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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   33503 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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(Not directed at OP, just a general statement).

I cannot adequately express how vile I find this practice. To buy a child, to pay a woman to bring into this world a baby that (presumably) she doesn’t want so that you can take it from her breast forever, is to my mind one of the worst crimes that you can commit, and I can’t fathom why we don’t punish it accordingly.

It’s not much better if the buyers are an infertile male/female pair. Yes, at least the child will have a mother figure but you have knowingly taken it away from its actual mother, forever. As for the mother, a woman abandoning her child should be a tragic and rare fact of life, not a business practice.

And no, fucking around with eggs and sperm so that the child isn’t even related to the woman in whose womb it rests for 9 months doesn’t make it better. It’s a base practice designed to obfuscate the nature of the transaction.

Some people can’t have children. That’s just the way it is. ‘Solving’ it with prostitution and (from the child’s perspective) kidnapping is supremely selfish and from my perspective absolutely unacceptable in a society with any pretensions to morality.

Funny. I have the complete opposite problem. To me, the adopter is obviously the “actual mother,” and merits all the accolades and judgments we heap upon a woman who raises her own child.

I can see how the transactional part is unsavory in the same way that I might find an imperial harem objectionable. Commoditizing anything reproductive gets my hackles up. But that’s still not an objection to the legitimacy of adoption.

This does not seem like the right counterfactual to compare against.

In the absence of a gay couple doing this, what happens? The surrogate and egg donor (same or otherwise) don't have a kid. Neither does the couple.

In an actual kidnapping, the alternative is the kid actually living with his family. Here it's the kid not existing in the first place.

I just want to echo an agreement here. And also: what the hell is wrong with these women? You have a child. It grew inside of you for 9 months. It shares your DNA. It will cry until you come to feed and hold it.

I just don’t think it’s possible to explain to people who haven’t experienced it the bond that a child has with its mother (substantially different than its father). This woman had a kid, then sold it to two men, one of whom is the father.

This is so vile. I agree that I struggle to find something as vile as this. This is equivalent to severe child abuse, and is by all measures child trafficking.

Yes, at least the child will have a mother figure but you have knowingly taken it away from its actual mother, forever.

Such an utterly bizarre statement.

I don't know why this is bizarre. My understanding is that motherhood is a biological reality - children begin to bond with their mother in the womb, and it is distressing for them to be separated from their biological mother.

Now, obviously there may be some distressing scenarios where it is in the best interest of the child to separate them from the mother at birth. But that's a case of enacting a minor harm to prevent a major one, not a harmless move of convenience.

motherhood is a biological reality

This is correct. And Corvos would say that the person who shows up on a DNA test as the child's mother, and who raised him for eighteen years, isn't really his mother in favor of the surrogate. It's a bizarre attempt to retcon the English language in the service of the Online Right's pregnancy fetish.

Note that this is not the situation in the OP (two gay men). The child has been removed from the pregnancy-mother and from the genetic-mother. Most of the time I come across surrogacy it’s in this context.

And Corvos would say that the person who shows up on a DNA test as the child's mother, and who raised him for eighteen years, isn't really his mother in favor of the surrogate.

Although I do think that DNA (and other factors) probably plays a role in parent-child bonding, it would play no part in bonding with the mother in the womb, where the mother and child share a direct biological link and the child learns to recognize its mother's voice.

If someone kidnapped their identical twin's child as a newborn and raised them for 18 years, everything you said above would be true (and in fact, more true since the identical twin would probably have the voice of the mother), but I think most people would agree that they were not the mother's child. That's probably the direction Corvos is coming from.

It's a bizarre attempt to retcon the English language in the service of the Online Right's pregnancy fetish.

Typically the mother of a child is the one who gave birth to the child. There's no retcon here, it's just that technology has moved past what the English language originally contemplated.

As with a lot of this stuff, there's a crypto-class element to it. The low-class crack addict who gave up the baby hours after birth is a "mother" while the upper-class woman who raised the child for eighteen years isn't.

I don't see the relevance of your comment (adoption of existing children that would have gone unwanted / uncared-for) to this thread (surrogacy, commissioning a child that would not have come into this world “naturally”).

Are you trying to argue that the “muh trad”-posters in this thread are only secretly jealous of the rich gay jews commissioning the existence of children — that their sentiments here actually stem from class envy and their waxing on “playing Taboo”[colloquialism] around the word naturalism is just a front?

Some people can’t have children. That’s just the way it is. ‘Solving’ it with prostitution and (from the child’s perspective) kidnapping is supremely selfish and from my perspective absolutely unacceptable in a society with any pretensions to morality.

I know at least one woman (white, American) who "had" a child via gestational surrogacy--she is now both divorced and living about 4,800 miles (7,725 km) apart from her daughter. Life's a bitch.

