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People often defend surrogacy with the idea that people have the right to do what they want with their bodies. I appreciate and respect those willing to stand in a libertarian defense of something I value, but for my part, I strongly prefer a more affirmative case.
For context, my husband and I are currently talking with a potential surrogate and working out some of the many, many logistical challenges on the road to parenthood. We're in early stages, and there is a great deal to be worked out, but we fully intend on becoming parents as soon as realistically possible. Given that, none of this debate is abstract for me, and I am as far from a neutral party as one can get.
While there are cases in which I respect the value of libertarian frameworks legally and I lean far towards "live and let live" from a metacultural standpoint, there is nothing libertarian about my moral approach to life. I do not believe all choices are equally valid or that there is nothing wrong with hedonism. I do not see things like parenthood as neutral choices that people can take or leave. Rather, what is perhaps my most fundamental philosophical conviction is this: life is Good, human life especially so. The most natural things in the universe are death, decay, and emptiness. Growth, life, and creation are fragile anomalies. We belong to an eons-long heritage of those who have committed to building and maintaining life in the face of inevitable decay. Our duty is to do the same.
Becoming a parent and raising children well is, put simply, the most good almost anyone in the world can do. It is a force multiplier: the good an individual can do is necessarily constrained compared to what their descendants can accomplish. People try to dodge around this, and even longtermists like Will MacAskill who intellectually understand the value of parenthood make excuses for it in their own lives. But it seems incontrovertibly true to me. People, particularly if they are in a position to provide well for children, should become parents. It is not a neutral action among many neutral actions. It is a moral ideal that people should pursue.
All of this takes us to adoption and surrogacy. I accept as a given that the ideal situation for a child is to be raised by their biological parents in a stable home. Inasmuch as social science is worthwhile to note, it has mostly backed this idea up. But for the most part, when people pursue other outcomes, the choice is not between "have biological parents raise a given child in a stable home" and "pursue other family structures for that child". For adoption, the value is obvious and non-controversial given the choice: "bring a child into a loving, stable home without its biological parents" or "send the child to an orphanage, toss it to the wolves, or pursue one of many other tragic outcomes for unwanted children". For most cases of surrogacy, the choice is a bit different: "create a child that will be raised by one or both biological parents in a stable home, but whose birth mother is not their genetic mother or caretaker" or "create no child".
Some people's moral intuitions are that nonexistence is preferable to, or not obviously worse than, existence in a less-than-ideal setting. I wholly reject this intuition, and looking at the record of the persistence of life in the face of adversity, belong to a heritage of those who have, time and time again, rejected it. Life is Good.
As for surrogate mothers? There is nobility, dignity, and grace in parenthood. Bringing a child into the world is an act of hope. To do so on behalf of another, even when provided financial compensation, is not a neutral or profit-focused choice. It's certainly not something that could or should ever be demanded of someone. It's a selfless choice both on behalf of the child who would otherwise not be born and the prospective parents who would otherwise have no children. The woman I've been talking a bit about it with is a young mother who feels she is not in a spot to responsibly raise more children of her own, but strongly wants to keep having children on behalf of others. That's a standard profile for a surrogate, and it's one I see as deeply admirable.
On my own behalf, I claim no fundamental right to have children, because I claim no rights that require others to act. But I absolutely claim that a society in which those who are equipped to raise children, and want to do so, can work alongside those who want to give birth to others' children is in a better spot than one that keeps children with potential to lead meaningful lives from being born. For my own part, while I won't claim to any extraordinary personal ability in terms of parenting, I have no doubt whatsoever that my husband is someone who should be a father, and I am grateful to live in a world where that's a possibility.
There are margins at which some of these arguments shift. There are absolutely exploitative and tragic environments that should be understood and called out. There are settings into which it's not appropriate to bring a child, and edge cases to analyze and discuss. My aim here is not to address all edge cases, but to examine the central case, and in particular, the case for an educated, well-off prospective parent in a society with lower-than-replacement fertility and increasing dismissiveness towards the value of parenthood. Life is worth pursuing and preserving to such a degree that you can get very far from the true ideal case before nonexistence is better than existence, or choosing not to become a parent is better than choosing to become one.
