(Them Before Us) — In The Republic, Plato envisions a society where the family is abolished. The state, rather than parents, oversees reproduction, deciding who should mate to produce the best offspring. Children are not raised by their biological parents but are placed in state nurseries, ensuring that no child “belongs” to anyone. To maintain order, rulers engage in a “noble lie,” convincing citizens that these breeding festivals are a random lottery rather than a calculated plan to produce the “highest quality” children in a way that detaches all parents.
For centuries, we dismissed Plato’s vision as nothing more than an unsettling thought experiment, a dystopian nightmare that could never materialize. The natural family structure—mother, father, and child—has always been our safeguard, an unbreakable biological firewall that keeps such ideas confined to the realm of philosophy or fantasy.
This is partially due to the fact that procreation has remained for all these millenia, an intimate act. Child creation has required the presence of a mother and father. Our biology has evolved to develop deep attachments to our offspring with the brilliance of genetics producing small memetic mirrors. Humans that look like us, that we see ourselves in, and selfishly attach to and want to preserve, even often at the expense of our own lives and well being. It is precisely this intimacy and subsequent attachment that defeated Plato’s vision, that made it more unthinkable than illegal (a much stronger version of defeat to be sure).
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Yet, once again, a challenge has arisen. Because Mothers and Fathers who create their children are too attached to allow them to be taken and distributed, the fertility industry has found ways to outsource the process. The dark forces of “progress” have seen the intimate bonds that result from the natural procreative process and have undertaken to circumvent them by creating life without connection. This begs the question, we resisted the industrialization of children before but will we still be able to resist when technology makes it possible, culture makes it aspirational, and the government makes it affordable? Will we still resist the temptation if the industry can sufficiently hide the consequences, celebrate the successes, and indoctrinate a generation of parents through their uninformed participation until they are too invested by the nature of their choices to condemn these practices (and their former selves) in hindsight?
The industrialization of children
Societally, we are already marching forward in that direction. Shielded from public view, exists a world of sperm and egg banks, mass industrial fertilization, and the perpetual freezing of the embryonic “excess”. We have scaled so rapidly beyond our character to care for this life that we now possess a dangerous surplus of days old human beings—millions frozen in time at their earliest stage of life, suspended in storage, many unlabeled, many unclaimed, and even more being abandoned daily. We have surrogates available for rent, reducing the act of pregnancy and birth to a commercial transaction. We have genetic screening that allows people to select and discard embryos based on perceived intelligence, appearance, or likelihood of disease. At each stage — creation (in a lab), gestation (in a rented womb), discard or storage for the “excess” (in a far away place) — the process is shipped out and completed away from our sensitive sensibilities. These tools of detachment are supplemented by a war of words. We see the language describing the process twisted to further accommodate our delusion.
We don’t say we’re creating children to be sold. We say we’re helping families grow.
We don’t say we’re manufacturing embryos in bulk and discarding the unwanted ones. We say we’re increasing the chances of a successful pregnancy.
We don’t say we’re buying and selling women’s reproductive labor. We say we’re empowering surrogates to help others experience parenthood.
And so the process achieves its goal, degrading our sensitivity to the unnatural. Slowly increasing our comfort with this new way of creating. But to what end? Is there danger down this path?
Pandora’s Box: From customization to commodification
If a child is not seen as an inherently valuable person with a definitive attachment to their mother and father, then what is a child and to whom do they belong?
Answer: a child becomes a product. They cease to be a person with a home and a family, to which they belong, and instead become a thing to be created, altered, and purchased to meet the desires of adults.
This deadly mutation begins with genetic customization, a subtle distortion of embryonic dignity. This occurs when we choose to preserve or end life based on intelligence, physical traits, or the absence of disease. We take it further when, dissatisfied with our own lot, we purchase someone else’s genetic potential in the form of sperm, eggs, or embryo. We overcome all or some of our undesirable traits by paying for better ones. Telling ourselves that this is best, this is humane, and most of all that this is progress.
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But customization is only the beginning of commodification. If children can be designed to look how we imagine, why can’t they be created to do what we need?
The truth is they can be, and they have.
There are children being intentionally severed from their biological mothers and fathers to go home with a same-sex couple so that these adults in non-traditional relationships can fulfill their desire to be parents even though their biology prevents that from being possible.
There are little boys being purchased from a freezer, gestated via a rented womb, and then pimped out for sexual pleasure by the men cosplaying as “Fathers.”
There are little girls being assigned through purchase and gestation to go home with elderly men and women too old to conceive, much less raise a child but too scared to be left alone in this world without a caregiver.
There are gametes being pulled from their deceased mothers and fathers to facilitate posthumous orphaned offspring, in the name of preserving the memory of lost loved ones.
