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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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