Is this all a foot in the door for transhumanism? I won't speak for others, but on my own behalf I eagerly answer: yes. In a universe where the most natural things are death, decay, and emptiness and all of life is in rebellion against that natural state, it is not just acceptable to prioritize what is Good over what is natural, it is correct. While we all must come to peace with limitations we cannot change, the high points of human history have been our collective work to push back against that creeping entropy and the arbitrary, often cruel limits it imposes. We have already become much more than we once were, and we can and should become much more than we are now.
This does not resemble my read on the impulse of libertarianism. Or at least no the strong version that I respect and in some ways identify with. Libertarians are not(necessarily) moral relativists. They do not believe that all other ways of being are equally good but they have the humility to realize that imposing morality on others is an arms race for which the victor is not at all guaranteed to be the group that actually has the superior morality, in fact defection and bad morality are likely a competitive advantage in the imposing your morality on others game.
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Oh man, this was supposed to be a fun abstract culture war spat. The vintage type, before wokeness, like when we used to hate each other about abortion. I don't know if I can do this when real stakes are involved.
I don't suppose there's anything I can do to change your mind? Any alternatives I can get you to consider? How about one of those dating sites for people who want to have kids? I heard they're popular with gay peolple. Anything where you wouldn't literally be purchasing another human being?
Unfortunately, the alternative to "go with a surrogacy service" isn't "find a dating site with someone who enjoys pregnancy enough to do it for free", for almost anyone. Trivially, while there's not a ton of gay couples looking for surrogates, but there's even fewer women with pregnancy (and turkey baster) kinks, and even of those not all want to go through the full process, and even fewer can absorb the financial and workweek ramifications.
((And I'm not sure the objection specified by @Catsnakes_ of "paying someone else to make a baby and abandon it" 'reals'; people have focused on adoption as a comparison, but there's other metaphors that break things. If I found a lady willing to do the initial part of the baby-making for free, but we went with embryo transfer at six days, is that better? What about vice versa, from a paid genetic surrogate to a gratis gestational one?))
I think an easier way to solve this Gordian knot (if you'll excuse the Solomon metaphor) is just to get rid of the 'abandon it' side. There's nothing in surrogacy that requires the gestational mother to be kicked out; to the minimal extent breaking contact has been favored in the past reflected legal concerns. Paying a mother to let you help raise a kid is a lot less fraught, and has a much longer historical background.
I brought it up because I know for a fact that these sites, and these women do actually exist - although not quite in the way you described it. I saw one in my country, but Google turns up a bunch of American examples (1, 2). The big difference is that these women actually want to have a kid, so you wouldn't get to keep it exclusively, but the whole "commissioning the creation of a child, only to yank them away from their mother's loving breast" is part of the horror of surrogacy to me, so having both parents involved in the child's life is the whole point. I find these "quick, anyone, let's make a baby!" "dating" sites, quite morbid themselves, but they're way better than surrogacy.
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Aye, that's the trouble with culture war spats, isn't it? None of them are abstract for everyone, and the culture war has real stakes. I want to live in a culture where my family and I can live according to our values and build alongside people who share those values. Emphasizing where surrogacy fits within that frame, and carving out space where people won't look at my family with the sort of suspicion and hissing condemnation @Catsnakes_ below illustrates is a real, important part of that.
To opponents of surrogacy, "literally purchasing another human being" and "providing compensation for the complex and demanding circumstances needed to create a human being" are a distinction without a difference; all I can say is that I see a crucial distinction, and see surrogacy as no more purchasing a human being than IVF or, more disputably, paying a hospital for childbirth. We live in a world where money is inextricably tied up in even intimate human interactions, but that doesn't strip them of their humanity or their worth.
As for changing my mind—look, obviously people stake a lot on major life decisions, and I can't pretend I expect my mind to change on this one. If it were to change, though, it would happen the same way it always does: either by convincing me that some of my values are poorly conceived, or working within the frame of my own values to convince me that my plans don't live up to them. That's why I don't really expect a change, of course—I've spent a long while considering my values and finding the right landing spot, and I suspect I'm mostly past the stage of serious, rather than marginal, adjustments. But the pathway to change is straightforward.
There's degrees of it though. I can show more sympathy when discussing trans issues with a trans person, and just focus on the facts of the matter. This is a pure values disagreement and it's hard to get around that. It's fun enough discussing those too, but the fun quickly evaporates when you discover the person you're arguing about Roe vs Wade with is getting an abortion next week.
Yes, everybody does, there's the rub isn't it?
