A WOMAN ON A REMOTE CONTROL
JOANNA OPERACZ
What could happen if there was contraception on a remote control – a button would be pressed and a woman would become infertile? Such an invention already exists. It can appear on the market in four years’ time
An contraceptive implant looks like a memory card taken out from a digital camera. It is a disc with measurements of 20x20x7mm. Beside electronics in the centre there is a capsule with a contraceptive preparation levonogestrel. This substance, used in many hormonal contraceptives, inhibits ovulation and thickens necked mucus in genital tracts of a woman, creating a barrier to sperms. A chip is implanted under the skin and is activated via an impulse from outside (for example, from a remote control). The impulse causes melting of a valve made from titan and platinum, and then a dose of hormone is released to the blood circulation of a woman carrying it. Once the electronic device is implanted, it would be supposed to work even for sixteen years. It would be possible to deactivate it for some time, so that a woman could get pregnant and give birth to a baby; and later it could be deactivated again. An American Agency for Food and Medications is going to start testing the invention next year.
Implanting chips is nothing new. They are used to mark animals, for example, cows and dogs. If a four-leg animal gets lost, it can be traced via GPS. The news is also implanting electronic devices dozing a member some substance directly to the blood circulation. There are even contraceptive implants whose functioning has been estimated for about three years, but because they are burdensome in usage, and cause many health problems, they are not popular. There are two new ideas: that a chip would liquidate fertility of a woman for most time when she can have children and that it would be possible to steer them from outside.
Windfall for a hacker
An American medical magazine ‘Science Translational Medicine’, which was the first to inform about the invention, wrote that refinement is needed to the issue of encryption of connection between an implanted device and a base. For, there is a risk that somebody beside a chipped woman could take over control on a chip. One can also imagine a situation when a hacker activates or deactivates implants of the whole area or even all of them which have been produced so far. Such an invention would also give a convenient and cheap tool to those who are trying to superintend fertility of people being under their authority, for example, women in prisons, women of refugee camps, girls taken to African partisan armies or simply poor analphabetic women who are persuaded to think that the source of their all troubles is giving birth to children. Now discouraging of such women from procreation is complicated – it is necessary to persuade them to take tablets, use contraceptives or take a contraceptive injection regularly. For example, if there was a chip, one could only implant it and turn it on – and a woman would be infertile for many years. An employee and the former parliamentarian of the European Parliament Konrad Szymański perceives a risk of abuses in this invention. – Even in the case of therapies saving life, it is acknowledged that a patient’s consent has a fundamental significance. Here human fertility – which has nothing in common with a therapy – can be subject to control from outside, including the control of the public authority. Much more banal consequences of using informative technologies, for example, pre-selection of content in search engines, are today the subject of a serious dispute just about freedom – he says.
What is a millionaire afraid of?
Why does an American computer potentate spend money on supporting the contraceptive invention? Bill and Melinda Gates are famous for financing anti-population projects. Their foundation gave at least 34 million dollars to the biggest abortion organization in the world – Planned Parenthood. They are not the only American rich people who finance such projects. An abortifacient pill RU-486 was made by support from a financier Warren Buffett. Abortion, sterilization and contraception are promoted in poor countries by such rich and influential Americans, as Ted Turner, George Soros, the Rockefellers and the former president Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary. It is mainly from inspirations of American millionaires and their money, that the United Nations Organization has got strongly engaged in anti-population programs in the last decades.
In order to understand their motivation, we must reach back to the end of XVIII and the beginning of XIX centuries, when an Anglican pastor and economist Thomas Malthus formed a thesis that population is endangered because of its increasing number. He estimated that there are more and more people in the world in the geometrical progress, and food – only in the arithmetical progress. So, he concluded that the only solution is decreasing population, certainly, at the cost of the poorest and the least resourceful. Therefore, reverend Malthus was, for example, an enemy of generosity. For, he thought that supporting the poor would cause their further inhibited increase. At that time there were about 7 milliard of them in the world and there was not a shortage of resources, and we know that the earth is able to provide food to much more people. It was thanks to, among the others, development of agriculture and technology. If today people are hungry somewhere, it is not because on our planet there is a shortage of fertile soil or water, but only for much more complicated social and political reasons.
Victoria, take care of the planet!
Although the theory about the global overpopulation is in science as serious as the statement that flies hatch in dirt, in the popular culture it is doing very well. Surely everyone watched at least one catastrophic film in which a plague falls onto the earth, caused by the excessive growth of human population. When the English celebrities Victoria and David Beckham announced a few years ago that they were expecting the fourth baby, they were attacked by words that they had not cared about the future of the planet. And not saying about poor inhabitants of Bombay, Manila or Addis Abeby? This hysteria is due to reanimation of medicaments of Malthus by leftist ideologists from the 60s of XX century. The author of the book ‘A demographic bomb’ Paul Ehrlich and other scientists focused in the so called Roman Club, were promoting the thesis that the Earth cannot provide food to more than 3 million people. They prophesied the collapse of humankind in the 70s. The only solution was to limit the population rate through ‘birth control’ (contraception, abortion and sterilization) and promote the family model with two children. The catastrophe did not come, so they moved its date for next years. Despite that, their ideas became very popular. Only after some time, under the influence of ecological movements, there were attempts to frighten not only with the shortage of resources, but also with pollution and bad psychological results of life in a crowd. Today heralds of the global overpopulation are not thinking on how to help inhabitants of slums in their life and work in human conditions, but on how to persuade them to kill their own children. – America should be aware that such ‘philanthropy’ in the countries of Africa and Asia is today one of the most serious reasons of anti-American aggression. Paternal belief of the western world, that it knows better, how societies of these continents should develop, is the breach of their right to sovereignty Konrad Szymański notes.
An American dream
However, here we are dealing with something more than naïve belief in leftist ideas from half a century before. The United States assume that their purpose is limiting the number of population in the countries of the Third World. The authorities of the USA in 1974 accepted the so-called report of Kissinger, that is, a document of National Safety Council, which stated that the high birth rate in poor countries is a serious threat for economic development and welfare of the Americans. The report mentioned 13 particularly dangerous countries, among the others: India, Brazil, the Philippines, Nigeria and Indonesia. Authors of the document whose content was revealed, not earlier than in 1990, were aware that running an open anti-birth activity would cause outrage and accusations of imperialism all over the world, as well as racism and genocide, so they suggested a propaganda sheath in the form of health projects and such humanitarian slogans, as: ‘fight with overpopulation’, ‘fight with famine’ or ‘reproductive human rights’. The report also emphasized that it is necessary to avoid direct engagement of the USA and realize one’s purposes via international organizations, mainly UNO agencies.
The contraceptive implant financed by Bill and Melinda Gates has a chance to fulfill this task. However, we should hope that this American dream will not become true.
AA
„Niedziela” 47/2014