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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.
A lot of surrogates don’t want to get wrapped up in the bullshit, especially surrogates working with higher-profile parents. Many states and surrogacy orgs require the information about biomoms to be available to the kid, and I’m pretty strongly in favor of that. But publicizing the mom* without her permission is inviting a massive amount of public attention onto someone who near-certainly doesn’t want it.
(*or moms, though I doubt Altman bothered with that)
In the more general case, I’d prefer a world where surrogates were closely connected to their kid(s), and there are a lot of policy changes that could make that more accessible — unfucking a lot of the parental rights clusterfuck, reducing the often-serious stigma, employment policies less heavily incentivizing the three-year in-and-out. There’s some awkwardness to a family relationship of dad, papa, and ‘aunt’, but it’s probably better for the kids.
But as a revealed preference thing, there are a lot of women who find a year of surrogacy a lot easier (or even net-enjoyable) than a dozen years of child-rearing. And I’m not sure they’re wrong to think it that way, or that it’s really a solvable problem.
For at least some portion, the question isn’t going to be surrogacy or convention family (or single motherhood); it’s between kids or no kids. And I’d rather push to improve the situation on the margins then close off the entire category.
I'm having a hard time believing this is all that common. A woman having custody rights to a rich dude's baby seems like something that would pretty straight-forwardly benefit her.
I would assume that any surrogacy contract is fairly explicit about the surrogate not having custody rights.
The fact that these contracts are enforceable says a lot about the extreme power imbalance between the people who pay for surrogacy and the ones who carry the child.
Could I make a contract with a rich person to cut off my arm?
Assuming no, then I'm not sure how even a fully informed surrogate can make a contract that always results in physical pain and loss of a child, and may additionally cause bodily harm or even death. Pregnancy and childbirth is no picnic.
To me, this stretches the extremes of what should be allowed in a contract. Perhaps surrogacy should be limited to altruistic volunteers as it is in many places.
Many manual labor jobs pretty predictably cause physical pain and damage if you do them for your whole career.
No more so than voluntary adoption? Which similarly gives up custody rights, and isn't something that's generally illegal.
There are also some jobs that have a moderate risk of bodily harm and death, and while we regulate these and require clear warnings, we don't ban them if alternatives aren't available.
I don't think surrogacy is an exceptional job by the neutral/lib values you are appealing to. Maybe it is from conservative ones, but you should argue from them directly
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