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Notes -
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.
This got me thinking a bit about surrogacy laws and how this plays out in the culture war. In my own country, the Netherlands, specifically commercial surrogacy is banned, but if you can find someone who wants to do it out of altruism, it is legal. This runs into some complications where people go to countries with laxer laws (usually poor third world countries) and get a commercial surrogate there. My impressions is that while this touches on a lot of culture war issues, it somehow is a rare issue that does not always follow established culture war lines. What I mean is that while conservatives are generally opposed to it, I have seen progressives both ardently in favour from a perspective of support for LGBT people but other leftists ardently opposed because they view it as something which in practice often amounts to rich white men exploiting poor brown women in third world countries. I suppose there is also probably a libertarian line where you don't care about it as long as everybody involved consents.
This leads to the strange result that when I look at a map on wikipedia concerning surrogacy laws, it appears at least commercial surrogacy is banned throughout most of the world, but it is legal in for instance California, Vermont, Texas, Florida and Russia. California and Vermont being on the same side as Texas, Florida and Russia on a controversial medical-ethical practice which touches on LGBT culture war stuff, with places e.g. Norway, Germany, Michigan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on the other extreme, is pretty remarkable to me.
I'm afraid I won't be able to provide your steelman for you though, because as far as I'm concerned, at least if Sam Altman and his husband paid for the surrogacy they ought to be jailed for human trafficking.
Surrogacy is mostly opposed by religious interests(who are a perpetual junior partner in red state politics and have far less influence than commonly believed in Russia) and actual radical feminists, of the sort who have more influence overseas. Pro-business types and less radical feminists and LGBT supporters are generally in favor.
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