Funnily enough Botonds comment could be interpreted as poking fun at either one of us, but I'm going to use it to support my argument here. Yes, what you want is understandable, again that's what everybody wants for themselves, but your comment is written in a weird way that seems to imply your values are best values. If you found out your next door neighbor is a cannibal - not a murderer mind you, everybody he eats is some weirdo he met online that wants to be eaten, you see stories like that every once in a while. Oh and let's say he doesn't even eat the whole person, just their hand or something, and the other guy is completely happy about it afterwards - wouldn't you let out the least bit of a hissing condemnation? Would you want the practice to be against the law? Would you want him to still be your neighbor? What would you make of the cannibal's pleas for wanting to live in a culture where he and his family can live according to their values?
The other thing is, while I find the dead-eyed "yes, I'm for surrogacy" attitude somewhat admirable, I can't help the resentment building up upon hearing the charming gay couple down the street, whose rights I helped fight for, tell me "what did you think was going to happen, bitch?". Thankfully there's plenty of gay people who are against surrogacy, so it's not all that bad, but Jesus, this has been a disturbing experience.
I'm not really a fan of IVF either, but even it doesn't involve taking a child away from their mother, and paying for the hospital bed is in a completely different universe.
Well, of course everybody wants that.
I feel like you're reading my comment as saying "I, uniquely, want a values-driven society, and cruel people like you prevent that."
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that the rubber meets the road with values differences at some points, and that's where the culture war becomes most complex and most serious. It goes without saying that I believe my values are correct. They are, after all, my values. Others disagree with them, and the truce of liberalism is the most stable way I've seen to deal with those clashes up to this point, but the culture war stops being an abstract chat when your decisions cross someone else's line in the sand or vice versa. I condemn or criticize some choices. Some condemn or criticize my own. I have strong feelings about who is right and who is wrong in most culture war conflicts, but the stakes are high for everybody. At some point, conflicts or no, people decide what sort of life they want to live and find allies where they can. The value I have chosen to make my own stand on here is that bringing people into the world, becoming a parent, and working to raise children well is a good that should be pursued even as circumstances fall short of the most ideal.
The resentment you describe is understandable but a bit peculiar. There was no slippery slope from gay marriage to surrogacy. Gestational surrogacy has been legal in (most of) the United States since long before gay marriage was allowed. There was no carve-out in the push for legal marriage saying "we want to have all the legal rights straight married couples do, except for the option to pursue already legal surrogacy options". Marriage and surrogacy aren't even directly connected, except for questions like who the parents listed on birth certificates are: single men can pursue surrogacy, just like single women can find sperm donors.
Not to lean too much into the villain role in your story, but... what did you think was going to happen? Did you think all gay men who wanted to get married simply saw marriage in the shallower modern "if two people love each other very much..." light and not as the best option for stable, happy family formation and child-rearing? Did you see the collection of legal rights attached to marriage, routes to adoption and surrogacy that straight couples were already using, and assume gay people were simply uninterested; were you treating the idea as primarily symbolic rather than a specific legal change that would open up specific doors for people?
So part of the misunderstanding probably comes from geographical distance. Things look a bit different worldwide, and even in places where it's currently banned, we still get the western Blob's drumbeat about wonderful surrogacy is. From that perspective, surely it's more understandable how it looks like a slippery slope.
Since you asked the question directly, I've been trying to interrogate if I'm misremembering something. Is it that I was young and kids weren't on my mind? Maybe that was a part of it, but I distinctly remember adoption by gay couples being part of the controversy, and I assumed that that was going to cover the issue of gay people who want to start a family. Especially since gay people I knew were saying adoption isn't even that important to them (they were on the younger side as well though).
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Family benefits were always part of the package. Andrew Sullivan's landmark 1989 argument, to my understanding the first major advocacy article on the topic in the US, is worth reviewing:
Andrew Sullivan, one can point out, is for a gay man unusually conservative in his sensibilities and was making an unabashedly conservative argument in favor of gay marriage. But gay marriage has always been more the purview of the more conservative-minded in the subculture.
You're right that it's comparatively uncommon for gay couples to have kids, but it's more that their kids often don't enter the sphere of Public Discourse. I didn't know Neil Patrick Harris had kids. Looking it up, I see Anderson Cooper, Dan Savage, Jared Polis, and Perez Hilton have kids as well. Dave Rubin is a new father. It's not wildly common, but it's not an anomaly.
