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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   37129 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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The only practical difference between a woman getting pregnant via a random man and giving the kid up for adoption, later being adopted by a gay couple, and surrogacy, is that the woman bearing the child is compensated for her time and efforts in the latter case (and, I guess, that the child's parentage is known). Neither of those seem like anything I would call a detriment compared to the former case.

I see another clear difference between these two situations in regards to the child's experience. If a mother gives her baby up for adoption, for whatever reason, the child must accept that his or her mother was not in a position to raise them, and find solace in the fact that another family was. This is just a sad fact of life that is part of the child's experience.

However, in the case of surrogacy, the child must understand that its parents wanted the position of sole parenthood so much that they compensated the child's actual birth mother in order to make her go away forever. And that is a weird twisted possessive experience that the child is left with in relation to its family that it will be growing up with.

So the child is trapped trying to establish normal familial relations with someone who saw it more as a possession than another human being who has a right to a relationship with a mother. And this is especially the case for gay male couples, who have unilaterally decided that their child can and will be happy enough to grow up without a mother just because they want to feel more normal and like they haven't lost out on any important American suburban experiences by embracing their gay lifestyle.

This is similar for lesbian couples, but not quite, given the number of men who seem happy to donate their sperm for a little bit of cash and don't seem bothered by the idea that they have children out there who they'll never know or care for. That is more analogous to the adoption where the child just understands that their father wasn't interested, but they do have parents who are.

The act of gestating a child and giving birth almost always, if not completely always, changes a woman's body forever, and is traumatic, and takes a lifelong toll, which is supposedly compensated for by a lifelong benefit of having a child to care for. I don't see how any one-time payment can be equivalent. I would be interested in hearing from a surrogate who really felt like it was.

My apologies for mixing up all the pronouns when referring to the child.

However, in the case of surrogacy, the child must understand that its parents wanted the position of sole parenthood so much that they compensated the child's actual birth mother in order to make her go away forever.

Or simply that the child was wanted so much that it was worth thousands of pounds to the parents... Do you think that child feels better or worse than the child of hetero parents who tell him he was an unplanned mistake?

So the child is trapped trying to establish normal familial relations with someone who saw it more as a possession than another human being who has a right to a relationship with a mother.

Do you apply this standard to IVF etc? Cruel, selfish parents willing to spend big money to pervert sacred nature so they can have their desired accessory-child? No, probably not, right?

And this is especially the case for gay male couples, who have unilaterally decided that their child can and will be happy enough to grow up without a mother just because they want to feel more normal and like they haven't lost out on any important American suburban experiences by embracing their gay lifestyle.

Do you also apply this standard to, say, women who use sperm banks, or single mothers who decide to keep a pregnancy after the would-be father has walked away or vanished?

I see IVF as different because the child isn't denied a mother and the child's mother still gives birth to them, even if she's not the genetic mother. I'm not that worried about the perversion of nature, sacred or not.

I would not apply the same standard to women who use sperm banks or have absentee fathers. I don't see why you would think i would.

Giving up an egg or giving up sperm so a woman can gestate and give birth to a baby she will parent is not similar to being paid to go through the entire birth process and then leave forever.

Other users have made an excellent point as well, which is that every argument you can make for surrogacy can be made for legalizing selling your kidney, or a lobe of your liver, and kidneys aren't sentient, and your liver will eventually grow back. I'd appreciate if you could explain if you think people should be allowed to sell a kidney or a lobe of their liver if you think a woman should be able to rent out her womb.

The simple answer here is to also support legalizing the sale of kidneys.

Those who recoil in disgust at this modernist-transhumanist depravity may be surprised to discover that the one country in the world where kidney sales are legal is the decidedly anti-modernist Islamic Republic of Iran. Their decision to legalize kidney sales was not motivated by some kind of debauched ideology; it was purely pragmatic. And it worked: today, there is no waiting list for kidneys in Iran.

I will admit, I was disgusted when I first saw this idea on the sidebar of /r/neoliberal, but I have since come around.

Iran is not a compelling example for me. In fact, I find it to be the opposite of a compelling example. It is interesting to know that about Iran, however, so thank you for sharing.

I disagree. Money being involved is important because it creates incentives. It's the reason prostitution is not morally equivalent to casual sex.

i.e.: congratulations you now live in a society where some women will be forced to bear other's children against their will

Doesn't matter if all you wanted was voluntary exchange.

I don't see a problem with financially incentivizing people to have more babies. If the government was doing it rather than gays, most people here would clap and cheer.

as long as they don't use my money for it, I don't care what people choose to spend their money on. the problem is that those financial incentives from the government are funded by unwilling taxpayers such as myself who would rather keep that money and spend it on something else.

Right, but I think in this case gay parents are ponying up the money for surrogacy and IVF themselves. Social conservatives are objecting specifically to this dynamic - paying someone to have a baby.

Given the discussion here in the past about this topic, I'd guess most people would cynically posit that the government financially incentivizing people to have more babies couldn't possibly work and would just add needless bureaucracy.

As far as I can recall, the usual point is that it is observed not to work.

