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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.
Such an utterly bizarre statement.
As with a lot of this stuff, there's a crypto-class element to it. The low-class crack addict who gave up the baby hours after birth is a "mother" while the upper-class woman who raised the child for eighteen years isn't.
I don't see the relevance of your comment (adoption of existing children that would have gone unwanted / uncared-for) to this thread (surrogacy, commissioning a child that would not have come into this world “naturally”).
Are you trying to argue that the “muh trad”-posters in this thread are only secretly jealous of the rich gay jews commissioning the existence of children — that their sentiments here actually stem from class envy and their waxing on “playing Taboo”[colloquialism] around the word
naturalismis just a front?Not so much the rich gay Jews but upper-class people in general. They feel perfectly comfortable talking about the gay Jew, it's the blond haired, blue-eyed, highly educated, heterosexual, married WASP that they have an inferiority complex toward. Particularly when he's a Democrat or Mitt Romney-type Republican.
Take George_E_Hale's original comment:
I'm not saying Hale's lying. But you can give a very misleading view of the world by selectively shining a light on some and not others. I don't know of statistics on those who use surrogates specifically, but given that nearly all are affluent I'd assume they have a lower rate of divorce and family instability than the general population. If you relied entirely on certain dissident right personalities, you'd get a very warped view of which classes have the most stable families in America. I don't think it's a coincidence that the opposition to assisted reproductive technology has grown at the same time that opposition to having kids out of wedlock has declined and at the same time that the GOP has increasingly become a political home for low-income, less-educated whites.
A few months ago, this story was going around Twitter about women using fertility treatments to conceive alone:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/27/doing-it-with-no-partner-easier-single-women-using-fertility-treatments
Twitter trads were saying muh brave new world, blah blah blah. Because that's their worldview, bad things come from affluent urban people in big cities working in universities and applying technology to the human body, doing all this evil unethical stuff because they stopped reading the Bible. While I thought "hey, wait a second, this idea of women raising children without fathers is not new. We're up to 40% of children born out of wedlock, disproportionately among the poor and non-white. Why aren't you talking about that?"
We're not?
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That's a serious enough complaint I think it overcomes the threshold for being “just whataboutism”. My day-to-day quality of life is impacted (for the worse) infinitely more by the class of people who grew up fatherless by some “natural” process of death or human attraction than it is by the class of people who grew up “technically fatherless” by the fact of surrogacy.
I would be interested to see folk like @Corvos from this thread argue against the practice by anything other than sympathetic analogy to other things that trigger a disgust impulse.
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Speak plainly please, what are you suggesting here?
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