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Shaming prospective parents is a disgusting evil if you ask me.
For centuries, it was common practice for women to defer their mothering to working women in the form of nannies, midwives, and wet nurses. How disgusting and evil were these practices? Did they forever ruin the lives of those who grew up under them? The child didn't have its mother- can it not lead a fulfilling existence now? Is this really that scary? Countless women have also died in childbirth, leaving children with no mother at all. Unless you can convince me that these situations are most likely to produce children who, due to separation from their mothers, would have been better off unborn, it doesn't really counter TracingWoodgrains's line of thinking at all.
Two well-off parents who want a child are already set up to do a lot better for their kids than most anyone else. You praise these mystical values of motherhood, but it's without substance. It sounds like an aesthetic preference built around an ideal of the gentle and loving mother that just isn't as common as you'd hope. I find it hard to imagine that the legions of drug-addicted single moms saddled with kids they resent are going to offer their children a much better life than a couple of men raising a kid- that they greatly committed to before birth- simply by virtue of their irreplaceable feminine touch, or whatever. If you can't imagine much in the way of disgusting evils beyond surrogacy, I encourage you to broaden the horizons of your imagination.
We'd be doing a lot better if we shamed more prospective parents, frankly.
Stealing a loaf of bread because you have no choice and stealing a loaf of bread because you just can are two different things. Furthermore, nannies, midwives, and wet nurses did not all entirely deprive the child of their mother, and plenty of people have turned out mighty fucked up due to a dead or distant mother.
Horrible tragedies occurring naturally is not an excuse to manufacture them.
Those women shouldn't have had kids. That they did doesn't excuse wrong done by anyone else.
Do we not shame enough prospective parents already? The left shames teenagers who get pregnant and young women who choose to be homemakers as opposed to focusing on their careers. The right shames single mothers and older women who froze their eggs or use IVF. We shame wealthy people who want to have as many children as possible. We shame parents who aren't wealthy enough to live in a good school district. We shame free-range parents who forget that it isn't the 80's anymore and let their kids wander unsupervised around the neighborhood. We shame parents who teach their children what we think are the wrong political or religious values. We shame parents in first world countries for contributing to climate change and we shame parents in third world countries for bringing children into a life with such a low standard of living.
If you shame enough people the only ones left to reproduce will be the shameless, the ignorant, and those who lack impulse control. All those prospective parents who would have been any good at it will have refrained from fear of doing it wrong and harming their potential children. Would that really be a better world?
You forgot to mention the opposite, the helicopter parents.
And yeah, I think all parents are imperfect in some way, but most are probably genuinely trying to be good parents (barring the abusive people who should not be parents).
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