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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.
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.
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.")?
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?
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