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Back before the SSC-Motte split happened on Reddit, among the resident disaffected leftists on SSC was some guy with an Arabic-sounding username. I forgot what it was, and he deleted the account a long time ago, or it got suspended. Anyway, one time he posted the usual and frankly boring leftist complaint of SSCer quasi-incel garbage humans tolerating the online presence of literal Nazis and even getting into discussions with them. He based his complaint on the argument that ‘if this side wins in the culture war, many of my buds will get executed as degenerate gays, so for me this all is deeply personal, I’m not just here to hang out etc.’
Needless to say, it seemingly never occurred to him (at least there was no sign of this) that if the OTHER side wins, then, according to the same logic, many people will get executed/gulaged for being landlords, venture capitalists, GOP officials, for supporting Proposition 8 or whatever it was, for opposing the toppling of Confederate monuments, for denying that gas chambers were used in Majdanek etc. It just didn’t register on his radar. Weird.
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Neither IVF nor paying the hospital for delivering the baby involves paying someone else to make a baby and abandon it. Helping a woman give birth to her own child does not permanently deprive that child of their mother. Surrogacy does. Have you grappled with that?
Wait, why does surrogacy amount to depriving a child of their mother? If a hetero couple did surrogacy but raised that child as their own, there's a mother as far as the child is concerned. What exactly is the child losing if brought into the world via surrogacy that is irreplaceable?
Hetero surrogacy is just as bad. There is an important bond which is lost. A child carried in the womb for 9 months knows its mother. It already knows her voice and is familiar with her. This is not insignificant.
To go somewhat off topic for a moment: I am disgusted by the transhumanist fascination with artificial wombs for the same reason. A mother's womb is more than a growing medium. Nothing we can construct is going to be able to replicate it-- the entire thing is a wire monkey with extra steps.
Gonna have to call bullshit on that one unless you have evidence. Children don't remember stuff that early, and certainly not from before they were born. To be clear, the evidence needs to be that it's typical for unborn babies to remember this stuff, not that it happened once in an exceptional case. I don't believe such evidence exists but if you have it I'll concede the point.
I wasn't talking about long term memories. There seems to be a consensus amongst experts that the fetus recognizes the mother's voice and heartbeat sounds, and recognizes her scent via exposure to amniotic fluid. This recognition continues when the baby is born, and it is believed that these familiar senses calm the newborn among other things. I'd prefer to give you links to research, but you'll have to settle for the deluge of popsci articles I can find on google, and knowing that this is what we were told by doctors as well. Here's one link [1], it's not an isolated example and there are tons more. Most of them seem to have at least some kind of citation at least. That said, expert consensus and common wisdom via experience is a kind of evidence of its own, even if there's not bulletproof research papers on the topic.
There's also evidence that skin to skin contact with their mother immediately after delivery results in lower stress, better ability to regulate body temperature, and other improved outcomes. I sincerely doubt that this suddenly stops being important after a week. This is easier to find research on, as well as a wealth of consensus online and it's standard practice in hospitals. [2]
It's also known that while obviously the mother goes through hormonal changes, even the expectant father in a pregnant couple goes through pre-partum hormonal changes that have an impact on parenting outcomes. [2] I can't find research on the topic, but it seems reasonable to assume that this is due to chemical signalling between mother and father and requires proximity, and not something that is likely to materialize spontaneously in the couple waiting to be handed a baby.
Frankly, I don't even think the burden of proof is on me. You want to deviate from a state of nature and the common wisdom, so you prove there's no harm. What do you think is more likely: the mother's womb is a sterile vessel, bonding with the mother that birthed it has absolutely no impact on life outcomes, and the hormonal changes that mothers and fathers go through are just for laughs? Or that the complex auditory, chemical, and physical signaling and bonding between newborn and mother throughout early infancy have a purpose of some kind that has a relevant impact?
[1] https://www.romper.com/parenting/how-does-a-baby-know-its-mother-it-comes-down-to-the-senses-25678
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6860199/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5313241/
ed: fixed links
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I think (without initially opining on whether or not it's true that unborn babies recognise their mother's voice) that the evidence demanded sets too high a bar. It's not necessary for the child to remember their mother's voice at a later age for it to have an impact on their development, as Catsnakes is implying. It just needs to have an impact on their early life and then the effects can snowball from there.
