Progressive Frankensteins

One of the defining elements of Oceania, the despotic regime in George Orwell’s 1984, is its totalitarian approach to definitions, even to the point of absurdity. If you control the language, so the thinking goes, you can control the people. In Orwell’s science-fiction, this is called “Newspeak.” But increasingly today, it’s just called the news.

Consider this sequence of “Newspeak”—“Drug-induced ‘chestfeeding’ liquid ‘comparable’ to that from mothers when it comes to baby nourishment.” Out of context, it is unclear whether this disjointed language might refer to an assembly line of excreting cyborgs, or to a dispatch from an alien planet gathered by Data from Star Trek. In context, the picture isn’t much better. This sentence is actually the subhead of a recent article from the British Telegraph about a National Health Services (NHS) Trust that has declared that “Trans-women’s milk [is] as good as breast milk.”

For those whose mental faculties haven’t been colonized by the new Orwellian vocabulary, what this NHS Trust has recently proclaimed is this: Contrary to common sense, your lying eyes, and every biology book printed before 2016, biological males can nurse babies just as well as mothers. Yes, you read that right. And no, let me assure you that you’re not the crazy one for wanting to pull your hair out now.

The source of this absurd declaration is a letter sent by the NHS Trust to a group that had requested clarification about an alarming policy the Trust had issued on “Perinatal Care for Trans and Non-Binary People.” The original policy encouraged “non-gestational parents” and “transwomen” (aka men, biological males) to attempt to physically stimulate lactation for their newborns. Although the policy has since been removed, the NHS Trust doubled down on their preposterous advice in their response letter, which includes a link to a bizarre resource page from La Leche League and employs dehumanizing terms like “human milk” in the place of “mother’s milk,” and “birthing parent” instead of “mother.”

Not to be outdone by our cousins across the pond, here in the United States President Joe Biden’s CDC currently hosts a webpage that urges providers toward “health equity” by using terms that “are inclusive of all gender identities such as ‘pregnant person,’ ‘breastfeeding parent,’ and ‘lactating person.’” And Biden’s State Department recently issued a cable that warns against assuming a person’s gender identity, or misgendering someone, and recommends using gender-neutral language “whenever possible,” such as “parent” instead of the gender-specific language of “mother” or “father.”

In his important book Bioethics, Gilbert Meilaender notes how the language we use reflects and even forms the way we reason and interact with our fellow man. He points to the title of Oliver O’Donovan’s work on assisted reproductive technologies to get at this idea: Begotten or Made? How we answer this question shows just how deeply our commodified and industrialized age has shaped the way we think about what it means to be human. Meilaender cites Leon Kass to drive this point home:

The premodern Christian English-speaking world, impressed with the world as given by a Creator, used the term ‘pro-creation.’ We, impressed with the machine and and the gross national product (our own work of creation), employ a metaphor of the factory, ‘re-production.’

The words we use are important, and they form and inform how we think about who we are and the world we live in.

What is our culture impressed with, then, as it chooses to exchange one of the most fundamental human terms like “mother” and “father” for a sterilized word like “parent”? What could have possibly captured our imaginations so strongly that we would trade the term “mother’s milk” for such dehumanizing alternatives? Whatever it is, it is certainly not something more good, more true, or more beautiful—just the opposite.

Note that this new language is less human by design. It is more monstrous, because we are no longer treating the human body and human relationships as gifts, but as a choose-your-own adventure at best, or at worst, the way Dr. Frankenstein built his monster: stitch by stitch, part by part. The human body and the human family are treated like plastics to be fashioned on a whim, devoid of any created purpose or design, solely directed by the naked will.

How did we get here? Our culture has “exchanged the glory of the immortal God” (Romans 1:23) for a lie, and now it worships the “creature rather than the Creator” (1:25). In so doing, we have forgotten what makes us human—the image of God—and so we act like beasts and become more and more like Frankenstein’s monster in our hellbent pursuit to escape the orbit of Nature and Nature’s God.

Progressive Frankensteins may use dehumanizing terms. But Christians cannot, indeed we must not, because we know who made us, and it is not we ourselves (Psalm 100:5). It is the same One who invites us to call Him Father and who made us male and female in His image, for His glory.