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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.
(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.
So you think if, say, a random Malian woman has the child of two random Swedes, she is now - rather than one of the actual, genetic, biological parents - the mother? This is pure fantasy, no different to a stepfather saying he’s the dad because he’s “the one who stepped up”. (Adoption and step-parenting can be very noble, but the adoptive and/or step parent is never the real / biological one).
This argument can easily go either way. Since before humanity the mother supplied the egg, the womb, and archetypically the nursing and parenting too. Now technology means that we can take an egg from one woman, implant it into another, and then pass the baby to another after delivery. They're all doing parts of mothering but none of them are doing all of mothering, and so there's always room to say they are or aren't a "real" mother, it's a matter of how pedantic you need to be.
To illustrate by inversion, would you say that the random Swedish woman is the mother? Because there's a trivial counter that she had no part in a biologically fundamental part of mothering. But does that mean that the child doesn't have a mother? Or two? If two, why are they different? I don't know the answer other than it seems the word is inadequate to properly describe the novel situation. Metamother? Metasexual reproduction? Egg mother, womb mother, and breast mother? Fractional mother? I don't know. Just that if you draw your line too rigidly you probably have to conclude the child doesn't have a mother, which doesn't sit well with the drawing of rigid lines. Relaxing those lines though opens up an argument that anyone who can claim a part of the label is entitled to the whole, and we all know where that goes.
Perhaps we could sweep the whole argument aside and ask why does it matter, what matters is knowledge of the underlying facts. But then the argument rears up again because the label implies a set of facts that ought to provide knowledge, otherwise what use is the label?
Just some thoughts.
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