There are 3 day old embryos being selected amongst a dozen siblings to be gestated and brought to life to save a parent or sibling. Being chosen for life because their bodies may be needed later for donation.
This leads us into the next step down this dark path: Children as Inventory.
Many people believe that growing babies in a lab is impossible. It may not be.
In 2016, scientists kept human embryos alive and developing in vitro up to 13 days post-fertilization, halting only because of a self-imposed “14-day rule” that frowns upon this unethical flirtation with embryonic torture. Yet, since then, ethicists have pushed to move this overton window by calling for the normalization of this practice. Demonstrating their commitment, in 2021 an Israeli scientist kept mouse embryos alive halfway through gestation in artificial wombs, openly suggesting they could do the same with human embryos.
Why this march toward artificial gestation? Because the mother who gestates the child will still almost certainly object to playing a part in this type of industrialized evil. Once the fertility industry can normalize fully growing a human in a lab, they will no longer be restricted by the inconvenient presence of any attached adults. They will finally cross the minimalist finish line reducing the involvement of human beings in reproduction all the way down to purchasable sperm and egg. These new children will no longer “belong” to anyone. They can now be created, gestated, and utilized for the sole purpose of completing a family, being used for labor, or even for supplying genetic material and organs.
Before you look away, or claim this last part is too distant a future to contemplate–here is the chilling reality: it’s already happening. Right now, we use those discarded embryos and the preciously created cells for “medical research.” This research includes their injection into human beings to try to repair or regenerate tissue and organs. Now ask yourself, if we were able to overcome our consciences and gestate a full grown human being would their tissue now be out of bounds? I believe we are just one layer of separation away from this becoming normal. Once we create children without biological attachment, and with no human involved in the process of gestation, there will be no one left to fight for them. When we reach that point—where human lives are manufactured at scale, nameless and faceless, for the benefit of those lucky enough to be born—what moral boundary will be left?
The consumer mentality and the death of sacrifice
How has society arrived here? Why are we increasingly isolated, lonely, unfulfilled, and addicted—yet intent to double down on the very mindset that got us here? I believe it is because we have abandoned responsibility and sacrifice as the foundational pathways for human flourishing.
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For centuries, society understood that family was not about self-fulfillment. Marriage and parenthood were not just personal choices. These were essential institutions that required sacrifice in order to build something greater than our individual selves.
But we now live in a consumer age, where the highest value is not duty, but personal satisfaction. And when the consumer mindset infects not just our material goods, but our relationships, our bodies, and our children, we should not be surprised when detachment, exploitation, and commodification follow.
In the past, when our desires conflicted with moral truth, we denied our desires. Now, when our desires conflict with moral truth, we deny reality. We denied that pleasure, sex, and reproduction were connected, so we created birth control to facilitate the illusion of “casual sex”. We denied that pregnancy was a natural outcome of sex, so we created abortion. We denied that a child belongs to a specific mother and father, so we created sperm banks, egg donors, IVF, and surrogacy.
We needed customizable products, so we denied that the unborn were people, and created embryo testing. And now we are beginning to deny that human beings must be born to parents at all, in hopes of creating a nameless class of unattached individuals created purely for the purpose of our utilization.
What happens when people can’t face what they’ve done?
As we normalize this child detachment, as more people participate in these systems—whether out of desperation, coercion, or ignorance—we must recognize a sobering truth: The deeper we go, the harder it will be to turn back.
When people make irreversible choices that harm others—especially their own children—many will not be able to bear the psychological weight of what they have done. Instead of acknowledging the harm, they will have to double down, normalize, and defend it–just to survive themselves.
We see this already with the transgender movement—parents who have sterilized their children or put them on puberty blockers often become the fiercest defenders of gender ideology. Why? Because the alternative, that they themselves are responsible for inflicting irreversible harm on their own child, is too painful to face.
The same will happen here. The more people who buy children, rent wombs, discard embryos, or use artificial reproductive technology to sever the natural bonds between parents and children, the more pressure there will be to silence dissent, suppress evidence, and declare that no harm has been done.
The only solution
There is only one safeguard against further moral collapse. There is only one firewall that can protect against the next iteration of Plato’s vision and the realization of total human detachment and commodification:
This is not a political opinion. This is not a religious doctrine. This is a self-evident human truth—one that has protected society for centuries, one that we took for granted until we began dismantling it piece by piece.
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If we do not stop this now, it will not just become harder to undo—it will become impossible. Because once enough people have done something terrible, they will fight to ensure it is never recognized as terrible. And when that happens, children will pay the ultimate price.
Reprinted with permission from Everyday Interpreter.
Josh Wood serves as the executive director of Them Before Us.
