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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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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.