And I'm only focusing on a bit of it, the part about birth. Her friend shows her some New Agey, pro-natural birth videos and now she's advocating the overthrow of modern medicine. What with the number of induced births, caesarean sections, and episiotomies, and the rather large percentage of women who died during childbirth before such procedures became available, taking the statement "The body that made this baby knows how to get it out" as a mantra is optimistic at best, and dangerously naïve at worst. Obviously, being able to give birth without undergoing any of that or needing an epidural is the best way to go, but putting all of your faith in your body to do the job is just as foolish as putting all of your faith in your body to fight off pneumonia.
And that's only part of what made me get up on this soapbox: "Maybe next time I'll talk about the evils of Western Civilization's mind/body dualistic split."
WHAT? What kind of blathering nonsense is that? So, what, I as an individual entity am determined by everything down to my toenails? Ridiculous. What makes me me is a bunch of electro-chemical reactions in that lump of goo in my head. My personality is not altered if I lose my appendix. The body is a cleverly designed transport/life support system for my brain. But it's far from perfect. It gets old, it dies, and it's so very organic. As Chaucer wrote: "O wombe! O bely! O stynkyng cod! / Fulfilled of donge and of corrupcioun..."
Consider the mind and body as one inseparable thing, and you're stuck. It dies, you die, that's it, and you'd better hope there really is an afterlife. But consider the possibility of separating the two, and then you've got options. Brains in jars? Sure, but that would get old after a while. The simplest thing is just to add mechanisms to the body to make it work more efficiently (or at all), or just to add new features. Of course, with her blanket condemnation of medical science, Wanton Hussy must believe that even adding a pacemaker to our bodies would sap our souls and turn us into evil robots (whereas we know that Mr. Cheney was like that before he had a pacemaker installed). No, we certainly can't do anything to our bodies! It just isn't natural!
As for me, I'd like to upgrade existing features: Add infrared vision, make the whole digestion thing more efficient, add some hard memory to my brain and store a few reference books and a couple of languages. Ultimately, of course, I'm not big on dying. I'm all for transferring my brain into a waiting cloned host body when my body wears out. Or as Arthur C. Clarke described, screw that organic crap and go for a machine body. Ok, that's a paraphrase. But as long as I can transfer that collection of chemical reactions into a new host and be sure that it's me, and not just a copy of me, it sounds like a great idea.
Unless we develop faster-than-light drives, our old stinky organic bodies aren't going to be going on many interstellar voyages. And that is the ultimate goal. Ok, that and being able to play games on our onboard computers during boring meetings.