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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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To me it looks like the woman acting as s surrogate here gets a lot of social support and validation from being a surrogate. However, so do many prostitutes, and so would people paid to donate a lobe of their liver or a kidney. I think it should be the same thing. You can have sex for free, you can donate an organ, and you should be able to donate the act of surrogacy, but you shouldn't be able to do any of these things as a paid service because that's bad for society. And yes, for me that does include pornography where the actors are paid to have sex with each other on camera. Commercial pornography is causing a lot of problems. Labor laws (no pun intended) exist to prevent the rich from exploiting the working class beyond what is tolerable or humane, and requires society to create non-exploitive forms of work to continue functioning.

Many jurisdictions place surrogacy in a similar space to prostitution and organ donation, where ostensibly paying for it is illegal. In practice, this largely just converts into a gray market, so just as 'escorts' or 'companions' (who are only being paid for their company, and if sex happens, whoops), 'unpaid surrogates' that are compensated for lodging or lost work opportunity usually sneak through. Zwicker's first surrogacy (for a cousin) was somewhat unusually in being completely unpaid, but it was also unpleasant enough juggling that and her own child she wouldn't have done it for family again.

I'm not convinced that's a better model, or that a hard ban would be (prohibiting adoption where there's sign of collaboration beforehand? clawing back funds? I'm not sure how you'd make that work, but let's assume something's possible, since this is a lot more seeable-as-a-state than prostitution). I could see that sort of policy having some impact on the marginal cases, where someone just on the border of affording to buy or being willing to sell doesn't go through with it, but the marginal cases aren't the ones that bring comparisons to axotl tanks or broodmothers.

But I'm... uh, probably going to have some pretty fundamental values differences. And even experience differences: I recognize how a lot of the bigger commercial vendors range from 'merely' scuzzy drug-addict-optimizers or abusing the bounds of informed consent to overtly ignoring rape or trafficking, but it's not clear how much of that is the commercial porn and how much is California and eastern Europe being the core of modern commercial pornography, and on the other extreme 'commercial pornography' in the furry fandom has a widely different set of problems mostly tied to artists needing better wrist support.

I probably don't have a good model of what you consider the "bad for society" bit here.

To give you a quick hit, bad for society is when your therapist can mention surrogacy as a legal way out of your poverty.

Yes, and the correlated bit where your social worker could mention it right before an SSDI/welfare interview. But I don't see this as something specific to the formal recognition; both therapists and social workers shouldn't encourage outright illegal conduct (uh, shouldn't), but both groups are organizationally and foundationally designed around Not Quite Illegal things. They're not always good at it, but they're usually not that bad, either.

Another example of where it could go bad: where you can be denied welfare because you were offered a job as a surrogate and refused it.

Actually is that a thing? As far as I can tell you cannot currently become a gestational surrogate if you are receiving welfare, so I think it's not. But seeing evidence of that happening at any sort of significant scale would be one of the few things which would turn my opinion against surrogacy as an option.

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