In 1932, a man sat down and imagined our future. He gave us a world with no disease. No poverty. No war. A world where children weren't born — they were made. Designed in laboratories. Screened. Sorted. Optimized. Perfected. And everyone in that world was happy. Everyone agreed. No one objected.
Aldous Huxley called it Brave New World. We called it a warning.
I'm here to tell you the warning is coming true. And the most dangerous part isn't the laboratories. It's that we've agreed to call it progress — and we've decided that anyone who disagrees should be quiet.
What is progress?
So let me ask the question no one wants to ask out loud: what is progress? That word gets used like it belongs to one side. Progress. Forward. The future. As if history only moves one way, and anyone standing in its path is standing in the past.
But progress was never just "whatever is newest." A society doesn't become good because its technology got faster. Progress has a test. And the test is this: how well do we protect the ones who cannot protect themselves?
By that test — the only test that has ever mattered — we are not moving forward. We are going backward. And we are dragging women and children with us.
The word they made famous
Now, here is what I've noticed. The people driving this believe with their whole hearts that they are the heroes. Good people. Many of them women who have fought their entire lives for justice. And many of them admire a certain woman — a justice — whose single most famous word was dissent. Who wore that word like armor. Who taught a generation that when the powerful are wrong, you rise, and you say: I dissent.
So I find it strange. Because today, the moment anyone dissents from their orthodoxy, that person is branded a bigot. Silenced. Told they're on the wrong side of history.
Dissent was noble when it was theirs. Why is it hateful when it's mine?
What I'm dissenting from
Consider the medicine. We're told the science is settled — that puberty blockers and hormones for children are safe, proven, compassionate. But the countries that invented this practice are the ones slamming on the brakes. England ran a four-year independent review, found the evidence "remarkably weak," and stopped routinely giving these drugs to children. Sweden pulled back. Finland pulled back.
The pioneers looked at their own results — and turned around. That's not the past resisting the future. That's the future looking at what it did to children, and flinching.
That is not progress. That is regression wearing progress's clothes.
The machine underneath
But there is a deeper machine underneath all of this. Because puberty blockers, designer embryos, children screened and selected like produce — these aren't separate stories. They're one story. And the engine driving it is a marketplace. We are turning the making of children into a market.
And here's what you must understand about markets. A market never just adds an option. A market competes. And in competition, one product edges out the other.
Nobody woke up one morning and decided to kill Main Street. No villain plotted the death of the mom-and-pop store. Target and Walmart simply offered something cheaper, faster, more optimized — and the incentives did the rest. Thousands of small, human, irreplaceable things vanished, and no one had to lift a finger to destroy them. The market did it quietly, one purchase at a time.
Now apply that to a child.
Once you can design a baby — screen it, optimize it, select it for the traits you want — the designed child becomes the premium product. And the ordinary child? The one conceived in love, carried in a womb, born with all its beautiful unknowns? That child becomes the budget option. The lesser model. The mom-and-pop store in a Walmart world.
No one has to plot the end of the womb-born child. The market will do it the way it always does — quietly, one choice at a time, until we look up and the human way of doing this has simply been edged out of business.
That is not progress. That is regression — and it is coming for the most female power in all of human experience: the power to bring life into the world.
The dissent
So let me be very clear about what I am doing here.
I am dissenting.
I dissent from the idea that we optimize children like products. I dissent from handing permanent, irreversible decisions to kids too young to make them. I dissent from calling the womb obsolete and calling that liberation. Not because I hate anyone — because I love these children too much to stay silent while the crowd calls surrender progress.
There is a girl out there right now. Fourteen. Certain. In pain. And the adults around her hand her a permanent answer to a temporary storm. By twenty-two she understands what was taken. And she cannot get it back.
And there is a woman out there who was told that outsourcing her body and optimizing her children was liberation. Who was told it was progress. We owe both of them the truth. And the truth requires someone willing to dissent.
Because the most chilling thing about Huxley's world was never the laboratories. It was that no one was left to dissent. Everyone agreed. Everyone smiled. That is the world we build the day we decide that disagreement is a sin.
The test of a society was never how fast it could move. It was whether it protected its children while it did — and whether it still had the courage to say, when everyone else was cheering: I dissent.
That is the test in front of us. And we do not have to fail it.