Pregnancy in the Age of the Machine

In 2023, nowhere is sacred. Not even the womb.

Our third child is now three weeks old.

Things change so fast during pregnancy and early infancy that most parents struggle to remember much of it. I feel I am particularly bad with this period though. This is probably mostly a gender thing, but my wife spent this whole pregnancy reminding me of how it compared to her other two. Occasionally, something would rocket back to me, but largely I just nodded and took her word for it.

Something I felt viscerally aware of this time around however—and which will stick in my memory—was the reality of pregnancy inside the Machine. 

The Machine, as I mentioned a couple of posts ago, is that “tendency within us, made concrete by power and circumstance, which coalesces in a huge agglomeration of power, control and ambition.” And the Machine, by and large, takes its form through technology—both old and new. The Machine can’t help itself. If an opportunity arises to seize power, to gain control, or to realise ambition through the use of technology, it will take it. The Machine is not necessarily modern—it is nearly as old as the hills, in fact. But modern technology has taken us into the Machine’s true pomp. If technology can grab something by the throat today, it will. My wife’s third pregnancy was no exception.

Our first child was born in 2018; our second in 2020—neither that long ago. And yet I feel as if the Machine did not intrude on us nearly as much during those two pregnancies. Perhaps we just got lucky (certainly possible—UK maternity care is wildly inconsistent across the country). Or, perhaps I simply wasn’t as conscious of all this back then—certainly, I didn’t encounter the idea until first reading Paul Kingsnorth’s conversion story in First Things in 2021. But a few moments of this third pregnancy really felt like they would not have happened to us even just a few years ago.

The first was early on, during a home visit my wife had from a midwife. My wife declined the various tests offered to detect potential Down’s Syndrome, as we have done during all our pregnancies. The midwife’s shock, apparently, was visible. She got flustered. It seemed fairly likely that no-one had ever declined these tests to her before. Finally, she collected herself and said: “Well, of course, you’ll be allowed to continue with the pregnancy.”

Allowed to continue with the pregnancy.

“Allowed”—by whom exactly? Of course, I must treat this midwife generously: I don’t think she believed the state has a right to end a woman’s pregnancy if she won’t screen for Down’s. She was doubtless trying to reassure my wife, lest she think that refusing the test would get her in trouble somehow. But her underlying assumptions were fairly clear. And they were entirely of the Machine.