Are you trying to argue that the “muh trad”-posters in this thread are only secretly jealous of the rich gay jews commissioning the existence of children

Not so much the rich gay Jews but upper-class people in general. They feel perfectly comfortable talking about the gay Jew, it's the blond haired, blue-eyed, highly educated, heterosexual, married WASP that they have an inferiority complex toward. Particularly when he's a Democrat or Mitt Romney-type Republican.

Take George_E_Hale's original comment:

I know at least one woman (white, American) who "had" a child via gestational surrogacy--she is now both divorced and living about 4,800 miles (7,725 km) apart from her daughter. Life's a bitch.

I'm not saying Hale's lying. But you can give a very misleading view of the world by selectively shining a light on some and not others. I don't know of statistics on those who use surrogates specifically, but given that nearly all are affluent I'd assume they have a lower rate of divorce and family instability than the general population. If you relied entirely on certain dissident right personalities, you'd get a very warped view of which classes have the most stable families in America. I don't think it's a coincidence that the opposition to assisted reproductive technology has grown at the same time that opposition to having kids out of wedlock has declined and at the same time that the GOP has increasingly become a political home for low-income, less-educated whites.

A few months ago, this story was going around Twitter about women using fertility treatments to conceive alone:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/27/doing-it-with-no-partner-easier-single-women-using-fertility-treatments

Twitter trads were saying muh brave new world, blah blah blah. Because that's their worldview, bad things come from affluent urban people in big cities working in universities and applying technology to the human body, doing all this evil unethical stuff because they stopped reading the Bible. While I thought "hey, wait a second, this idea of women raising children without fathers is not new. We're up to 40% of children born out of wedlock, disproportionately among the poor and non-white. Why aren't you talking about that?"

Speak plainly please, what are you suggesting here?

stands awkwardly in infertility

In which case, you have my sympathy. As I said:

It’s looking like I won’t be able to have one myself, which tears me up inside. But that doesn’t mean that anything you do to have a child is right or justified.

It’s not what I’d hoped for either, but there are other ways to contribute to society.

I appreciate your sympathy, but I will not appreciate the sentiment that it “is what it is” and one of my options is a moral stain on society and I should go to jail or something. The sentiment of this “sanctity” between a birth mother and child is completely lost on me. My mother gave birth to me, I suckled on her breasts and came out of her womb blah, blah, blah, and there was not a single maternal aspect about her and no amount of biological relation did anything to help that or my proceeding siblings; if anything, I had a better shot of being raised not like a dog with literally anyone else. And observing this pattern repeatedly among my friends and even my boyfriend makes the notion of biological motherhood being superior above all else a joke to me. I’ve seen enough mothers give birth to children they have as much maternal attachment to as a toddler does to their toy to be rid of the notion there’s something special made between a biological mother and her children that can’t be replicated in any other parenting situation.

You say youre not a troll, but this is a very wordy version of "Conservatism is bad because I hate my family.".

…how so?

It looks more like someone giving a counter example to a proposed definition. Nor does it say anything about the general principle of conservatism.

What definition? Im pretty sure the disagreement is substantive. And yes, she doesnt say anything about conservatism in general - various ways of hating your family are deployed against various parts of social conservatism, and this is one of them. Maybe it would have been clearer to say "instance" instead of "version"?

Yes, at least the child will have a mother figure but you have knowingly taken it away from its actual mother, forever.

I figured they were fighting over that bit: whether or not giving birth is enough to get the special status of “actual mother.” It’s a substantive disagreement but also a definitional one.

Okay, I see what you mean by “instance.”

I thought its about whether its ok to buy/sell a child/its production.

Honest question for religious conservatives here, why shouldn't secular people just straight up make your religion illegal, shut down your churches, burn your bibles, etc? Sure, advocating that would lead to a politically damaging public backlash. But is there a principled reason why they shouldn't do those things?

But is there a principled reason why they shouldn't do those things?

Yes. My religion is correct. Accordingly, doing any of that is evil.

But ignoring that, as hydroacetylene says, a classical liberal might think that it would be morally wrong to do that. Further, it's not like everyone will stop if you just ask nicely. You're going to have to kill a bunch of people. What benefit do you have that's worth killing a bunch of productive citizens?

Further, it's not like everyone will stop if you just ask nicely. You're going to have to kill a bunch of people. What benefit do you have that's worth killing a bunch of productive citizens?

This is correct. You should always consider that the people you try to repress might retaliate against you violently. Religious fundamentalists should likewise consider this before trying to force their religious morality on secular people. Some people here have said that physicians in Texas are refusing to treat pregnant women as part of some pro-choice political agenda. I doubt this, but if it's true I say, what'd you expect? You think they're demonic, well, the demonic people don't feel like giving you medical treatment.

the people you try to repress

What does "repress" mean?

before trying to force their religious morality on secular people

What does "religious morality" mean here? What are the bounds of "religious morality" vs. "definitely-not-religious-totally-universal morality"? If Raskolnikov says that he thinks that killing people is just fine, would you say that society as a whole is obligated to listen to him?

