Womb raider.

On October 17th 2015, the first onstupidity.com post emerged. Kicking, screaming, bloodied, shitted and repulsively grotesque in a rather vivid, medieval sort of a way. Who knew it would grow up to be the towering failure it is today? Since that cold autumnal afternoon (I can’t remember if it was cold, but it feels like it should have been, like when a ghost walks into the room) all kinds of mind-blowing, tilt-altering, game-changing events have happened and I’ve been generous enough to proffer my dubious opinion on at least a handful of them. The rest is just waffle and offal and assorted leakage. But at least it’s my leakage. It’s leaked out of me. And through some strange combination of time, boredom and an intermittent application of effort this post just happens to be number 501, which means the last one was number 500 (please don’t try to tell me this blog doesn’t provide an educational service, albeit a shabby, accidental version of one).

In fairness, 500 posts is quite a lot. It’s certainly a lot more than, say, 12 posts; though I must remember that size has never been everything. If you like you could say the ineffably grim infant that was born in 2015 is now a fat, lazy eight year old: ruddy cheeked, slack-jawed, vacant eyed; embarrassed to change for PE at school but always up for a second helping of chips. A bit like stools, with the passing of time and assorted distractions the posts you may have been unfortunate enough to read seem to have become less frequent but also longer and certainly thicker. You should at least be pleased not to have to read the whole lot of them at once because when I looked a minute ago there were 526,530 words to ingest over 1153 pages (Calibri (body) font, size 12, with each post starting on a new page), which is enough to give you crippling indigestion followed by prolonged bouts of painful wind. But the nice thing about my child is that it’s not a real child and so the fatter and less productive it gets at least has no tangible impact on society. It’s also been a lot cheaper than having a real child and I’m less likely to bore the shit out of you by talking about it as if you care.

Which takes us neatly onto the question of where to draw the line when it comes to wanting to a have a child. Sort of. History is smeared with instances of adults so desperate for their own children that they have resorted to bribery, theft, blackmail and murder. It would be too simple to say that women want children more than men simply because they possess the biological kit necessary to deliver the finished goods. The truth is men can get just as silly and squiffy when it comes to making a family and if you put a suitably ambitious pair together there’s a chance the whole thing will go far too far; just look at that selfish pair of pricks in Morecombe – Sue and Noel Radford – who have a clutch that, unbelievably and pointlessly, numbers 22. Most couples who really, really want kids, y’know, to pass on their insipid DNA or rekindle their love or as a ‘project’ or just so they have kids so they can talk about their kids to people who aren’t in the slightest bit interested, just go ahead and have them – apparently that’s how God made us. But what about when God makes a boo-boo and traditional baby making techniques don’t work? Well then that’s where science turns up and tries to do things that even God hadn’t thought of. I don’t know why but I’ve known quite a few couples who have had to resort to very expensive bouts of IVF treatment and while I am generally happy for them I envy them not one bit. And just think, thanks to the invention of the freezer and assorted other science stuff , there are rooms deliberately stuffed with jars stuffed full of countless eggs and spunk just waiting to find a purpose in life. Just waiting to be life itself.

Of course, you can always resort to less extreme avenues such as surrogacy (a desperation within a couple so great they’re happy to have a child that is only half theirs) or adoption (a desperation within a couple so great they’re happy to have a child that has literally got nothing to do with them). Adoption in particular is a very strange concept and throws up all kinds of questions about who should be allowed to have children and who should be allowed to raise the children of people who should never have had them in the first place. Adoption is a necessary and sometimes thankless process but is also so tightly regulated that for a perfectly eligible couple to achieve their goal is marginally harder than for a chump-dumb hillbilly to successfully operate a helicopter with his teeth using instructions that are only in Chinese. Personally it all seems so hard, to want children so much and be denied at every turn. Still, I suppose you could always go the easy route and get a womb transplant.

This week the UK has seen it’s first successful womb transplant. By ‘successful’ they mean they’ve taken a womb from one person and put it into another person and now they have to see if it works as a functioning womb and can create a healthy, bouncing baby (forgive me for simplifying this down to the bare bones), and I would say that only then should we be realistic enough to use the word ‘successful’. I’m not a great fan of transplants. I find them a bit creepy, and I’m not just talking about wombs. I’d be equally sniffy about a lung transplant or an ear transplant, just as I would the thought of walking around with someone else’s testicles swinging between my legs. Science is all very good at intervening in the things that nature gets wrong but I can’t help thinking that some wrong’s are best left as they are. The two women involved are sisters, which makes some sense but doesn’t make it all of a sudden a better idea. The elder sister has had two children and that’s enough for her, so why not just do the noble thing and pass on your womb so that others can have their hopes and dreams fuelled to breaking point before someone takes a match to them? Something, somewhere, has been very lost in translation.

My prediction is that it will all end in tears. Great if it doesn’t, but no surprise if it does. The surgical team (nine of them, in case you wondered) in the news all look very happy with themselves, with the exception of one chap who looks haunted by what he has just helped to do; that what’s just happened is exactly the sort of thing that would happen at the start of an unusually stomach-turning horror film. Either that or he’s just exhausted from spending the last 17 performing a ridiculous operation that will only result in a huge surge in demand for used wombs in good condition, by women at the end of their baby making tether. And all on the NHS. Naturally (if that’s the right word) there is some chance this second hand womb will work out a treat and produce a child, but such will be the elevated status granted this miracle birth that the kid will very likely turn out to be a spoiled twat, called something like Bentley or Aurora, who will suckle greedily from the wrong breasts until they are 14 and bring dinner parties to an abrupt halt by suddenly shouting out “come on Mum, show us your womb!”. All that for very expensive surgery that isn’t even life saving. Whatever next? A man getting a womb transplant? It’ll probably happen sooner or later.

G B Burton. 23.08.2023

Footnote: I could have used the word ‘uterus’ but in truth that name is even less appealing than ‘womb’. Who comes up with these words? Actually, don’t tell me – it’ll be Latin or something.