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A lot of sputtering disgust, and not much in the way of rational argument that I can see.
I am a doctor, my life's work is healing people, extending their healthy lives and keeping sickness and death at bay. I'm just less fundamentally incoherent than people who can perform such a duty and still not be explicitly transhumanist.
I applaud surrogacy. As far as I'm concerned, two people making uncoerced positive sum (to them) transactions is something eminently desirable, and if I find a specific case reprehensible, that's no grounds for me to stick my nose into their business. Someone suffering from infertility (or simply unable or unwilling to childbear) gets the gift of parenthood, and someone with a functional uterus gets a big chunk of cash, and a baby ends up with devoted and well off parents who are immensely motivated to care for it. Neither you nor I have any grounds to meddle, and I feel the same visceral disgust at your disgust as you do for people not harming you in the least.
If my libertarian tendencies weren't obvious enough, I also fully support people doing whatever the hell they want with their bodies, to the extent it doesn't outright harm others. You want to chop off your balls? Go ahead fam. Replace your nipples with subwoofers and your bones with titanium? Fuck my shit up. Not my business, not that I'd want to say no in the first place.
Despite my transhumanism, I don't endorse the modern transgender movement! Most of it appears to be pure social contagion in the mentally unwell, and even the best modern surgical and pharmaceutical interventions are far too crude to make you but a superficial mockery of the other sex.
But that's today's failure, not an indefinite moratorium on sex transition. If we had the technology to safely (ideally reversibly) transition people to the opposite sex at a cellular level, such that they were functionally indistinguishable from someone assigned the same gender at birth, then I see no reason to object! I wouldn't fuck a transwoman today, but I would fuck this hypothetical one, because all of my current objections such as the uncanny appearance, smell, texture, hormonal imbalance, infertility etc become utterly irrelevant.
At any rate, I don't expect to successfully argue you out of your aesthetic objections, I simply don't see a better reason for them than that you simply don't like it. That's perfectly fine, your utility function is yours and brooks no argument, but that should at least be obvious to others without such conditions.
That's all very fine, but the obvious point remains - surrogacy isn't like renting an apartment together, it creates by design a third human being, one with it's own interests, but unable to argue for them. As responsible adults, we're obliged to consider them too. it's not just an aesthetic. In addition, the modern cancer that is 'human rights' discourse offers no answers.
Ah yes, normal childbirth, I've heard of that too.
I am no fan of the usual mysticism around human rights, as if they fell fully formed from the heavens, but at the very base level, following the trends and consensus derived from- normal childbirth, Caesarean sections, pregnancy screening for birth defects, IVF etc, in the order in which they become ever less "natural" without really compromising the wellbeing of the future child.
I'm sure we can cobble together a reactionary or two to harangue me about IVF if we really wanted to, but that doesn't change the fact that a once controversial and deeply "unnatural" procedure has simply become unremarkable and only a true monster would object now. I can't really see a harm to the unborn child, barring marginal increases in birth defect rates that can be screened for, so once again, my libertarian self can't find an objection at all.
The day fetal alcohol syndrome becomes a punishable offense on the mother's part is when I accept that society's schizophrenic attitude towards responsible adults making their own child rearing decisions is simply coherent, because it's not. If you can let them get away with such harm to their future offspring without putting a gun to their head or carting them off to rehab, then you have no leg to stand on when upper middle class, well educated and conscientious couples engage in surrogacy.
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