You think they're demonic

Where did I say this?

the demonic people don't feel like giving you medical treatment.

I have no problem with freedom of association, provided that we exist in a society with available alternatives.

I wonder why you wrote this here?

Under a classical liberal framework? Yes, the same principled reasons that it shouldn’t violently repress dozens or hundreds of other groups.

Under an NrX framework? Because we make good citizens and have demands compatible with flourishing societies. This doesn’t necessarily apply to other religions, but it seems to for Christianity.

Under a one-truth exclusivist framework, that reason would be ‘because we are right and you are wrong’. Obviously, you disagree. But that disagreement goes both ways.

Under a progressive move away from classical liberalism, even Scandinavia and the Netherlands prefer to tolerate their fundamentalist Christian minorities. I suspect a society willing/able to repress Christian fundamentalism is one you do not wish to live in; it probably takes China-tier totalitarianism.

I suspect a society willing/able to repress Christian fundamentalism is one you do not wish to live in; it probably takes China-tier totalitarianism.

This slippery-slope objection never seems to stop religious fundamentalists from demanding their morality be the basis of state policy, so you'll forgive me if I wonder whether it's being put fourth in good faith.

There are societies in existence right now which don’t oppress married straight people but which target the groups Christian fundamentalists don’t like. Like Poland is not as nice of a place to live as the USA but that’s because of needing to catch up after communism, not because of present day authoritarianism.

The societies which successfully oppress Christian fundamentalists are societies in which government oppression hits everyone, like China. No doubt Dutch Christian fundamentalists would prefer a government more favorable to them, but they get by just fine with laws far less favorable than in the USA. And the Netherlands has far more state capacity, and far fewer political protections for Christian fundamentalism, than the U.S., and attempts to repress it have failed.

I’m not going to pretend my bias doesn’t exist, but by the same token I won’t agree that it doesn’t have an empirical backing. You can have societies where Christian fundamentalism has a lot of influence, and even makes life very difficult for certain groups, without subjecting everyone to totalitarianism. Repressing fundamentalist Christianity seems to be a different thing- you can go full China, or you can tolerate it.

We're several years past Blue Tribe presidential candidates running on taxing religions they don't like. And of course, Japan successfully suppressed Christianity in the 1600s, Russia in the 1900s and China in the 1950s. In the more limited context of this forum, one of the things that beat the liberalism out of me was the multiple iterations of the circumcision argument, where my opposites argued that religions have conformed themselves to society before, and therefore there's no reason not to use state power to force them to conform arbitrarily in the future. Nor is my opposition to this attitude principled; I'm happy to argue on behalf of the Jews, but I would not be willing to extend the same toleration for the more extreme forms of female genital mutilation, much less Aztec blood sacrifice.

It is entirely obvious that there is no secular, materialist reason not to ban a given religion. We ban harmful things all the time, always have and always will, and there is no objective definition of "harm" for people to resort to in situations of disagreement. It is trivial to generate a definition where conservative Christianity (or drinking alcohol, or playing video games, or teaching women to read, & etc) are serious threats that require the power of the state to suppress.

More generally, tolerance is not a moral precept. There are many good contingent arguments why suppressing conservative Christianity would be a poor idea; Christians are pretty near the core of good citizens, at least under a standard of "good citizen" that has prevailed until recently, and also they are a very old and thus fairly well-understood phenomenon, so there's an argument to stick to the devil you know, as it were. Ultimately, however, toleration is a question of value, and values observably change over time. If your values have changed sufficiently that toleration of conservative Christians no longer seems like a good idea, that's sorta the whole ball game, isn't it? It's sort of like architecture: at the point where you have to expend constant effort to keep the building from falling down, it's probably coming down one way or the other.

Liberalism was built on the assumption that the values held by its founders were something approximating a universal constant, that all humans would hold something approximating those values more or less indefinitely. This assumption is false, and once that realization settles in, Liberalism becomes completely incoherent. Moreover, it is likely that its development and influence were necessarily path-dependent, that it only worked as long as it did because no one had really tried it at scale before, and so the results were unknown. The results now being known, it seems unlikely that it will persist, much less revive.

There are many good contingent arguments why suppressing conservative Christianity would be a poor idea; Christians are pretty near the core of good citizens, at least under a standard of "good citizen" that has prevailed until recently, and also they are a very old and thus fairly well-understood phenomenon, so there's an argument to stick to the devil you know, as it were. Ultimately, however, toleration is a question of value, and values observably change over time. If your values have changed sufficiently that toleration of conservative Christians no longer seems like a good idea, that's sorta the whole ball game, isn't it?

