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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34875 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Sam Altman and his husband had a kid.

Let me say outright I wish him, him, and the child well. Certainly growing up in a wealthy family affords a child many benefits that would not be had without that wealth, so good for the kid. Let me also say I am, as a person tangentially involved in medicine and medical science, not adamantly opposed to IVF, personally, though admittedly I have not spent a lot of time poring over the moral aspects of it. It seems like one of those things that generally contributes toward the good, inasmuch as it is creative, in the most literal sense of the word, and not destructive. My mind might be changed by a persuasive argument.

What irks me though, is that in the linked article there is no mention whatsoever of the mother of this child, the woman who carried the child in her womb, from whose egg the child generated (whether you view this as the mother or not is of course up to you.) It is as if the two men just somehow had a child, as if that is the most natural thing in the world, and there should be no questioning of it by anyone for to do so would be, I don't know, wrong or backward-ass.

Yet here I am, wondering. Should there not be at least a rhetorical nod toward the woman, a phrase in some sentence saying that the child was brought into the world via gestational surrogacy--a good way to introduce the term into people's vocabulary, the regular working men and women among us who may have never thought of the term. Yet there is nothing. Nada y pues nada. Can anyone steelman this beyond the assertion that it is a required newspeak in our Brave New World?

If I were to be dramatic, I'd say a woman has been literally erased here-- a maternal unpersoning. I know at least one woman (white, American) who "had" a child via gestational surrogacy--she is now both divorced and living about 4,800 miles (7,725 km) apart from her daughter. Life's a bitch. I never outright asked her about the woman who carried the child to term, though I know that this was a so-called "commercial surrogacy" and the woman who did carry the child was from India, probably without much financial means, and the whole affair was generally unpalatable to me. But I loved the (egg) mother as a sister, though she is unrelated to me, and still do, though she is a little nuts.

But Altman and Mulherin are both men, and thus the egg came from neither of them. I don't know, I just wish the goddam media would throw me a bone sometimes.

(Not directed at OP, just a general statement).

I cannot adequately express how vile I find this practice. To buy a child, to pay a woman to bring into this world a baby that (presumably) she doesn’t want so that you can take it from her breast forever, is to my mind one of the worst crimes that you can commit, and I can’t fathom why we don’t punish it accordingly.

It’s not much better if the buyers are an infertile male/female pair. Yes, at least the child will have a mother figure but you have knowingly taken it away from its actual mother, forever. As for the mother, a woman abandoning her child should be a tragic and rare fact of life, not a business practice.

And no, fucking around with eggs and sperm so that the child isn’t even related to the woman in whose womb it rests for 9 months doesn’t make it better. It’s a base practice designed to obfuscate the nature of the transaction.

Some people can’t have children. That’s just the way it is. ‘Solving’ it with prostitution and (from the child’s perspective) kidnapping is supremely selfish and from my perspective absolutely unacceptable in a society with any pretensions to morality.

The question is simple: do you want people to exist, or not to exist? The bond between mother and child is a sacred thing yada yada, the problem is, modern mothers, left to their own devices, don’t have any. No bond, no child, and no mother. And that’s a sadder outcome than some blemish on your idealized view of motherhood.

Kids are resilient. You can just pump them out, hand them over to some strangers or an institution, and they’ll turn out fine. Well, they’ll complain in adolescence, but they’d do that anyway. Even life under suboptimal starting conditions is still well worth living.

I too can set up a neat dichotomy that totally ignores your point: is it moral to buy children, or is it not?

But moving on to your actual objection, there are all sorts of unethical things that you could do to make children: you could kidnap women, keep them underground, perform IVF on them, take the baby away, rinse and repeat for 20 years and that’s 20 babies per woman. Who are you to tell those babies that their lives aren’t worth living? Maybe you can give the 20 babies to 20 childless cat ladies, and bump up the utilons some more.

I think children are hugely important. I’m on record as saying so. It’s looking like I won’t be able to have one myself, which tears me up inside. But that doesn’t mean that anything you do to have a child is right or justified.

is it moral to buy children, or is it not?

Well, the market's supply of children only stopped exceeding the demand in the Western world around the 1950s.

You could legitimately just stop by the human[e] society and inspect the merchandise. They were usually no-kill shelters, but naturally, any healthcare an inmate received would ultimately be palliative. Resources tend to be very limited under these conditions.

Haiti is the closest non-Western country where this is still true, which is why it's a popular choice for Western women- inspecting the merchandise is important in all transactions. Scratch and dent domestic models (prenatal drug exposure, abuse, etc.) are also a popular choice in the Western world and come in a much wider variety of colors, should that be a consideration for you.

Of course, then you have to make the other decision- imported child, or domestic cat?

there are all sorts of unethical things that you could do to make children

[Insert debate around contraception here.]

is it moral to buy children, or is it not?

In some cultures e.g. rural China this is or was a common practice, where poor parents with too many children would sell one to a wealthy family (usually an older and therefore less fertile couple) to improve the standard of living of both the exchanged child and the remaining members of the birth family. This happened to my grandmother, who seemed perfectly fine psychologically, and to several other members of my extended family, some of whom definitely seemed to carry lingering resentment over it (the older they were when it happened, the more problems they had, as one might expect). I suppose all I have to say on the morality of it is that it's better than the whole family starving to death, which was often the alternative.

