I ran across a tweet the other day that lodged itself in my mind like a thorn. It was from Genevieve Gluck, a name that occasionally floats across the radar of gender-critical feminism, usually sounding some kind of alarm about the degradation of womanhood at the hands of progressivism.

This particular post included a short, gut-wrenching video clip. It’s a disturbing video to watch, so I won’t post it directly in this article. But in the clip, a surrogate mother, writhing in the sweaty, primal agony of labor, reaches—again and again—for the baby she’s pushing out of her body.

Her instinct, her God-wired maternal reflex, is to touch, to hold, to bond. But she is repeatedly denied. Gloved hands keep shoving her arms back. Nurses—cold, clinical, dutifully obedient—intervene, as if she were trying to steal a wallet instead of connect with the very life that just exited her womb.

She isn’t allowed to touch her own child. Not because of some biohazard concern. Not because of a medical emergency. But because the child doesn’t belong to her. She was just the vessel. The rental. The incubator. The laborer.

The comments underneath were a digital buffet of ideological confusion. Some rightly called it what it was—exploitation, dehumanization, commodification of the most sacred act on earth. But many, far too many, looked at the scene rightly with horror, but many, including Gluck herself, wrongly attributed such atrocities to “capitalism.”

But that mother—ripped away from her own flesh and blood—wasn’t suffering under laissez-faire economics. She was suffering under an idea. A poison. A cultural cancer wrapped in the rhetorical gauze of bodily autonomy, feminist liberation, and Marxist materialism. What we witnessed wasn’t capitalism gone wrong. It was ideology gone rancid.

Let’s not play dumb. We all know what’s happening here. This isn’t some accidental byproduct of market dynamics. This is the fruit of an intentionally cultivated worldview that treats motherhood as a negotiable service, children as bespoke products, and the womb as real estate.

This is the moral landfill produced when feminism unshackled womanhood from biology, when Marxism reduced the family to an oppressive economic unit, and when postmodernism took a sledgehammer to truth and nature and called it liberation.

This grotesque industry—because that’s what it is, an industry—has nothing to do with free enterprise in its biblical form. It has everything to do with the cultural scaffolding built by people who hate order, hate nature, and, if we’re being honest, hate God.

You want to blame capitalism? Let’s talk about where this really came from. Let’s talk about the Bolsheviks, who dreamt of erasing the nuclear family so the state could raise children.

Let’s talk about Kollontai, who envisioned a world where women no longer needed to be mothers, just cogs in the collective.

Let’s talk about Maoist China, where the government told women when and how many times they could reproduce, and backed it up with forced sterilizations and late-term abortions.

Is that capitalism too?

Or how about the feminist prophets of womb-splitting liberation? Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone—these weren’t market enthusiasts. These were ideological revolutionaries who believed the only way for a woman to be free was to divorce herself from motherhood entirely.

Pregnancy, they claimed, was oppression.

So now we’ve got women convinced that “empowerment” means monetizing their uterus for someone else’s pleasure and convenience. We’ve come full circle—from rejecting the idea that a woman is property to celebrating when she rents out her reproductive organs on a contract.

This isn’t empowerment. It’s Enlightenment-era slavery dressed up in a hospital gown and euphemized with words like “choice” and “reproductive justice.” When a woman is told she can’t touch her own baby, that’s not capitalism—it’s the end result of a worldview that treats human nature as a glitch to be corrected.

And don’t give me this tripe about the free market. Yes, there’s money involved. But money isn’t the villain. Money is the vehicle. The driver is the philosophy behind it. In a society guided by Christian morality, there are things you simply don’t buy and sell. People, for instance. But in the godless petri dish of modern progressivism, everything is transactional. Feelings are currency. Identity is marketing. And babies? Just another product line.

The reason that surrogate mother was denied a moment of human connection wasn’t because Adam Smith scribbled something in a dusty old book about the division of labor. It was because some postmodern bioethicist, steeped in the sludge of critical theory, decided that the commissioning parents’ feelings outweighed a mother’s instincts.

We’ve redefined womanhood into oblivion, torn down the idea of maternal sacrifice, and replaced it with a cold ledger. And then we act shocked when women are treated like warm incubators instead of sacred image-bearers.

No, this isn’t capitalism. This is Frankenstein feminism. This is secularism in stilettos and drag. This is what happens when a culture rips children from the womb through abortion, then sells access to the womb through surrogacy. It’s a seamless system of death and desecration. First we kill them. Then we rent them. All in the name of freedom.

The irony would be hilarious if it weren’t so incredibly evil.

Capitalism, at least in its biblical sense, is restrained by morality. It’s not the casino free-for-all that progressives claim. It thrives on the assumption that people are self-governing, accountable to a higher law.

In a moral market, a woman wouldn’t need to sell her womb because she’d be cared for, supported by family, church, and community. In a moral market, children wouldn’t be bartered over because they’d be treasured as gifts from God—not trophies for affluent weirdos.

But a moral market is impossible when the culture is immoral. You could give us the best economy in history (and we had it, for a time), but if the soul of the people is rotten, they’ll use their freedom to build empires of cruelty. Not because capitalism made them do it—but because the worldview underneath told them it was their “right.”

So let’s stop blaming capitalism for the sins of Marx. Let’s stop using the language of victimhood to excuse the architects of this madness. The problem isn’t free enterprise. The problem is the ideological cocktail of feminist relativism, Marxist collectivism, and postmodern nihilism. And the hangover is here.

This surrogate mother—this real, grieving woman—was not oppressed by the market. She was oppressed by a culture that told her she could loan out her body like a car lease and not pay a spiritual toll. She believed the lie. And now her arms are empty.

That’s not a free market. That’s bondage.

And the chains weren’t forged by capitalism. They were forged by ideas that hate what is true, what is good, and what is beautiful.

In short, they were forged by hell.