This assumes that Christians are the ones standing still and others are the ones whose values are changing. This does not fit with the last few years, where people who previously didn't know what IVF was have made opposition to it central to their politics. As you say, the question of whether a religion should be tolerated depends on what it's actually doing, and that can change over time.

This does not fit with the last few years, where people who previously didn't know what IVF was have made opposition to it central to their politics.

I have no idea what you're talking about. I remember IVF as a hugely controversial issue since before I was even politically aware, like since I was 10 or thereabouts.

Why is IVF more important than every other part of being a productive citizen? Especially given that it's not like Christians are being at all successful in getting rid of it.

The fact that you seem to be sincerely arguing for this makes me considerably more positive towards the times when being a Christian was a prerequisite for holding public office.

More comments

I'm not a religious conservative, but of course there is - people need ways to maintain and improve their spiritual health. Is there an atheist materialist reason? No, because religious people aren't atheist materialists.

And more simply, the suppression of true religion is opposition to God himself. That is bad.

Atheistically, if you care about modern liberalism, that would suffice as a reason, what with tolerance being worthwhile and all.

There are a lot of ways you could have rebutted an argument from personal experience without taking cheap shots like this.

If you just mean you get a bad vibe, then fine, but I dont see which rule it breaks. There are other rebuttals that could be made, but I dont want to make a rebuttal - my point isnt even that its right or wrong, its a) this comment is 4x as long as it needs to b) if it wasnt plushed up, you might notice its an extremely klischee point and try to do more than reenact arguments weve seen a 1000 times.

It’s a legit point. The conservative project relies on an idyllic view of the past and of conservative families, which can be hard to maintain when you’ve seen it from the inside. My grandparents ‘s generation were all very religious, and so it was common for spouses to hate each other all their life.

Plus, a lot of straightforward claims conservatives make like ‘all mothers love their children’, ‘all men feel the need to protect women and children’, ‘all people have a god-shaped hole’, etc, can be refuted through a single anecdote.

The conservative project relies on an idyllic view of the past and of conservative families, which can be hard to maintain when you’ve seen it from the inside. My grandparents ‘s generation were all very religious, and so it was common for spouses to hate each other all their life.

But certainly not all families are like that. I was raised in a happy family, and, to my knowledge, have mostly encountered happy families at church and so forth.

Do conservatives usually say that these things just happen by default? I'm more used to conceptualizing things as natural tendencies or roles, which we then have a responsibility and a duty to actually carry out.

The conservative project relies on an idyllic view of the past and of conservative families

Well, no. I don't know what you mean by "conservative project" but conservatives don't simply register the past as "idyllic" as a rule. There's plenty of bad stuff in there! Communism, Nazism, the origin point of modern conservatism was Burke's response to the French Revolution.

The point is that conservatives point to pro-social behaviors, practices, and traditions that over hundreds and thousands of years have repeatedly shown themselves to be unquestionably beneficial to humanity and society. These are the very concepts, ideas, and traditions we seek to conserve. We don't believe in radical and accelerated experimentation with these. Within living memory, we went from "boys shouldn't hit girls" to arguing that more boys should be allowed to pummel girls for money.

My grandparents ‘s generation were all very religious, and so it was common for spouses to hate each other all their life.

Then I'd argue they weren't people of genuine faith, but scrupulous virtue signalers who used organized religious practices - and voiced adherence of them - to assuage their guilt for being shitbags. This is extremely common in evangelical circles and in the online RadTrad and OrthoBro spaces. It is astonishing how people who truly, deeply live the principles of their faith come across as intensely normal, pleasant, and happy people.

‘all mothers love their children’

This is not a core conservative claim unless you add in "should" between "mothers" and "love"

‘all men feel the need to protect women and children’

See above.

‘all people have a god-shaped hole’

Ah, well, credit where it is due. I think this is probably a core conservative claim and one of the big wedges between conservatives and "libertarians" (although, personally, I find the term "libertarian" to be close to meaningless.) For instance, one can't help but smirk at the fact that the "Rational" community has re-invented the concept of Satan as Moloch....when Moloch is literally a Biblical demon.

I'm not saying those are core claims, just what garden-variety conservatives frequently say at the dinner table. I don't consider anecdotes like justawoman's to be refutations of serious conservative thought. But they are not "trolling".

It is astonishing how people who truly, deeply live the principles of their faith come across as intensely normal, pleasant, and happy people.

I'm trying to avoid debating the entirety of conservatism, but that's obviously a No True Christian fallacy.

Other ideologies have their own idealizations of an imagined past or an imagined future, of course. And simplistic stuff they say at the dinner table.

I'm trying to avoid debating the entirety of conservatism, but that's obviously a No True Christian fallacy.

What's the sample that you're drawing from? Since I mostly have experience from churches and similar, and those tend to have pretty good families as far as I can tell.

