This is quite a dry, transactional approach. What does it mean for a women to bear a child? How important is it for a child to have a mother and a father, and ideally their real parents as their parents? Over the long term what is the most stable (and happy) form of family life? How do we best promote that as a society?
The stable and happy form of family life we want is one where the children are loved and the parents treat each other well and stay together. Which homosexual-parent households do just as well as heterosexual-parent ones. See e.g. (study linked within):
Just like how the pro-life movement is undermined by its supporters' lack of enthusiasm for any support for children *after* their birth, pro-family advocates who might otherwise win some people to their way of thinking end up focusing less on what can encourage parents to stay together, and more on their belief that gay people shouldn't be parents. Which makes people realize that it's not about being pro-family at all, but rather that's a thin veneer for hate. If you're actually pro-family, you want more kids born to smaller households who love them and can afford to take care of them and where the parents stay together. As the slogan of another movement has it: love is love. All other factors pale in comparison.
I'm a conservative - I think the burden of evidence for change lies with the person advocating for change. We have a set of normative social relationships established over [hundreds at least] years, that's the key piece of evidence. Rights based changes (not evidence based), followed by some random sociology study don't begin to constitute evidence to make the changes we've made.
The idea that normalization of "gay marriage" has been motivated by some kind of empirical evidence is beyond farcical. Surely you aren't trying to make such a claim?
I know this is late- but just according to the article, it’s an analysis of 34 studies taking place between 1989-2022 in several different countries with legalized SSM. Are you arguing that all 34 studies have been flawed in every country over a 33 year period? I’m trying to understand why this doesn’t pass your benchmark
I do think that we live in a world that "research finds" that everything is fine with gay people, regardless of whether or not that's true.
But if you believe we should infringe on liberty, you still need to provide actual evidence. More than vibes.
And if you want to prevent a class of people from reproducing, you'd better show that they make *particularly* awful parents.
If you're about to bite both bullets - to say that bad parents should be prevented from having children, and also that gay people make uniquely bad parents - that would at least be an argument. But if you're just vaguely asking "what is good?" then I don't see the relevance of your comments.
Gay couples can't have children or reproduce, by definition. I mean, I suppose they could reproduce despite their claimed sexual preferences, but if they then actually marry the person they reproduced with and raised their child together, one has to question whether they're really gay anymore at that point. In a typical "gay marriage," obviously the child can only be the child of one of the "parents," at best.
Are the Black Hebrew Israelites "pro-Jew" when they come along and proclaim themselves to be "the real Jews?" Would any actual pro-Jewish person go along with such nonsense, or would they condemn it as anti-semitism?
It's the same when cohabitating homosexuals come along and claim to be a "family." Accepting this claim undermines the entire concept of a "family," as it no longer has any meaningful qualifications. It would now mean just any combination of people who live in close proximity and claim to "love each other," totally disconnected from behavior, biology, or anything else tangible.
By this logic, we should encourage a re-flourishing of polygamy, as it is once again entirely compatible with our brave new definition of "family." Why can't one man and eight wives raise however many of their children? At least the kids of such an arrangement would actually be the children of the people raising them.
you seem to have a view of gay people raising children that regards it as comparable to the robots in the Matrix raising humans as a power source. I suggest you get out there and actually meet some real gay people, and see how they're raising children (i.e., as lovingly as any other parent, on average).
One proposed mechanism to explain why homosexuality evolved - in all highly social species, beyond even primates, and across all human societies - is that gay people are a social safety net to help the children of close relatives (called "kin selection"). There are also other evolutionary adaptations it is linked with, such as reduced male aggression and increased female fertility in kin.
TLDR: Gay people were genetically engineered to be good at raising children, in a manner of speaking. It takes a village to raise a child. Highly restrictive notions of what a family is or is not do not reflect observed reality within human societies.
If we look at "observed reality within human societies," obviously you will find that the modern notion of "gay marriage" was non-existent until about 5 seconds ago, and remains non-existent among the majority of the world's population. So I wouldn't lean on that phrase if I were you.
If the idea that people are now doing it means that it is good and acceptable because it is now "observed reality," this is a tautology. Slavery was also an observed reality of basically every human society until relatively recently. This doesn't mean slavery is morally desirable.
It might be nice to pretend that we could somehow decide this issue with "data," but unfortunately, we live in a situation where so-called "data" regarding anything vaguely related to homosexuality is beyond untrustworthy. And if we're being honest, this is not a "data" issue. Just as the gay rights advocates of both decades past and the present day form their view based on moral priors first, then maybe search out data later, I also choose to base my viewpoint on moral axioms rather than attempting to sort through statistical analyses. You almost certainly do as well, if you were being honest about it. This is an issue of first principles, not of numbers on spreadsheets.
And yes, the notion of what a family is, is highly restrictive. Definitions of words are highly restrictive, by definition. Otherwise they aren't definitions and the words don't mean anything. Just as red is not green and men are not women, two homosexual people cohabitating with someone else's child is not a "family."
