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How about a pallet cleanser?
In the other thread a few people brought up surrogacy, and maybe I've spent too much time with TERFs, but am I the only one that overwhelmed with the feeling of Lovecraftian horror whenever it's brought up? The feeling is even more uncanny, because it's like I slept through some great societal debate where everybody decided it's actually a lovely thing that should be celebrated. Although maybe it's not all that bad, there's a certain "how it started, how it's going" quality to the NYT headlines. In any case the casual way it's supporters talk about surrogacy freaks me out even more than militant pro-choicers.
Then there's the whole slippery slope thing:
Love is love, we have a right to get married just the same as you! - Yes I agree!
We also have a right to adopt! - Sure! I mean I have my issues with adoption in practice, but in principle if there are kids without parents, and willing gay couples to adopt them I don't see an issue.
We also have a right to biological children! What? Do you expect us to be ok with not having children?
Wait what? Yes I do! I'm all for tolerance, and living and letting live, but you're not going to make me see this as a lovely family moment, and anyway I don't remember signing on to turning a fundamental human experience into an industry when I supported the gay rights movement. Accept the limits of your biology, and move on.
Which brings me to Dase's idea "postrat «don't mean-spiritedly dunk on a rationalist» challenge (impossible)". Indeed, I can't help myself, and even though I used to be rat/rat-adjacent, I find myself having growing disdain for the entire philosophy. There's a meme that's slowly gathering momentum, that all the trans stuff, and 72 genders is just a foot in the door for transhumanism, and after I heard the idea for the first time, I can't seem to unsee it. This twisted ideology will drive us to throw away our humanity, turn us into a cross-over between Umgah Blobbies and the Borg, or trick us into committing suicide, because there's a subroutine running on some GPU somewhere, that's somewhat similar to the processes in our brains. Given the utter dominance of the trans ideology, the vindication of the slippery slope argument, and the extrapolated trajectory of these ideas, I believe we have no other choice - Transhumanism must be destroyed!
Here's a question that I have about that handmaid's tale maternity photo shoot that you linked. Is this gay couple going to include that woman in the child's life as the child's mother? If not, is this weird picture going to be something that the child gets to look at in their lonely moments wondering who the woman was who gave birth to them, and what it would have been like to have her as a mother? Did this couple think any of these things at all themselves?
My biggest problem with surrogacy, as I stated in another comment, is that the child is left being forced to embrace parents who paid their biological mother and gestating mother to go away forever so that they could assume a full parental role.
It seems like that child is sort of compelled from birth to ignore the psychological and emotional implications of having two male parents who paid their mom to go away because they wanted to feel normal. That's why it's not the same as adoption, because the new family that you're supposed to embrace did not contractually obligate your biological parents to give you up.
The surrogate came up with and posted the photo shoot idea (and also isn't the genetic mother?). Her name is public (at least through TikTok) and self-describes as a 'surrogacy advocate', and other photos from the set naming her are in fairly mainstream media. According to this piece, "The Dlugosz family [two men and the kid] still plans Capital Region visits. Zwicker [the surrogate] expects the relationship to wane over time. For her, that’s OK."
Zwicker seems to very strongly object to being identified as the child's mother, and probably not solely for the legal or genetic reasons, but neither does it look like the fathers paying her to go away the second the c-section was over. It's hard for me to read if it's to prevent herself from getting too attached, or because she just doesn't feel it's the same as with her first child and doesn't want to get in the way of the people who are, and she might not be entirely sure herself. Surrogacy clinics claim to do significant prematch screening, and there's a lot of media discussion (and, uh, horror stories with legal snafus) enough that I'd expect any prospective surrogate-seekers to have at least considered it.
More generally, attitudes vary. I'd personally consider it healthier if there's some longer-term relationship, historically this has been favored, and there's some evolving norms around 'surrogate aunts' or similar more euphemistic references. But there are parents (sometimes feeling that they'd be treated as non-parents, sometimes worried about legal trouble if a surrogate mother has regrets) or surrogates (since there can sometimes be financial or legal issues that way!) who prefer a more immediate or direct break afterward.
((And, in practice, as many surrogacies look to involve infertile het (or XY/XX trans-gender-weird) couples as gay ones. Zwicker's photoshoot here was her second surrogacy, with her first going to Zwicker's cousin and that cousin's husband.))
To me it looks like the woman acting as s surrogate here gets a lot of social support and validation from being a surrogate. However, so do many prostitutes, and so would people paid to donate a lobe of their liver or a kidney. I think it should be the same thing. You can have sex for free, you can donate an organ, and you should be able to donate the act of surrogacy, but you shouldn't be able to do any of these things as a paid service because that's bad for society. And yes, for me that does include pornography where the actors are paid to have sex with each other on camera. Commercial pornography is causing a lot of problems. Labor laws (no pun intended) exist to prevent the rich from exploiting the working class beyond what is tolerable or humane, and requires society to create non-exploitive forms of work to continue functioning.
Many jurisdictions place surrogacy in a similar space to prostitution and organ donation, where ostensibly paying for it is illegal. In practice, this largely just converts into a gray market, so just as 'escorts' or 'companions' (who are only being paid for their company, and if sex happens, whoops), 'unpaid surrogates' that are compensated for lodging or lost work opportunity usually sneak through. Zwicker's first surrogacy (for a cousin) was somewhat unusually in being completely unpaid, but it was also unpleasant enough juggling that and her own child she wouldn't have done it for family again.
I'm not convinced that's a better model, or that a hard ban would be (prohibiting adoption where there's sign of collaboration beforehand? clawing back funds? I'm not sure how you'd make that work, but let's assume something's possible, since this is a lot more seeable-as-a-state than prostitution). I could see that sort of policy having some impact on the marginal cases, where someone just on the border of affording to buy or being willing to sell doesn't go through with it, but the marginal cases aren't the ones that bring comparisons to axotl tanks or broodmothers.
But I'm... uh, probably going to have some pretty fundamental values differences. And even experience differences: I recognize how a lot of the bigger commercial vendors range from 'merely' scuzzy drug-addict-optimizers or abusing the bounds of informed consent to overtly ignoring rape or trafficking, but it's not clear how much of that is the commercial porn and how much is California and eastern Europe being the core of modern commercial pornography, and on the other extreme 'commercial pornography' in the furry fandom has a widely different set of problems mostly tied to artists needing better wrist support.
I probably don't have a good model of what you consider the "bad for society" bit here.
To give you a quick hit, bad for society is when your therapist can mention surrogacy as a legal way out of your poverty.
Yes, and the correlated bit where your social worker could mention it right before an SSDI/welfare interview. But I don't see this as something specific to the formal recognition; both therapists and social workers shouldn't encourage outright illegal conduct (uh, shouldn't), but both groups are organizationally and foundationally designed around Not Quite Illegal things. They're not always good at it, but they're usually not that bad, either.
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