A local marriage and family advocate is urging the Chinese government to seek God, as the country struggles to increase its birthrate. The Asian nation recently announced its intention to design robots that can carry a foetus and give birth.
News that China will be designing these robots with artificial wombs has gone viral. The “pregnancy robot” was conceptualised by Dr. Zhang Qifeng, founder of Kaiwa Technology in Guangzhou, China, and is expected to debut next year. The robot is intended to carry a baby for about 10 months before giving birth and will cost an estimated 100,000 yuan (approximately $14,000 USD).
Founder of #MarriageMattersJamaica, Philippa Davies, sees the latest development as another desperate attempt by the Chinese government to boost population numbers, which have been declining rapidly over the last few decades.
“This development of using technology to try and have babies is probably evidence of the desperation that the Chinese government is feeling right now; any which way in order to have babies. But this is destined to fail, for the same reason that the one-child policy was destined to fail, because the Biblical design is that you need a loving man and woman in a loving relationship, ideally married, to extend and express that love by procreating and having children,” she told the Freedom Come Rain newspaper.
“Children are human beings; they have feelings, so the same mechanical, dehumanising worldview that initiated and drove the one-child policy, where you see your citizens not as persons with value but as machines and agents to be manipulated and exploited for your economic and political global vision, it is that same mindset behind creating a technology to give birth or to house and incubate babies. But it will fail because human life is of great value, and those babies are going to need somebody to love them and care for them,” said Davies, who is an attorney-at-law.
The Chinese government had implemented the draconian one-child policy in the 1970s and then increased it to two children per family in 2015. The government enforced these policies by providing financial and employment incentives to those who complied and implemented mass abortion and mass sterilisation initiatives to keep the birth rate low. Both policies created serious implications for China’s demographic and economic future, and so the three-children policy was introduced in 2021 and allowed couples to have up to three children. Despite this latest policy, couples are still hesitant to have multiple children due to several factors, such as the high cost of living and career aspirations.
According to Davies, the Chinese population control efforts show that whilst you can use force to prevent people from having children, you cannot use force to make them have children.
“You have educated a population to turn against what is natural and normal and expected – that men and women would have sex and have babies. You then stifled the natural, normal urge and outcome of man, woman in marriage relationships. You have taught them to turn against what’s normal and natural and to devalue children, even to hate procreation, and having seeded that, this is now the fruit,” she said, before urging China to turn to the God of the Bible.
“He alone will be able to change hearts and minds and bring about the hope and redemption that they are seeking through these man-made technological efforts. It is really God who can turn the hearts of men and women back to His original design, and this is a message not just for China, but all the nations that are struggling and are trying to be creative, innovative in trying to raise their birth rate. Go back to basics, and that “basics” is the World of God,” Davies reasoned.
CHILDREN ARE NOT COMMODITIES!
China has invested heavily in robotics, but some experts have expressed concerns about the potential health and ethical risks of having a robot bring a child to term.
“Some people don’t want to get married but still want a ‘wife’; some don’t want to be pregnant but still want a child. So one function of our ‘robot wife’ is that it can carry a pregnancy,” Dr Zhang Qifeng, the scientist behind the manufacturing of the robot, was quoted as saying by Newsweek.
Jamaican counselling psychologist Carole Bridge believes the implications are far-reaching.
“Children would just be commodities – you take an egg and a sperm arbitrarily, and then if that results in a viable embryo, then you implant it in this robot. It doesn’t belong to a family but can be sold as a commodity for sexual use, for labour, or for all sorts of nefarious uses,” she said.
Bridge pointed to the importance of a baby bonding with its mother from in the womb.
“The whole structure of society as we know it would break down – no need for marriage, no nurturing of children to know God, siblings would not be together as [they are] bred for different purposes. We would have a psychotic society, as no one would be emotionally attached to anyone,” she predicted.