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The guy who chanted "Bomb Iran" to the tune of "Barbara Ann"?
And allegedly purchased a child via surrogacy. Probably not the kind of aesthetics I'd support, but I suppose that's the problem with trying to judge someone by aesthetics. I don't care for Trump's, but I'd be hard pressed to name a politician from either party who has aesthetics that make me think I should support them.
In the absence of artificial uteruses, how is a gay male couple supposed to have a biological kid for one of the fathers except throug surrogacy? I don't see what the aesthetic opposition could be here unless it is to such a degree that gay males are not able to "aesthetically" have biological children at all.
Tearing away a child from it's mother's arms is not aesthetically displeasing to you?
They can do it the same way everyone else does.
Since the mother has signed up to be paid for surrogacy, I am not particularly inclined to view the child as being torn away from the mother's possession. Possibly, I am not open enough to the infant's perspective that it is being torn away from its mother, but divorce, mothers dying, infant adoption, etc., seem to me like they are common enough that this is not a huge problem. I am open to the idea that allowing surrogacy should be completely illegal on the grounds that it is too much like selling organs, but a) this would also ban surrogacy for high-risk mothers and b) is better than organ sales in that faking the supply chain is totally impossible. If surrogacy exists at all, it seems like it has to be an option for gay males.
Yeah, there's that, but also, it's rather naive to think that it's all fine because the mother signed on the dotted line, before a major transformative experience. And that's without looking into the gory details, like how a lot of them do it out of desperation, how the contracts penalize them for backing out, etc.
All of these things are massive tragedies, and we don't go out of our way to deliberately create them. Divorce, given it's scale, is a huge problem.
Correct. Surrogacy should not exist at all, it is a moral horror. I don't understand how the thought that this is about gay men, enters into people's heads.
Although it is not my own, I find the position of no surrogacy for anyone perfectly coherent. Normally, I would just upvote and move on, but I find myself wondering how you feel about wet nurses. Breastfeeding is a fairly intimate bonding experience, so a wet nurse arguably also has a strong claim to motherhood, or at least it seems aesthetically displeasing on the same grounds as surrogacy.
Depends on the reasons for it. Sometimes a mother can't produce milk, so if it's either wet nursing or the baby starves, it seems fine. If it's because of some aristocratic lady's notions that breastfeeding is beneath her, someone should slap her around and tell her that maybe motherhood is beneath her (though the issue with that is she'd have your hands chopped off for it).
Yeah, sounds about right, though it feels less severe to me, as it doesn't involve literally selling a child. From the child's perspective, it's pretty messed up, though.
I think of surrogacy as probably involving the implantation of a fertilized egg that does not originate with the surrogate. This way, a mother without a functional womb would still get to pass on her genetic material, and it would also make it so that surrogate-purchasers would not be forced to use the surrogate's genetics, which is potentially very desirable for both sides of the transaction. The financial transaction here is selling the use of the womb, which seems sufficiently icky for someone to reasonably find it unacceptably unaesthetic, but it does not really seem like selling a child unless the birthmother's egg is being used.
Maybe a way to think about this is to ask if an eggless woman somehow steals a couple's last and only viable fertilized egg from a fertility clinic and implants herself, to whom should the child belong once birthed? My view is that the child clearly belongs to the woman who provided the egg.
I'm well aware, and I suppose I have to go back on what I said about gay surrogacy, as this clearly shows it is actually worse than the heterosexual version. If we just take the moral dilemma from the end of your comment
We can see that this is not what's happening in case of gay surrogacy, where neither woman gets any claim on the child. It is therefore not a result of a good faith attempt at attributing motherhood, but a deliberate attempt to weaken the legal position of anyone on the seller side of surrogacy, and just adds to the moral horror of the situation. And no matter how you do attribution in this case, be it surrogate, egg donor, or mixed, someone is definitely selling a child there.
Now, back to the heterosexual / general case of the scenario, I'm much more inclined to side with the woman actually giving birth. Exceptions make bad law, and your "ovary heist" scenario is implausible and would extremely rare relative to a much more common one: IVF with an ovary donation. Your approach would presumably hand over the rights to over the child to the donor, if she changes her mind? Or do we go "contracts ueber alles", and the donor has no rights because she signed them away, but the ovary heist victim does, because she did not? Is this a general framework, and people can sign away any right in your opinion, or does it only apply to motherhood?
"Potentially" doing a lot of work here. I see only one side clearly benefiting from this. If, at any point, the surrogate has a change of heart, this arrangement only disadvantages her.
A womb is not a disembodied part that can be rented out while you're not using it, and the experience of childbearing can't be sequestered to just it. It's something a woman goes through with her entire body, and which has a significant impact on her mind as well. This is seen in the surrogacy contract itself, which often includes dietary and health clauses.
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