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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   6200 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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This is a bit of a one-sided spin.

According to the suit, filed in Ontario Superior Court in May and obtained by the National Post, the parents claim the surrogate didn’t adequately keep them informed about the baby’s health, put the child at risk, violated confidentiality and caused them emotional distress.

[…] The parents agreed to proceed with the pregnancy after doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital said the baby was generally healthy and had no major problems beyond the cleft lip.

But tensions flared again between the surrogate and the parents when she insisted on a home birth performed by midwives rather than in a hospital, as the parents requested due to the cleft lip.

The child had breathing difficulties during delivery but recovered when he was given oxygen, and that an ambulance was summoned to take him to the hospital, the report said.

After their child got treatment, the parents took the child home and ceased contact with the surrogate, who asked them to cover around $10,000 in outstanding expenses, lost wages, transportation costs and skipped contributions to her pension plan.

The parents ignored her, leading her to take them to small-claims court, where she learned her contract required arbitration to settle any such disputes. She was then slapped with the lawsuit.

On one hand, I agree that the customers in this case shouldn't have any power to compel abortion, and "emotional distress" is just obnoxious litigiousness; the most they should be able to threaten is cancellation of the contract and the transfer of the baby's custody rights to the mother (not sure how the Canadian law currently works in such cases). But the fact that the child had a real medical problem which, by the way, could have led to lifelong brain damage is an important factor, and they seem straight up correct and responsible in demanding hospital birth.

Siding with a poor exploited woman against dem gay perverts is a very easy way to signal prosociality, and rather hollow, given that embryos not being people and having no right to life is a general societal consensus. Good heterosexual couples have politely exterminated entire classes of human beings with birth defects; when was the last time you've seen a child with Down's? As with Grindr-Tinder, the deviants mostly accelerate the propagation of the cynicism's frontier.

I find both parties corrupt here.

P.S. In fact, this specific detail might point to an ironic conclusion that half-assed Chesterton's fences are worse than committed social engineering from scratch. If you're turning childbirth into a services market and don't want gratuitous cruelty, you should regulate it like factory farming. Pull all soul out of it and replace with low-friction procedure. Hate abortions? Delegitimize cozy home birth with midwives. Surgery-maxx, develop in utero treatment. Actually, remove the mother entirely and speedrun to artificial wombs. The stable state of a post-Christian society is not quasi-Christian.

It seems obvious that a surrogacy contract should cover birth defects. If I were a client, there is no way I would sign something that did not give me an out: an explicit abortion scenario or, as you suggest, the transfer of custody and legal rights/obligations to the surrogate as the surrogate's option, possibly with further financial support in the contract depending just how rich I am. I also would not sign something that did not let me require a hospital birth or even c-section, with these again being problems that can be solved with money.

when was the last time you've seen a child with Down's

A couple of weeks ago. Some of us are actually pro-life.

when was the last time you've seen a child with Down's?

Yesterday, if you'll allow (presumptive) early-teenagers. It happens every couple months or so, it's not common but not exceptional either.

Claude says 1/630 live births have Down's and about 50% abortion rate (with bad tracking/stats), which suggests 1/315 conception rate. Compare it to 1/790 live birth rate in the 1970s (same source), and increased screening+abortion isn't even keeping pace with the increased incidence due to aging parents.

This is surprising to me. I guess Americans really re pro-life. I've stopped seeing young Down's years ago. Subjectively it seems they've been decimated in Russia, and probably many other places.

Canada, not the US, but close enough. One very strong confounder is that we aren't seeing a representative sample of society. Even if there was the same rate in different areas (and we both saw the same number of people out and about), they might stay at home or be institutionalized in one country and "in the community" in another.

Good heterosexual couples have politely exterminated entire classes of human beings with birth defects; when was the last time you've seen a child with Down's?

I hate the Europoor eugenicists who have mostly eradicated kids with Down's on a similar level to how much I hate the people in this story, so what's your point?

I find both parties corrupt here.

"They may be suing her for failing to murder the baby, but she chose to do a home birth instead of a hospital birth (which was not contractually required) despite the adoptive parents wanting one so they're both corrupt". I don't find anything corrupt or objectionable in the surrogate mother's behavior (other than agreeing to the surrogacy in the first place).

"They may be suing her for failing to murder the baby

This seems to be fake news as they've abandoned this angle upon getting the medical conclusion that the defect is NBD.

I find knowingly putting the baby's life and health in jeopardy objectionable, indeed evil, and morally inconsistent with the opposition to abortion; and your lack of reaction to that (as well as apathetic "not contractually required" dodge) indicative that you have no moral scruples beyond disgust/purity kneejerk reactions.

Home births(or non-hospital birthing centers, which I suspect this actually was) aren't that dangerous. They're fairly common in the US(which Canada, whether or not it likes it, is enough of a suburb of that the same should apply)- certainly common enough that if they were particularly dangerous, this would be well known and called attention to by major medical bodies.

I don't protest home births in principle, but in this case it seems to have been ill-advised.

Yeah, I'll second this. The gay guys letter saying that they 'wish' for an abortion when they thought the medical defect was likely to be serious (which I'd find that really objectionable) was ill-advised, and the surrogate's home birth decision was ill-advised, and neither of these seem to really matter for the actual lawsuit/arbitration, which is mostly about compensation for additional costs and fees. Which is its own very stupid mess and everyone involved needs to grow up, but it's not very specific to surrogacy in ways that the home birth or 'do you abort under X conditions' questions are.

This is fake news.

My apologies, "We asked her to do it, and since she didn't we are suing her for a bunch of the problems we're claiming we have to deal with because she didn't do it" might be more accurate.

I find knowingly putting the baby's life and health in jeopardy objectionable, indeed evil, and your lack of reaction to that (as well as apathetic "not contractually required" dodge) indicative that you have no moral scruples beyond disgust/purity kneejerk reactions.

Home births with a midwife in the US (and I assume Canada) are often (though not always) safer than hospital births, at least in terms of maternal and child outcomes (selection effects and other things obviously play a role here). Hospital births aren't inherently more dangerous than a home birth with a midwife.

Would it kill you to not try to spin your way out of a false claim? They aren't suing her out of spite because she didn't abort.

Hospital births aren't inherently more dangerous than a home birth with a midwife.

Indeed they are not, but nitpicking aside – they're less dangerous in the case of births for which we have a high prior about medical complications. If I were a parent-to-be, I'd be quite paranoid about breathing difficulties. Babies are sort of built to recover from oxygen deprivation, but there's a limit to that.

Would it kill you to not try to spin your way out of a false claim? They aren't suing her out of spite because she didn't abort.

No I agree with you, it was a false claim on my part.

EDIT: Specifically, the news article I linked presented it that way and I accepted the idea uncritically, which was an error on my part, and I'm sorry about that.

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