Stelarc — a performance artist currently inhabiting the body of a 74-year-old Cypriot-Australian man — believes that the “human body, as we now know it, is obsolete.”
His work plays with the boundary between man and machine. In one piece, he gave members of the public control over his limbs via electronic muscle stimulators. In another, he designed a system that enables a physical body to animate a virtual body as it moves through cyberspace. In 2007, Stelarc had a cell-cultivated ear surgically attached to his left arm, with the hope of one day attaching a wireless listening device and allowing others to listen in, hearing as Stelarc hears. He dreams of a world in which we are no longer limited by our animal forms: “life would no longer commence with birth and end with death! Life would become a digital experience.”
Reading a recent piece in The New York Times titled ‘The Fight for Fertility Equality’, it seems that a new movement of pro-surrogacy campaigners are thinking along distinctly Stelarcian lines:
Still in its infancy, this movement envisions a future when the ability to create a family is no longer determined by one’s wealth, sexuality, gender or biology… They argue that people — gay, straight, single, married, male, female — are not infertile because their bodies refuse to cooperate with baby making.
Ron Poole-Dayan, the founder and executive director of an organisation called Men Having Babies, sees his movement’s objectives as simply the next logical step in the fight for equality, following on from the successful campaign to legalise gay marriage in America. He argues that the barriers gay men face in having children are social, rather than physical, and that assumptions to the contrary are bitterly “hetero-centric.”
Poole-Dayan and other fertility equality campaigners insist not only that commercial surrogacy should be fully legalised, but also that medical insurance companies should cover the costs. Some employers already offer so-called ‘fertility benefits’, paying for egg freezing, IVF, and surrogacy — a perk that is increasingly common in the tech sector. Fertility equality campaigners would like to see this extended, thereby allowing anyone, no matter their income, sex, sexual orientation, or relationship status, to have a child that is genetically related to them.
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