does not make free choices. Usually, it never makes free choices, that's another thing, but the option to choose freedom is there.