I'm trying to avoid debating the entirety of conservatism, but that's obviously a No True Christian fallacy.

Aren’t weekly church attendees doing much better, and doing better for others? Doesn’t seem ridiculous or fallacious to note that people who actually practice Christianity tend to become better people, while those who just occasionally talk about it don’t.

Its legit to the extent to which you agree with the complainer that it was the family rather than them that was at fault. Obviously, it is hard to provide evidence for this without doxxing yourself, but that comment didnt even make an attempt, it doesnt even describe any concrete event, only how she feels about things generally.

Say it again, that made me tickle.

Okay, look, I get that you get dogpiled a lot and it's tempting to respond with taunting and snark, but don't. I am demanding that other people stop with the cheap shots, and I'm demanding that you stop responding to cheap shots with "Nyah nyah didn't even hurt me!"

I appreciate your sympathy, but I will not appreciate the sentiment that it “is what it is” and one of my options is a moral stain on society and I should go to jail or something.

I don't expect slavery enjoyers to appreciate my opinion of slavery being a moral stain on society either, but that too is what it is.

The sentiment of this “sanctity” between a birth mother and child is completely lost on me.

So all this Handmaiden's Tale "they just see us as incubators" talk was projection all along? Why are you even bothered by not being able to reproduce, if there's nothing sacred about the mother-child bond for you?

Huh? What Handmaiden’s Tale talk has there been where?

I’m not exactly bothered by it and I like the idea of having children related to me.

Huh? What Handmaiden’s Tale talk has there been where?

You haven't seen any Handmaiden's Tale memes? At all, ever? Not even during MeToo?

I’m not exactly bothered by it and I like the idea of having children related to me.

Well, in that case I find you bringing up your infertility a bit manipulative. The reason people feel sympathy for your situation is that they believe you're deprived of something sacred - literally in case of religious people, and effectively in case of secularists. If you don't see anything particularly valuable about that bond, and it's just a mere "liking" for having biologically related children, the "it is what it is" will commence at an even higher intensity.

No, I don’t spend time on reactionary Twitter lol.

I bring up my infertility not because I want your sympathy but because when you’re talking about women raising surrogate babies you’re talking about me, and there’s this rule where you have write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

No, I don’t spend time on reactionary Twitter lol

?? Those memes came from online feminists.

and there’s this rule where you have write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

I absolutely want you to be included in the conversation, but I don't see how anything Corvos said would make you feel awkward, given your beliefs.

The question is simple: do you want people to exist, or not to exist? The bond between mother and child is a sacred thing yada yada, the problem is, modern mothers, left to their own devices, don’t have any. No bond, no child, and no mother. And that’s a sadder outcome than some blemish on your idealized view of motherhood.

Kids are resilient. You can just pump them out, hand them over to some strangers or an institution, and they’ll turn out fine. Well, they’ll complain in adolescence, but they’d do that anyway. Even life under suboptimal starting conditions is still well worth living.

The question is simple: do you want people to exist, or not to exist?

That’s not the simple question; starting there sneaks in the contentious axiom that the ends justify the means. You’re arguing past the actual objection.

By reduction to that simplistic question, you can justify any that produced a loved child including rape, infidelity, incest, and more.

Maybe that’s a conclusion you come to, but it’s built on a mountain of disagreed assumptions that you can’t simply assume past

I do agree that the end can justify the means in certain cases. But here, the argument that these means, based on voluntary exchanges, are morally wrong, has not been sufficiently defended. I'm not arguing for rape-and-kidnapping-based natalism.

But here, the argument that these means, based on voluntary exchanges, are morally wrong, has not been sufficiently defended.

But if this is your issue, then the ‘simple question’ you posed is irrelevant or insufficient. Of the moral argument comes down to whether there is a valued life at the other side, then we have to include consideration of those other scenarios. If it’s more complex than that, then your premise that it’s a simple question is one you don’t even agree with. So which is it?

It's a simple question for me because bringing more life into the world is an unalloyed good, and I fail to see the negative in this situation (aside from vague religious and personal feelings). But overall it’s a complex issue. Not the place for blind moralism.

I too can set up a neat dichotomy that totally ignores your point: is it moral to buy children, or is it not?

But moving on to your actual objection, there are all sorts of unethical things that you could do to make children: you could kidnap women, keep them underground, perform IVF on them, take the baby away, rinse and repeat for 20 years and that’s 20 babies per woman. Who are you to tell those babies that their lives aren’t worth living? Maybe you can give the 20 babies to 20 childless cat ladies, and bump up the utilons some more.

I think children are hugely important. I’m on record as saying so. It’s looking like I won’t be able to have one myself, which tears me up inside. But that doesn’t mean that anything you do to have a child is right or justified.

is it moral to buy children, or is it not?

Well, the market's supply of children only stopped exceeding the demand in the Western world around the 1950s.

