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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.
"It's the fact that we don't approach it with a clear and widespread understanding that it is in fact transhumanist to do."
Who's this "we" here? I assume you're talking about the United States, a country of crypto grifters, tradthot inflooencers, transgender mixed martial artists, strip club owners, obese Alex Jones fans, feminists horrified by male sexuality, white nationalists with Asian wives, bible thumpers predicting the return of Jesus that never happens and elderly Jews still mad they got blackballed from the country club in 1972. Are "we" supposed to come together and have some reasonable, rational "conversation?"
If you don't think kids should be raised by two male homosexuals, you don't need "bioethics" for that. You could have gotten that from an illiterate peasant in Guatemala. "Bioethics" has not done a single good thing since it was thought up and belongs on the railroad tracks.
I am very amused by this collection of Transmetropolitan-influenced caricatures.
Please, do go on.
Wow that was my thought exactly. Is that a well-known comic book in the US?
In the comics scene for sure, but in a "here's the 6 classic graphic novels you have to read" sense where most people have maybe read the first issue for the cred then nothing else. Although Ellis got cancelled a few years back, so he has been downplayed in normie spaces.
I read all of it, but I always thought it was a niche (not a comic book guy, it was recommended to me by one). Also I missed his cancellation, what did he do?
The short version is that he is/was attracted to a certain sort of woman highly represented by his fan base, is famous enough to take advantage of it, and managed this lifestyle poorly. His status in the comics/nerdy interest world was sufficient to allow him to form a sort of rolling soft harem of young (younger than him anyway) women around the English-speaking world. His particular approach (game?) seems to have been to make these women feel special and unique, and that they had a special and unique relationship with him.
Based on the hit-site (https://somanyofus.com/) that his "victims" made, he seems to have made at least 60 or so young women feel that they had a special, unique relationship with him, many simultaneously. The Pick Up people call this “spinning plates”, keeping multiple, limited commitment, relationships all going at once. His particular approach seems to have really made these damaged women think that there was more of a future to the relationship than there really was, and he seemed prone to ‘ghosting’ them without warning. Some famous men are able to manage something not unlike this, but they usually do so through honesty about the limited future of the relationship, where these women seem to genuinely feel to have been strung along then unceremoniously dropped without notice.
Reading some of the statements in the above website, it also gives a bit of a soft cult leader vibe too. He had a rather large online presence in the 00s and interacted with his fan groups a lot, more than I’ve seen with a lot of popular artists who tend to keep a more distant approach through an agent or assistant etc. He seemed to be personally running the Warren Ellis fan forums and appointing admins/mods etc. I was very active online then, but was never much of a comics reader, though many of my friends were. I don’t remember any other artists/authors being this directly involved in their own fandoms. He paid a lot of attention to his forums, fan groups, and the events they held, always keeping an eye out for one of his "type" of woman, who he would then begin to directly message.
The hit-site is worth reading, I think, at least for young (and maybe not so young) men. Particularly the “Testimonials” (https://somanyofus.com/testimonials)
It’s an incredible collection of the wide variety of red flags they may encounter interacting with modern, western women, and object lessons on the dangers of mishandling your interactions with the same.
How many others just saw this post in the comments feed and went "Wait, why would Neil Gaiman be moderating Warren Ellis fan forums?" before clicking it?
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