by Gabrielle Temaat
Two professors discussed dismantling capitalism and electing a female president to restore reproductive rights, and warned of a dystopian future with “cannibalism” and “forced breeding camps,” at an event held Wednesday at Arizona State University.
“Jenny Irish’s HATCH: A Speculative Future for Reproductive Rights” was held both in person and via Zoom.
It featured Irish (pictured above, right), a poet and English professor at ASU, as well as Professor Angela Lober (pictured above, left), director of the Academy of Lactation Programs at ASU’s Edson College of Nursing and Health Innovation.
Professor Lober opened the one-hour moderated discussion by stating she “got into this space because the United States hates women and everything the female body does.”
She said she is concerned about the state of maternal healthcare in the country, citing the existence of “maternity care deserts” and the lack of comprehensive care for mothers and children.
Economic interests often override health concerns, as evidenced by the lack of financial incentives in breastfeeding and maternal-child health, Lober said.
Irish, when asked about her concerns for the future of abortion laws, said she fears the possibility of “forced breeding camps” and “cannibalism” driven by a lack of resources.
“So much of our reality points toward those futures,” Irish said.
Lober added: “The balance between hope and despair is an everyday experience for me.”
“A couple years ago I never thought Roe v. Wade would be overturned. How could we possibly do that?” Lober said.
Asked what they would do to restore reproductive rights, Lober said “dismantle capitalism” and “elect a female president.”
Irish said any time Americans have an “external entity” asserting control over women’s bodies, they should all be “terrified.” She said the country should consider how “forcing women into motherhood” affects the broader community.
Irish also talked about transgenderism and said there is an “all-out assault on the trans community and people’s ability to self-identify.”
“It is disgusting, immoral, and wrong,” she said.
The scholars also took questions from the 15 or so students in the audience as well as over Zoom. When asked about the decline in birth rates globally, Lober said it doesn’t “bother” her, as “we are overpopulated.”
She also said she encourages her children not to have children of their own.
Karina Fitzgerald, the event coordinator, said the goal of the event was “to encourage students that are following creative pursuits or other types of worldbuilding to simply explore other elements that they haven’t thought of before in their writing, or other ways to challenge themselves in creative processes.”
“It’s an element of worldbuilding that people might not think of a lot when they are creating fictional stories,” Fitzgerald told The College Fix in an interview. “It’s a good exercise for students to get in the practice of.”
The event was co-hosted by ASU Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, which hosts events that aim to design “a future keyed to human flourishing,” according to its website.
The event description states the “prose poems in Jenny Irish’s newest collection, Hatch, trace the consciousness of an artificial womb that must confront the role she has played in the continuation of the dying of the human species.”
“This apocalyptic vision engages with the most pressing concerns of this contemporary sociopolitical moment: reproductive rights, climate crises, and mass extinction; gender and racial bias in healthcare and technology; disinformation, conspiracy theories, and pseudoscience; and the possibilities and dangers of artificial intelligence.”
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Gabrielle Temaat is an assistant editor at The College Fix. She holds a B.S. in economics from Barrett, the Honors College, at Arizona State University.
Photo “Angela Lober” by Angela Lober and “Jenny Irish” is by Jenny Irish.
