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.