You could legitimately just stop by the human[e] society and inspect the merchandise. They were usually no-kill shelters, but naturally, any healthcare an inmate received would ultimately be palliative. Resources tend to be very limited under these conditions.

Haiti is the closest non-Western country where this is still true, which is why it's a popular choice for Western women- inspecting the merchandise is important in all transactions. Scratch and dent domestic models (prenatal drug exposure, abuse, etc.) are also a popular choice in the Western world and come in a much wider variety of colors, should that be a consideration for you.

Of course, then you have to make the other decision- imported child, or domestic cat?

there are all sorts of unethical things that you could do to make children

[Insert debate around contraception here.]

is it moral to buy children, or is it not?

In some cultures e.g. rural China this is or was a common practice, where poor parents with too many children would sell one to a wealthy family (usually an older and therefore less fertile couple) to improve the standard of living of both the exchanged child and the remaining members of the birth family. This happened to my grandmother, who seemed perfectly fine psychologically, and to several other members of my extended family, some of whom definitely seemed to carry lingering resentment over it (the older they were when it happened, the more problems they had, as one might expect). I suppose all I have to say on the morality of it is that it's better than the whole family starving to death, which was often the alternative.

TLDR: if the parents are unable to take care of an existing child, and take painful measures to make sure the child grows up ok, then I understand. What I object to is creating a baby for profit, knowing in advance that this is going to happen.

I talked a bit about adoption here:

Women sometimes give up their children, of course. If they do so out of desperation and in the sincere belief that it will be better for the child, then it’s a tragedy but I understand.

If such a woman does so repeatedly, premeditatedly, knowing in their heart of hearts how each pregnancy is going to end up, then again she is wilfully using her children and abusing her role as a mother to fuel her lifestyle and I believe she deserves to be condemned.

But moving on to your actual objection, there are all sorts of unethical things that you could do to make children: you could kidnap women, keep them underground, perform IVF on them, take the baby away, rinse and repeat for 20 years and that’s 20 babies per woman.

The unethicalness of that comes not from the 'babies not being raised by their biological parents' part but from the 'women being coerced' part. Forcing a woman to be a surrogate is no more a general argument against surrogacy than agricultural slavery is a general argument against agriculture.

The argument given was that producing new life is an unalloyed good that far overwhelmed any ethical issues that might arise from the manner in which that life is produced.

To disambiguate “surrogacy in and of itself is morally fine” and “producing new life is so good that it automatically justifies any means” I contrived a new scenario in which the means were unambiguously bad (kidnap and rape). Does that make more sense?

is it moral to buy children, or is it not?

Of course it is. It's immoral and selfish to deny them life. Do you accept this consequence of your stance?

What is your actual justification? A vague appeal to sacredness("not a business practice.")? Personal feelings of disgust ("I cannot adequately express how vile I find this practice.")? "Objectification"? Forced acceptance that life sucks ("That’s just the way it is.")?

You cannot deny life to something that does not exist. If you think it’s selfish to not have as many children as you possibly can, by all means make your case to the childless and I’ll help as best I’m able.

In the meantime, I justify my position both innately and consequentially:

  1. Sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and the relationship between a mother and her child is one of the most ancient and holy things that we as humans do, and profaning it in this way is deeply, deeply evil. I know that you won’t find this convincing, but I’m putting it first because it’s true and to get it in the open.
  2. I strongly suspect that a child created in this way will suffer compared to one that isn’t. The bond between mother and child is at least partly chemical and hormonal, established during pregnancy. A woman who has not bonded with her child in this way, but instead ordered it from a service, is likely to be a worse mother and also to be unable to offer the child the unconditional love it needs to grow into a healthy adult. @George_Hale’s anecdote bears this out. On the child’s side, babies are sensitive to their mother’s odour, touch and voice (learned in the womb), which helps to soothe them after the incredibly stressful process of birth (which we know from measurements of adrenaline). Having a baby’s first experience be that of permanent separation from the mother is very unlikely to be healthy. We still have very little idea how modern ways of living help and harm us; widespread Frankensteining of the most important relationship we have at the most important developmental stage of our lives for convenience is really, really stupid.

I understand that it's somewhat tangential, but for some perspective, the number of children born by surrogacy anytime soon will probably be dwarfed by the number of children whose mother died in childbirth or shortly after in the ancestral, "ancient and holy" environment.

  1. You must have a low threshold for what you consider ‘deep, deep evil’. Most people probably don’t realise all the ways in which they’re ‘profaning’ your preferred norms on “Sex, pregnancy, childbirth,  and the relationship between a mother and her child ”. Is almost everyone deeply deeply evil then?

  2. Wrong comparison. I don’t consider surrogacy as an alternative to normal child-bearing, but to normal non-child-bearing. A surrogate child is not pulled from the set of normal comfortable children and thrown into an orphanage, he's pulled from the aether. He's thankful he even has a mouth to eat old bread with.