Is it observed not to work, or do people just assume it doesn't work without checking? My impression is that it totally works but we don't do it anyway (relevant graphs are on on page 67). The upshot is that the Swedish government changed a policy from providing benefits if children were born within 24 months of each other to the same benefit but within 30 months instead, and the number of children born with a between-24-and-30-month gap roughly 1.5x'd while birth rates by age gap stayed pretty much the same for every other age gap. It was not a subtle effect.

They might be referring to Communist Romania, though Ceaucescu mandated rather than incentivized.

Plenty of regimes incentivised having a big family: Jus trium liberorum of Ancient Rome, Battle for Births of Mussolini's Italy, "Médaille d'honneur de la famille française" of France, "Cross of Honour of the German Mother" of Nazi Germany.

The medals probably came with some cash reward.

Your recollection is probably correct. I should have it worded it more like "has never worked empirically and as such is almost definitely not going to work in this case" rather than "couldn't possibly work."

Well I'm certainly not among them. Despite being concerned about birth rates.

i.e.: congratulations you now live in a society where some women will be forced to bear other's children against their will

You now live in a society where a desperate woman has this as an option, as opposed to simply starving to death in the streets with no choice at all.

I am once again failing to see the downside.

Literally nobody is starving to death on the streets, so to put is as the only available alternative to renting your womb and selling your baby is fundamentally dishonest.

In practice I’m doubting that surrogacy will be used by the poorest of the poor, but rather by the lower working class. These are not in danger of starvation.

In which case it's a choice, and handwringing about being forced holds no water. Shrug.

The downside is that there are forms of extortion which tend to take all of the value you can get your hands on (blackmail, kidnapping for ransom, etc). If surrogacy becomes the largest amount of money that some women can obtain with their time and body, a nonzero number will be extorted into it.

I think the upsides far outweigh the downsides here but the downsides do exist.

To note that very high percentages of prostitutes are not doing this voluntarily, and that’s a similarly totalizing commitment to surrogacy.

We disagree on what is worse or better than death, I presume.

Perhaps so, but if your contention is that 'some women will be so desperate for cash that they will bear a child just to earn some', the bad thing there seems to be that a woman might ever be in such a situation, not that circumstances have now changed such that they can actually follow through on such a preference.

I hate this argument. "Why don't we just fix all of the problems of society and I can be totally free" is Rousseauan bullshit. We are animals and establishing rules to prevent ourselves from doing evil regardless of our intentions is the essence of morality.

Eliminate misery and I'll maybe consider whether behaviors that exploit it might be allowed, but I'm not considering it fine just because of an hypothetical.

All those Ukranian women and assorted orphans are not hypothetical.

Oh sure I'm not suggesting that one cannot talk about surrogacy until poverty has been abolished, my point is rather that restricting surrogacy would not actually make things better in a society where such desperation and poverty does exist, because while not a decision to be taken lightly there are clearly some women who think that going through childbirth is worth it for the reward, and while it makes me squirm too isn't hasn't actually made anything better about the situation 'women might be forced to choose between surrogacy or deprivation' since you've just made everyone choose deprivation, a deprivation apparently bad enough that they're willing to bear a child to alleviate it.

I understand, but people may also choose to kill in order to escape deprivation and still I feel justified in punishing them for this immoral conduct that endangers everyone by undermining the sanctity of life. This is not exactly similar, but my motivations are not different.

You also ignore the other core part of my argument, which is about the incentive. If you allow this and the demand outstrips the supply, generating misery great enough to provide for it becomes the necessary conclusion. Which is exactly what happened with prostitution and why human trafficking is a thing.

If you are a leftist and buy into the concept of wage slavery, sure. If you take a slightly less negative view of exchanging money for labor, then they aren't "forced against their will".

I read somewhere that fiscally right conservatives become leftists when it comes to all matters reproductive.

Well this is where ancaps lose me. I hold to certain things being more sacred that voluntary exchange, and sex and child-rearing is most definitely on the list.

The horror of such a situation is not something I see as allowable, even if Moloch says it's a-okay because everyone consented.

But then of course, the libertarian solution is that you're free to have such horrors in your community so long as I'm allowed to bar you from mine.

"it's against her will, even if it's consensual!"

This is basically the argument made in every spurious me too case.

That’s because the reasons that actually motivate people’s response in those cases are not what they are allowed to argue for in today culture, so that they are forced to make argument in the accepted framework, that is, framework of consent.

I wrote about it at the previous place:

What happens here is the conflict between traditional norms of sexuality, and the ones that have arisen during sexual revolution. This is really simple: a guy who uses his fame and status to pump and dump naive girls is seen as morally repugnant, according to traditional norms of sexuality that most people still hold, either consciously or subconsciously. That’s because traditional norms focus on stability, responsibility, and equity. However, in modern liberal take on sexuality, the core value is individual choice. Ability to choose is what empowers humans, and choosing is ultimate way to express sexuality. The confusion stems from the fact that people laud the norms of the latter, but make moral judgement based on the former set of norms. Hence, the guy is wrongdoer, because he wasn’t supposed to just pump and dump them: instead, he was supposed to validate them, by expending his efforts to signal she has high value. That she chose to do it and consented to the act is irrelevant: that’s not the deal she had in mind when consenting. She was hoping to get traditional deal, but instead she got the modern one.

The context was slightly different, but the point is the same.

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