TLDR: if the parents are unable to take care of an existing child, and take painful measures to make sure the child grows up ok, then I understand. What I object to is creating a baby for profit, knowing in advance that this is going to happen.

I talked a bit about adoption here:

Women sometimes give up their children, of course. If they do so out of desperation and in the sincere belief that it will be better for the child, then it’s a tragedy but I understand.

If such a woman does so repeatedly, premeditatedly, knowing in their heart of hearts how each pregnancy is going to end up, then again she is wilfully using her children and abusing her role as a mother to fuel her lifestyle and I believe she deserves to be condemned.

But moving on to your actual objection, there are all sorts of unethical things that you could do to make children: you could kidnap women, keep them underground, perform IVF on them, take the baby away, rinse and repeat for 20 years and that’s 20 babies per woman.

The unethicalness of that comes not from the 'babies not being raised by their biological parents' part but from the 'women being coerced' part. Forcing a woman to be a surrogate is no more a general argument against surrogacy than agricultural slavery is a general argument against agriculture.

The argument given was that producing new life is an unalloyed good that far overwhelmed any ethical issues that might arise from the manner in which that life is produced.

To disambiguate “surrogacy in and of itself is morally fine” and “producing new life is so good that it automatically justifies any means” I contrived a new scenario in which the means were unambiguously bad (kidnap and rape). Does that make more sense?

is it moral to buy children, or is it not?

Of course it is. It's immoral and selfish to deny them life. Do you accept this consequence of your stance?

What is your actual justification? A vague appeal to sacredness("not a business practice.")? Personal feelings of disgust ("I cannot adequately express how vile I find this practice.")? "Objectification"? Forced acceptance that life sucks ("That’s just the way it is.")?

You cannot deny life to something that does not exist. If you think it’s selfish to not have as many children as you possibly can, by all means make your case to the childless and I’ll help as best I’m able.

In the meantime, I justify my position both innately and consequentially:

  1. Sex, pregnancy, childbirth, and the relationship between a mother and her child is one of the most ancient and holy things that we as humans do, and profaning it in this way is deeply, deeply evil. I know that you won’t find this convincing, but I’m putting it first because it’s true and to get it in the open.
  2. I strongly suspect that a child created in this way will suffer compared to one that isn’t. The bond between mother and child is at least partly chemical and hormonal, established during pregnancy. A woman who has not bonded with her child in this way, but instead ordered it from a service, is likely to be a worse mother and also to be unable to offer the child the unconditional love it needs to grow into a healthy adult. @George_Hale’s anecdote bears this out. On the child’s side, babies are sensitive to their mother’s odour, touch and voice (learned in the womb), which helps to soothe them after the incredibly stressful process of birth (which we know from measurements of adrenaline). Having a baby’s first experience be that of permanent separation from the mother is very unlikely to be healthy. We still have very little idea how modern ways of living help and harm us; widespread Frankensteining of the most important relationship we have at the most important developmental stage of our lives for convenience is really, really stupid.

I understand that it's somewhat tangential, but for some perspective, the number of children born by surrogacy anytime soon will probably be dwarfed by the number of children whose mother died in childbirth or shortly after in the ancestral, "ancient and holy" environment.

  1. You must have a low threshold for what you consider ‘deep, deep evil’. Most people probably don’t realise all the ways in which they’re ‘profaning’ your preferred norms on “Sex, pregnancy, childbirth,  and the relationship between a mother and her child ”. Is almost everyone deeply deeply evil then?

  2. Wrong comparison. I don’t consider surrogacy as an alternative to normal child-bearing, but to normal non-child-bearing. A surrogate child is not pulled from the set of normal comfortable children and thrown into an orphanage, he's pulled from the aether. He's thankful he even has a mouth to eat old bread with.

Do you have scientific evidence for your position? And if the available evidence was against you, what about the ‘ancient and holy ways’? It would be a waste to debate this if it was never your true objection.

Ancient and holy things? What about atheist mothers? That’s not true for them then, so your assertion “it’s true” is false.

Those mothers are wrong. There are paedophiles who honestly think that sex ennobles children, but I will not legalise it for those people on that basis.

I feel like just saying “atheists are wrong, God exists” isn’t much of an argument for anyone who isn’t religious, and I’m failing to find the connection between legalizing child sex and…the existence of atheist mothers?

More comments

That you reject sanctity and natural law does not make them incoherent.

Neither does asserting your belief in them make them coherent, or persuasive. Leaving aside whatever "natural law" is supposed to be (I gather that for people living in an Anglo common-law system it is one of those terms that sounds inherently authoritative, but to my ears it just seems like a nicer way to say "law of the jungle"), our best understanding of "sanctity" is that it's a qualium that people can experience about anything, if the right neurons are stimulated. Between epileptics having mystical experiences because their sanctity circuits got zapped and various Austronesian tribes assigning sanctity to random words and objects every few years, why would one see it as reflecting anything about the world independent of the reporting subject, or relevant to any subject other than the reporter?

Maybe you can give the 20 babies to 20 childless cat ladies

It is not actually possible to create catgirls that way.

Ha. Thanks for the chuckle, I needed it.

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