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Notes -
(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.
stands awkwardly in infertility
In which case, you have my sympathy. As I said:
It’s not what I’d hoped for either, but there are other ways to contribute to society.
I appreciate your sympathy, but I will not appreciate the sentiment that it “is what it is” and one of my options is a moral stain on society and I should go to jail or something. The sentiment of this “sanctity” between a birth mother and child is completely lost on me. My mother gave birth to me, I suckled on her breasts and came out of her womb blah, blah, blah, and there was not a single maternal aspect about her and no amount of biological relation did anything to help that or my proceeding siblings; if anything, I had a better shot of being raised not like a dog with literally anyone else. And observing this pattern repeatedly among my friends and even my boyfriend makes the notion of biological motherhood being superior above all else a joke to me. I’ve seen enough mothers give birth to children they have as much maternal attachment to as a toddler does to their toy to be rid of the notion there’s something special made between a biological mother and her children that can’t be replicated in any other parenting situation.
You say youre not a troll, but this is a very wordy version of "Conservatism is bad because I hate my family.".
Honest question for religious conservatives here, why shouldn't secular people just straight up make your religion illegal, shut down your churches, burn your bibles, etc? Sure, advocating that would lead to a politically damaging public backlash. But is there a principled reason why they shouldn't do those things?
Under a classical liberal framework? Yes, the same principled reasons that it shouldn’t violently repress dozens or hundreds of other groups.
Under an NrX framework? Because we make good citizens and have demands compatible with flourishing societies. This doesn’t necessarily apply to other religions, but it seems to for Christianity.
Under a one-truth exclusivist framework, that reason would be ‘because we are right and you are wrong’. Obviously, you disagree. But that disagreement goes both ways.
Under a progressive move away from classical liberalism, even Scandinavia and the Netherlands prefer to tolerate their fundamentalist Christian minorities. I suspect a society willing/able to repress Christian fundamentalism is one you do not wish to live in; it probably takes China-tier totalitarianism.
This slippery-slope objection never seems to stop religious fundamentalists from demanding their morality be the basis of state policy, so you'll forgive me if I wonder whether it's being put fourth in good faith.
There are societies in existence right now which don’t oppress married straight people but which target the groups Christian fundamentalists don’t like. Like Poland is not as nice of a place to live as the USA but that’s because of needing to catch up after communism, not because of present day authoritarianism.
The societies which successfully oppress Christian fundamentalists are societies in which government oppression hits everyone, like China. No doubt Dutch Christian fundamentalists would prefer a government more favorable to them, but they get by just fine with laws far less favorable than in the USA. And the Netherlands has far more state capacity, and far fewer political protections for Christian fundamentalism, than the U.S., and attempts to repress it have failed.
I’m not going to pretend my bias doesn’t exist, but by the same token I won’t agree that it doesn’t have an empirical backing. You can have societies where Christian fundamentalism has a lot of influence, and even makes life very difficult for certain groups, without subjecting everyone to totalitarianism. Repressing fundamentalist Christianity seems to be a different thing- you can go full China, or you can tolerate it.
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