Do you have scientific evidence for your position? And if the available evidence was against you, what about the ‘ancient and holy ways’? It would be a waste to debate this if it was never your true objection.

Ancient and holy things? What about atheist mothers? That’s not true for them then, so your assertion “it’s true” is false.

Those mothers are wrong. There are paedophiles who honestly think that sex ennobles children, but I will not legalise it for those people on that basis.

I feel like just saying “atheists are wrong, God exists” isn’t much of an argument for anyone who isn’t religious, and I’m failing to find the connection between legalizing child sex and…the existence of atheist mothers?

You suggested that they didn’t believe mothership was sacred, so it’s okay for them to do what they like with it.

I am saying that earnestly thinking something is okay doesn’t make it okay. Buying children from their mother / selling your children does not become moral just because you don’t believe in God.

More comments

That you reject sanctity and natural law does not make them incoherent.

Neither does asserting your belief in them make them coherent, or persuasive. Leaving aside whatever "natural law" is supposed to be (I gather that for people living in an Anglo common-law system it is one of those terms that sounds inherently authoritative, but to my ears it just seems like a nicer way to say "law of the jungle"), our best understanding of "sanctity" is that it's a qualium that people can experience about anything, if the right neurons are stimulated. Between epileptics having mystical experiences because their sanctity circuits got zapped and various Austronesian tribes assigning sanctity to random words and objects every few years, why would one see it as reflecting anything about the world independent of the reporting subject, or relevant to any subject other than the reporter?

Maybe not, but "sanctity" is not an argument.

Maybe you can give the 20 babies to 20 childless cat ladies

It is not actually possible to create catgirls that way.

Ha. Thanks for the chuckle, I needed it.

As for the mother, a woman abandoning her child should be a tragic and rare fact of life, not a business practice.

So you think if, say, a random Malian woman has the child of two random Swedes, she is now - rather than one of the actual, genetic, biological parents - the mother? This is pure fantasy, no different to a stepfather saying he’s the dad because he’s “the one who stepped up”. (Adoption and step-parenting can be very noble, but the adoptive and/or step parent is never the real / biological one).

the adoptive and/or step parent is never the real / biological one

I disagree with your assertion¹ that the the biological parent is necessarily the real parent. If we are to extend respect to the title of 'father', a man who spends eighteen years consoling a child when they have nightmares, teaching them how to care for themself, attending their events, &c., &c., is far more worthy of that respect than someone whose only contribution was spending five minutes naked and horizontal.

¹Remember, when you assert, you make an ass out of the Emergency Response Team.

This argument can easily go either way. Since before humanity the mother supplied the egg, the womb, and archetypically the nursing and parenting too. Now technology means that we can take an egg from one woman, implant it into another, and then pass the baby to another after delivery. They're all doing parts of mothering but none of them are doing all of mothering, and so there's always room to say they are or aren't a "real" mother, it's a matter of how pedantic you need to be.

To illustrate by inversion, would you say that the random Swedish woman is the mother? Because there's a trivial counter that she had no part in a biologically fundamental part of mothering. But does that mean that the child doesn't have a mother? Or two? If two, why are they different? I don't know the answer other than it seems the word is inadequate to properly describe the novel situation. Metamother? Metasexual reproduction? Egg mother, womb mother, and breast mother? Fractional mother? I don't know. Just that if you draw your line too rigidly you probably have to conclude the child doesn't have a mother, which doesn't sit well with the drawing of rigid lines. Relaxing those lines though opens up an argument that anyone who can claim a part of the label is entitled to the whole, and we all know where that goes.

Perhaps we could sweep the whole argument aside and ask why does it matter, what matters is knowledge of the underlying facts. But then the argument rears up again because the label implies a set of facts that ought to provide knowledge, otherwise what use is the label?

Just some thoughts.

The baby has spent 9 months in her womb, literally sharing components of her blood through the placenta. It has grown up listening to her heartbeat, immersed in her amniotic fluid, breathing her. There will almost certainly be consequences of this, and of permanently removing it from her. At the same we know that pregnancy has a huge effect on the mother: hormones and neural changes that prepare her to nurture her child. On both sides, pregnancy is a huge part of the mother-child bond!

The procedure has been set up so that the child will have no natural, complete mother. There is a woman who donated her genes but did not go through pregnancy physically or mentally (with what consequences we do not yet know) and a woman who carried the baby in her womb but is not genetically related to it and will never see it again.

Is it your position that the surrogates are criminals, too, or that they're willing victims who are just too stupid to know what's good for them?

The former: I believe that selling your child should be a crime. I have more pity for them than for the buyers, because they are almost certainly in worse straits and they may be hurt by the separation in ways that they didn’t foresee when signing the contract, but it’s still wrong to use your child in that way.

