Published February 20, 2025
Britain’s Daily Mail recently reported how around one hundred young Thai women were kept against their will, pumped full of hormones, and subjected to having their eggs forcibly harvested every month, to be sold on the black market by Chinese criminals. The women were lured to a farm in the eastern European country of Georgia under the impression that they were to act as surrogate mothers for couples who could not have children. The story is horrific, involving the reduction of these women to the equivalent of farm animals. But the question of what exactly it is that constitutes this reduction is perhaps instructive.
The Hungarian philosopher György Lukács argued that under the logic of industrial capitalism, the commodity form becomes the universal category for understanding society. Behind this rebarbative Marxist jargon lies a very simple idea: Industrial capitalism transforms the moral imagination of society so that everything, from a paperclip to a human person, comes to be valued in monetary terms and thus as things that can be bought and sold. All become commodities, exchangeable for cash.
Lukács’s point arises from his Hegelian Marxism, but it captures something of our late modern, technologically dominated existence that is separable from his revolutionary politics. In a world where consumption is the key to social status and where personal happiness is the moral imperative, there is a powerful tendency to treat everything as instrumental to these ends.
The human battery farm in Georgia indicates that modern reproductive technology is taking this to a new level. I have noted before how modern fertility technology tilts society toward treating babies as things. That is an integral part of the philosophy that the technology brings with it. It makes babies to order, creating a level of control of the reproductive process that is absent in nature. And this process also requires that the child becomes an object of contract law, both for its own protection and for those of the other parties—the parents, biological and otherwise—involved.
But it is not only children who end up as commodities in this process. The women who donate the eggs or allow their wombs to carry someone else’s child have voluntarily allowed their own bodies, and thus their own selves, to become objects. As individuals they may have done this with good intentions—to help an infertile couple, for example. But the means by which they have done so reinforces a broader cultural intuition that sees children and women as commodities. When childbearing becomes separated from motherhood, both mother and child are reduced to components in a transaction.
In light of this, while the human battery farm in Georgia might seem extreme, it is consistent with modern reproductive logic. Women freely donate eggs all the time. IVF is becoming increasingly normalized. Just this Tuesday, Trump signed an executive order to expand access to IVF. What disgusts people about this story isn’t so much the egg farming itself, but the deception and coercion of the women involved.
Does the coercion make a significant moral difference? Of course it does. These women are being treated like battery hens in a manner that obviously degrades their humanity. They have had their freedom taken from them and their bodies forcibly turned into objects by those who value them solely for the eggs they can harvest. But in another sense, the bigger question here is: What constitutes these women’s humanity? Is it only their autonomy, their freedom to use their bodies in accordance with their own wishes? Or does it also involve an understanding of themselves as embodied persons such that anything that militates against this is in itself dehumanizing? The detachment of their eggs from their own potential motherhood and subsequent insertion into the market as goods to be exchanged does precisely that. The broader concept of women and children as commodities is unaffected by the question of whether they were coerced or acted voluntarily.
These women were the human equivalent of battery hens. Their treatment was sickening, and the perpetrators will hopefully face justice and be suitably punished. But sadly, society has already legitimized the commodification of women with regard to reproduction. That is the logic of surrogacy and egg donation. Just as Lukács’s commodity form now arguably applies to children because society aspires to control the very mystery of conception itself, so too it must apply to women. The specific loss of autonomy on this Georgian human battery farm is appalling. But the deeper cultural catastrophe here is the commodification of the human person, which lured these victims to the farm in the first place. This week’s executive order only reinforces this deeper, dehumanizing trend within our society.
Carl R. Trueman is a fellow in EPPC’s Evangelicals in Civic Life Program, where his work focuses on helping civic leaders and policy makers better understand the deep roots of our current cultural malaise. In addition to his scholarship on the intellectual foundations of expressive individualism and the sexual revolution, Trueman is also interested in the origins, rise, and current use of critical theory by progressives. He serves as a professor at Grove City College.
