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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.
Here's a hint for why there's no mention of the mother in the article, as OP wondered. It's controversial!
Not all women get paid for this, FWIW. And some find the process of being pregnant and birthing joyful in and of itself.
Why isn't participating in bringing a life into the world into a well resourced home seen as a moral good? If one is cynical enough, anything can be made to sound like a trashy business transaction.
Because, again, the woman is giving birth to a child she intends to permanently separate from its mother, to satisfy her own purposes. She’s doing so because she finds “the process of being pregnant and birthing joyful in and of itself” instead of for money but that doesn’t make it better.
I would make an exception if she were willing to truly fulfil the role of a mother for the child in some sort of weird 3-parent relationship, but my understanding is that this doesn’t usually happen.
I just mean it is not an immense sacrifice to some people that they might only consider because they wanted to get paid or had some other kind of illegitimate gain from it or wanted to pervert the social order in some way.
Some people, friends or family, see a loving couple that can't reproduce on their own and want to help.
Anyway, are you similarly against giving children up for adoption?
What about the people doing the adopting?
As an aside, the legal process is quite explicit that the surrogate has no rights to a relationship with the child. And again, it's controversial. People don't necessarily volunteer to strangers they they have done this.
Re: adoption, I discussed in another thread. Please forgive the copy-paste:
TLDR the stereotypical desperate woman who gives up a child she can’t care for is doing the best she can for the child and I sympathise. Beyond that it depends.
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