Women sometimes give up their children, of course. If they do so out of desperation and in the sincere belief that it will be better for the child, then it’s a tragedy but I understand.

If such a woman does so repeatedly, premeditatedly, knowing in their heart of hearts how each pregnancy is going to end up, then again she is wilfully using her children and abusing her role as a mother to fuel her lifestyle and I believe she deserves to be condemned.

To buy a child, to pay a woman to bring into this world a baby that (presumably) she doesn’t want so that you can take it from her breast forever, is to my mind one of the worst crimes that you can commit, and I can’t fathom why we don’t punish it accordingly.

Here's a hint for why there's no mention of the mother in the article, as OP wondered. It's controversial!

Not all women get paid for this, FWIW. And some find the process of being pregnant and birthing joyful in and of itself.

Why isn't participating in bringing a life into the world into a well resourced home seen as a moral good? If one is cynical enough, anything can be made to sound like a trashy business transaction.

Because, again, the woman is giving birth to a child she intends to permanently separate from its mother, to satisfy her own purposes. She’s doing so because she finds “the process of being pregnant and birthing joyful in and of itself” instead of for money but that doesn’t make it better.

I would make an exception if she were willing to truly fulfil the role of a mother for the child in some sort of weird 3-parent relationship, but my understanding is that this doesn’t usually happen.

She’s doing so because she finds “the process of being pregnant and birthing joyful in and of itself” instead of for money but that doesn’t make it better.

I just mean it is not an immense sacrifice to some people that they might only consider because they wanted to get paid or had some other kind of illegitimate gain from it or wanted to pervert the social order in some way.

Some people, friends or family, see a loving couple that can't reproduce on their own and want to help.

Anyway, are you similarly against giving children up for adoption?

What about the people doing the adopting?

I would make an exception if she were willing to truly fulfil the role of a mother for the child in some sort of weird 3-parent relationship, but my understanding is that this doesn’t usually happen.

As an aside, the legal process is quite explicit that the surrogate has no rights to a relationship with the child. And again, it's controversial. People don't necessarily volunteer to strangers they they have done this.

Re: adoption, I discussed in another thread. Please forgive the copy-paste:

Women sometimes give up their children, of course. If they do so out of desperation and in the sincere belief that it will be better for the child, then it’s a tragedy but I understand.

If such a woman does so repeatedly, premeditatedly, knowing in their heart of hearts how each pregnancy is going to end up, then again she is wilfully using her children and abusing her role as a mother to fuel her lifestyle and I believe she deserves to be condemned.

TLDR the stereotypical desperate woman who gives up a child she can’t care for is doing the best she can for the child and I sympathise. Beyond that it depends.

Anyway, are you similarly against giving children up for adoption?

For the most part, yes!

One look at the actually-existing adoption industry will make all the hairs on your body stand on attention. We only look at adoption as something good because historically it implied parents dying a tragic death, and someone else picking up the slack out of charity. There are cases where giving up kids for adoption is understandable, but they're mostly a product of another era, when, for example, a mother could not ensure her own survival, so she'd give up her kid on the assumption someone else could take care of it. Barring such extreme circumstances, this shouldn't actually be allowed, and the only reason we don't means-test it, is that we assume most women have extremely strong maternal instincts, and would do whatever they can to avoid giving the child up.

My wife and I have had a decent number of kids. I can’t imagine any woman finds carrying a baby for 9 months a joy. That doesn’t mean there aren’t joyful moments but on the whole it sucks per my wife.

My own wife describes it this way when she considered being a surrogate during a single period between her first husband and kids and me and our kids.

You're right and the process is vile and it need not extend further than necessary. I expect iterated embryo selection to force this in a dangerous direction. Adoption usually looks a lot like buying... It's not particularly evil looking, for the parents or kid if the parents don't suck. I know a family that spent tens of thousands USD in bribes to buy adopt an HIV positive Ukrainian orphan 2 decades ago. Everyone is quite happy about her marriage and that she gave birth to 2nd kid (she doesn't test positive for hiv at this point, nor do kids).

Then we must invest in artificial wombs. This is a case where technology can clearly solve a moral problem.

I'm not opposed to artificial wombs as a technology, but shudder to think about what the worst percent of humanity might do with them. That said, the worst percent can and has brutally enslaved women so the artificial side is more convenience factor.

I found myself withholding judgement, but foolishly so, for as I say she is divorced and the husband took custody of their child (probably for the better for everyone.) In gestational pregnancy the ovum of the donor woman and sperm of the donor man are implanted into the womb of the surrogate woman, complicating who the mother is. As I say for me this is unpalatable, less a technological breakthrough as much as a dystopian realization of how morally bankrupt our world has become (well probably always was). Others may disagree.

Sorry, I edited before seeing your message.

less a technological breakthrough as much as a dystopian realization of how morally bankrupt our world has become

I agree with you.

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