For example, if the baby post-birth is less likely to settle when held by its not-mother (versus a hypothetical alternative where it was held by its mother) because it didn't recognise the not-mother's voice, this in turn goes on to impact how it relates to the not-mother at later ages, and so on into its broader relationships with other humans. Early development is important, and personality emerges at an early age, with newborns being different from birth.
To the object-level point: unborn babies respond differently to recordings of their mother's voice versus a stranger's- implying recognition. There's no reason why this recognition would cease post-birth. Study: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12741744/
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How do you go about proving that this has material consequences for the child? What is your proof that this is causing them harm?
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A child needs its mother. A baby knows its mother from the time it is sensate. It knows her sounds, her voice, how she moves. She is safety and comfort and everything else to that child. Physical contact with the skin of the baby's mother, especially immediately after birth but throughout its early infancy is known to be important to the baby's well being. It's already an agonizing tragedy that there are so many orphans that already have to grow up without theirs, and those who adopt are doing a good thing but something that is a distant second best to the child being with its mother. But to specifically pay to create a child so that you can take it away from its mother is a disgusting evil worse than almost anything I can think of. What you are talking about doing wrongs a child in a way you can never repair. Your husband should not be, does not deserve, and does not need to be a father. The degree of selfishness involved in this entire concept disqualifies both of you permanently.
Orphans, mothers who die in childbirth, abusive mothers, absentee mothers, and so on and so forth.
They pretty obviously don't. All kinds of kids in these situations manage to grow up and have lives of their own.
Your over-emotional assertions are just that and nothing more.
People live and get along with missing limbs, no eyesight, and so on too. That doesn't mean it's just as good as being whole.
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Yes.
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How do you feel about the failures from IVF?
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That seems obviously the case to me.
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Shaming prospective parents is a disgusting evil if you ask me.
For centuries, it was common practice for women to defer their mothering to working women in the form of nannies, midwives, and wet nurses. How disgusting and evil were these practices? Did they forever ruin the lives of those who grew up under them? The child didn't have its mother- can it not lead a fulfilling existence now? Is this really that scary? Countless women have also died in childbirth, leaving children with no mother at all. Unless you can convince me that these situations are most likely to produce children who, due to separation from their mothers, would have been better off unborn, it doesn't really counter TracingWoodgrains's line of thinking at all.
Two well-off parents who want a child are already set up to do a lot better for their kids than most anyone else. You praise these mystical values of motherhood, but it's without substance. It sounds like an aesthetic preference built around an ideal of the gentle and loving mother that just isn't as common as you'd hope. I find it hard to imagine that the legions of drug-addicted single moms saddled with kids they resent are going to offer their children a much better life than a couple of men raising a kid- that they greatly committed to before birth- simply by virtue of their irreplaceable feminine touch, or whatever. If you can't imagine much in the way of disgusting evils beyond surrogacy, I encourage you to broaden the horizons of your imagination.
We'd be doing a lot better if we shamed more prospective parents, frankly.
Stealing a loaf of bread because you have no choice and stealing a loaf of bread because you just can are two different things. Furthermore, nannies, midwives, and wet nurses did not all entirely deprive the child of their mother, and plenty of people have turned out mighty fucked up due to a dead or distant mother.
Horrible tragedies occurring naturally is not an excuse to manufacture them.
Those women shouldn't have had kids. That they did doesn't excuse wrong done by anyone else.
Do we not shame enough prospective parents already? The left shames teenagers who get pregnant and young women who choose to be homemakers as opposed to focusing on their careers. The right shames single mothers and older women who froze their eggs or use IVF. We shame wealthy people who want to have as many children as possible. We shame parents who aren't wealthy enough to live in a good school district. We shame free-range parents who forget that it isn't the 80's anymore and let their kids wander unsupervised around the neighborhood. We shame parents who teach their children what we think are the wrong political or religious values. We shame parents in first world countries for contributing to climate change and we shame parents in third world countries for bringing children into a life with such a low standard of living.
If you shame enough people the only ones left to reproduce will be the shameless, the ignorant, and those who lack impulse control. All those prospective parents who would have been any good at it will have refrained from fear of doing it wrong and harming their potential children. Would that really be a better world?
You forgot to mention the opposite, the helicopter parents.
And yeah, I think all parents are imperfect in some way, but most are probably genuinely trying to be good parents (barring the abusive people who should not be parents).
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