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I’m trying to parse why I have such a strong reaction towards gay men using surrogates.
I mean, obviously there’s the ‘if you want kids, there is an obvious way to do that’ factor where going for a lifestyle that excludes having children then gets corrected back. But I don’t react in the same visceral way to gay adoption, or lesbians getting pregnant through whatever method(Craigslist rando, IVF, sperm donor).
I think it’s the buying people. Child trafficking in adoption is a serious problem that all sorts of people put effort into avoiding, albeit not particularly successfully. On the other hand, the homosexual men using surrogates are blatantly buying a child.
The linked photograph doesn't do anything to dispel that notion either — the woman is shot to be functionally anonymous, an interchangeable rent-a-womb in the background. You get the feeling that as soon as she gives birth, she'd be shoved out of the picture entirely, possibly before she's fully recovered. But she's the most important part of the whole thing! None of this happens without her, and so instead I see a celebration of two men's narcissism, and have the uneasy feeling that the impending new life is going to be treated like a teacup dog or other fashionable accessory.
And there are enough examples of pairs of gay paedophiles adopting children to abuse them or rent them back out that it pattern-matches in unfortunate ways. Example 1, example 2. This is culture war red meat and Chinese Cardiologist stuff, so it's hard to draw well-founded conclusions in either direction. However, it is interesting that the couple in the second example were written up by Australia's national public broadcaster in a very flattering article on gay parenthood-by-surrogacy and "can you believe it's this hard for them to be parents"? (The author of the Quadrant article in example 2 was unaware of the wayback machine — archived ABC link.) When the "happy dads" who get the fawning news article turn out to be child abusers, you can see why some people jump to conclusions.
Well duh. Do these people not know how babies are made? Compensating for biological impossibility is difficult and expensive.
It’s the fit-throwing about that aspect, which there really isn’t a solution to other than government subsidies, that rings alarm bells, and the ‘buying a child’ thing that justifies them.
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What? This gay couple compensated a woman for use of her womb, why are you comparing that to child trafficking, which involves a child already born and taken for typically immoral purposes (sex, forced labor, etc.)
Oh, this is a bit old already, but since you expressed genuine confusion, I figured I'd address it. Trafficking is engaging in trade of other humans, and surrogacy fits that definition perfectly.
This sounds like one of Stevenson's Persuasive Definitions i.e changing the meaning of a word without changing its elicited feelings. If this is trafficking, then trafficking is now not inherently immoral, as is typically implied (no one talks about traffickers as ethical people). For you to get to that point, you would have to demonstrate that surrogacy was immoral. Which is your view, I realize, but no one in this thread has put forward a convincing argument for that.
I was under the impression that it always was defined as the trade in human beings. My objection to it is that buying and selling other people is inherently immoral. Asking what's wrong with it is like asking "what's wrong with sexual exploitation?".
No, I don't think that the common usage of the term.
From DHS:
Wikipedia:
and Merriam-Webster:
So no, human trafficking by common usage is not considered to include any and all instance of people buying other people. The key point is the coercion by various means and intention to use the purchased human in forced labor or prostitution.
In my defense, in my language "human trafficking" would literally translate to "human trade".
Anyway, you're really ok with people just purchasing children? If Bill Gates started buying up kids of all ages by the thousands, it would be fine as long as he just wants to become their legal guardian, and not to force them to do anything that's not expected of kids?
I reject the use of "purchase" in both the surrogacy context and this example. It strikes me as the non-central fallacy.
In any case, if Bill Gates were to pay for surrogacy or adopt kids until he had 1000, I would be skeptical that he could provide the kind of fatherly relationship I think many people expect a father to have with his children, adopted or otherwise. More likely, he just pays for their schooling and housing and lets them grow up as if he just had one kid. Does giving 1000 kids a great shot in life negate the probably less-than-ideal fatherly relationship he may have with them? That might be an interesting conversation, but it certainly would not make sense to try and apply the negative connotation of "human trafficking" to such a situation. Not to me anyways.
The "non-central fallacy" was just Scott's way of saying "I can't point to anything wrong with what you're saying, but I don't like how you're using it rhetorically".
To be clear, what I meant would look more like this. After we decide whether that's buying a person, we can move on to what's the difference between that and surrogacy.
Right so I specifically picked a relatively functional billionaire for the example, to evoke the image of him providing decent housing and education to the kids he's buying. It might even feel justifiable from a utilitarian perspective, but to me treating the parent-child relationships like they're stocks on an exchange is already a horror in itself.
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A counterpoint: Westerners
trafficpurchase children from far poorer countries all the time, as in Western countries the demand for kids to adopt far exceeds the supply (whereas the opposite is true in the host country).This is done openly and their activities are usually portrayed positively, even though children are generally considered possessions (their involuntary labor is your right as a parent or guardian) in the West for the first 18 years of their life.
What's the difference between this kind of remote adoption, enslaving workers from foreign countries (for labor or prostitution, which is what people usually mean by "trafficking"), and domestic surrogacy? Because I don't think there's a difference at all, and the argument against those things can be made, but is not defensible on strictly utilitarian grounds (because if it was, human history wouldn't contain the amount of slavery that it currently does).
Do you think it is charitable to put emphasis on how you have a right to the child's involuntary labor "in the West" when actual such cases are almost unheard of in the West (aside from making them clean their room) and ubiquitous in the third world?
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In the OP I wrote how I have issues with how adoption works out in practice, and that would be one of them. In theory the difference is that the kids list their parents to some tragedy, and need someone to take care if them. In practice it ends up being an industry because of the supply/demand dynamics you brought up.
There are some bad things specific to surrogacy though. An orphan already lost their parents, surrogacy deliberately puts a child in the situation where they will be abandoned by one of the parents, which otherwise would not have happened.
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Even as a lefty ass lefty I find the idea of paying someone to have your kids ickky. Thing is, you can't argue with it without nibbling out another little caveat in the market and in free association.
In our current framework, a woman's labor vis. babby being formed obviously is quite and imposition, and you can't just ask someone to do something for nothing.
The existential proposition of the market: if it exists, it has a value. If it has a value, it can be bought. If it cannot be bought, it has no value. If it has no value, it doesn't exist.
I'd possibly add onto the market proposition the clause "if it can be bought, the price can be driven down" to represent commoditization. Digression aside, good comment.
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