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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 13, 2026

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"It's morally wrong to sell people" doesn't sound so difficult.

Surrogacy needn't be a paid service. I actually know a gay guy (with a steady partner) who had a child with a platonic female friend of his, with the understanding that the child would primarily be raised by the two men, purely out of friendship. Not a typical case, of course - both due to the lack of a financial arrangement, and the fact that the mother is still very present in the child's life in practice - but clearly recognizable as surrogacy without actually involving anything that could be described as selling people.

Surrogacy needn't be a paid service.

  • Ok, but it overwhelmingly is, and
  • this is where the second argument comes in

and the fact that the mother is still very present in the child's life in practice - but clearly recognizable as surrogacy

Depending on what you mean by "very present" I might disagree about it being recognizable as surrogacy. Is she legally recognized as the child's mother? If not, then I don't think it meets the criteria.

Some time ago I ran into a "dating site" for people who specifically want to hook up for the purpose of having a kid (here's an American example. On the female side it was unsurprisingly full of "T: -10s" on the biological clock women, but what I found interesting (though obvious in retrospect) was that on the male side a good chunk was obviously gay guys. From what I could tell the end goal was both sides keeping rights to the kid, but they could use the site to negotiate how much either side wants to be involved. All in all I still find it pretty degenerate, but it's orders of magnitude superior to surrogacy.