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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.
"Surrogacy" is a classic bioethics problem for a reason.
The question of the 21st century, and (hopefully!) beyond, is what role humans will play in the future. We are accustomed to using the word "dehumanizing" as a pejorative, as we treat pretty much everything else in the world worse than we treat one another (which is often saying something...)--so to be not human is by definition to be less than human. But "dehumanize" can be a purely descriptive term.
(This is also a big part of AI anxiety, I think--if there's something higher than us on the intellectual food chain, doesn't that make us food? See e.g. The Matrix as an early example of taking this somewhat literally...)
For hundreds of thousands of years at least, maternal affection has been a matter of life and death for our species. There is basically nothing more fundamentally human, except perhaps the act of heterosexual coupling that creates infants in the first place. And (perhaps contra some other commenters) I think there are fully human roads to practices like adoption (women have often shared the task of breastfeeding with other women, e.g.).
But artificial reproductive technologies--even as basic as your IUI "turkey baster" techniques"--head down a slippery slope. By applying technological progress to ourselves, we objectify humanity itself. We step outside our species, however slightly, and subject ourselves to egregorian evolution (usually, Moloch).
So my own perspective on this is that the problem isn't the womb rental (so to speak) per se. It's the fact that we don't approach it with a clear and widespread understanding that it is in fact transhumanist to do. That the resulting relationships are transhuman relationships. That the mother of this child has been used, for a time, as (spoilers for Dune):an axlotl tank (e.g.--mildly NSFW)
Is it wrong, to "rent out" the human body? Is it wrong, to deprive a human child of a mother? I'm open to the possibility, and doing such things has historically been closely associated with monumental evil, in the details even if not in the act itself. But I think the problem in the case of surrogacy for same-sex couples is precisely that we insist on pretending that there's "nothing to it," rather than observing that this is transhumanism in action, the activity of reducing our bodies to the level of chattel--to the level of moveable property, of mere technology. Philosophers have long observed that the body is mechanical in nature!
I consider myself fairly pro-transhumanism. I would like us to be more than we are, and I would like us to approach that in a careful and thoughtful way. But we don't actually have the technology to make that happen, yet, and if we ever do I think it will be an extinction-class event for our species. People who do transhumanesque things now--employ surrogacy for same sex "reproduction," have their sex organs removed to fulfill a personal aesthetic, etc.--are like small children "playing house" in alarmingly sexual ways, doing grown-up things without adult supervision or a mature understanding of what they do. It is a form of arrested development; unable or unwilling to accept the reality of the world they live in, gay men buy children so they can play house. But matters are not so simple, and the resulting child will be raised without some historically central human experiences. It is not nice to say that makes them "less than human," but in the fully transhuman sense, it clearly makes them less human. I hasten to add--there are many experiences we may all have, in this sense, that make us "less human!" But even so, it seems like a terrible thing to deliberately inflict such things on biological humans who have not chosen transhumanism for themselves.
I still think parents in some form or another are necessary for psychiatric health. It seems like just observationally a lot of social pathologies and mental health issues went through the roof after the widespread use of institutional daycares and preschool. We’ve essentially been kenneling our kids for much of their waking lives, and im becoming much more convinced that, especially if it starts young, it has a lot of negative impacts on the mental health of the child as they can’t form the strong family bonds that existed for most of human history. It’s actually a pretty odd social experiment that we did to ourselves without thinking about it.
If you think about a child in daycare maybe a good one will have 2 adults and 8-10 kids. That child is a number. Not the caregiver’s fault, but she’s not the kid’s parent and she can’t care as much as a parent could. And even if she did, she has other children to worry about. Now this starts in the USA especially in infancy maybe 8 weeks or so, depending on the leave offered to the mother (fathers rarely get leave). And because it covers the working hours of parents, including commute, you might have a child in daycare from 8am to 6pm and be putting the baby to bed soon after. The child gets weekends with mom and dad, and spends most of the time in institutional care.
Going further to deprive future children of any parental bonding at all would likely make that situation much worse. I suspect that it would create sociopathic behaviors in most children in that situation. How does a child learn to care about others if they never received the same care themselves? Could they feel the pain and suffering they cause another human being? If they could, would they care?
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