This is exactly the sort of article I signed up to read from RH originally. Clear thinking, incorporating both pragmatic and ethical lines of thought, without pre-existing partisan or groupthink bias. The more he writes stuff like this, and the less he writes about race (on which he has a screeching level of blind spot and groupthink imo), the more readers he'll gain among centrists and intellectuals. Which I gather is one of his goals.
I assume that's why he wrote an extensive letter here on Substack after getting roundly critiqued in the national conversation for his former pseudonymous publications, a letter about how he used to hold shitty views on race and gender when he was a younger, angrier man, and now he doesn't think that way anymore.
But hey, I'm sure RH will "come around eventually" too, huh?
"There are a lot of women in the first world who are scared of being pregnant and reasonably don’t want to take time off from their high paying jobs"
They are going to take time off from their jobs, unless they are also planning on paying someone to look after their baby too. Hard to see that any significant number of fertile women would actually do this.
"and many poor women without marketable skills who would happily carry their children for a mutually agreed upon price."
I think you are underestimating how important it is to mother-child bonding to have the baby in her tummy first, and also how painful it is for the surrogate to lose the baby, something she will only find out about afterwards. You can say that every voluntary exchange is ipso facto justified, but this is like saying the crackhead who lost his job, his friends, his wife and kids and now lives in a motel is acting in his rational self interest because right now he cares more about getting high. This doesn't necessarily justify a ban, but safeguards, like a mandatory counselling session outlining the risk for the surrogate mother, seems reasonable.
The question is, can individuals make their own choices about the importance of mother-child bonding or does the government need to step in to protect someone's rights? I think in this situation, both the surrogates and the parents are always going to understand the risks perfectly well.
Nor is the surrogate a slave; nobody will force or even strongly encourage them to agree to a surrogacy deal. It has to be very much worth their while, which is why the going rate is somewhere north of $100k for 10-11 months' work.
Nobody is being auctioned, nor forced to indefinite terms of labor. Indeed, in most cases the surrogate has a right to decide to keep the baby in lieu of payment. The analogy to slavery is equal parts wrong and disgusting.
Nope, you’re wrong. Children have diminished rights. They are subject to the whims and objectives of the parents. We accept this with children conceived by the parents, because we all believe that biology guides the parents to have, in total, THEIR children’s best interest in their hearts. With surrogacy (liberally seasoned with the techniques of in vitro fertilization - also an evil practice) you have a situation where some children (conceived embryos are treated as less than human, meaning placed in a freezer to most likely die of neglect) are treated as much less than human, and a few selected children get denied the right to grow up with their biological parents because one or several adults paid to remove the child from their parents. VERY much reminiscent of a slave marketplace.
You seem to be advocating against adoption, not surrogacy. In most cases a surrogate is carrying the baby that is genetically derived from the couple who hired the surrogate, so it will be "related to them", which seems to matter to you (though it wouldn't to me). I fail to see how this is an argument against surrogacy.
Also, this is moving the goalposts from your initial critique comparing the practice to slavery, which you did not address.
So, the surrogate, carrying a human they are not related to, what are they experiencing for nine months? Pregnancy? Yes. How did they get pregnant? IVF? I believe IVF is plainly immoral (I have direct experience with this industry - don’t get me started). A father copulated with the surrogate?(not his wife)? That’s also plainly immoral (at least it was until five minutes ago).
I addressed the slavery characterization - re-read carefully. Slave markets denied the humanity of the slave. Surrogacy markets deny the human of conceived human beings.
However, in the same way that a slave is denied agency, the child here is transacted for money with no choice in the matter. If they grow up questioning how they feel about their mother giving them away for money, too bad, so sad for them. That consideration is apparently irrelevant.
So you are opposed to adoption of any kind? What about fostering? Should we bring back orphanages or simply kill any kid who has lost their biological parents?
Poor people can change their circumstances - poverty isn't genetic. But do people know that?
Also, what level of education do these people have? Are they literate? Do they have mental capacity to understand what they're doing, or what their opitions are? Do they even understand how babies are made? How much agence do they have against a system pushing for population control.
The welfare state was manufactured by the government, it needs to be unmanfactured.
Finally, I was born into poverty to a 14 year old, and was adopted out of the nightmare. I am grateful to have been born (as are my parents and my husband) and given up so I could have a better life. I have been able to tell that to my birth mother too.
I know many in my circumstance as well. There are thousands of couples waiting to adopt or foster, but the red tape is awful. Challenges around transracial adoption, in particular, abound. Yet, we are working to make adoption harder, not easier.
Most would agree - certainly RH would, given his writings - that we should make adoption easier, particularly cross-border adoption.
Let's take one of your dilemma's horns here: If an adult is not literate, their ability to earn a decent living is very much curtailed. Surrogacy provides one option for them which is far more attractive than most things facing them at that moment. Risk-wise and money-wise, it beats the hell out of being a lumberjack, or many other careers open to those who can't read. Their agency is their ability to choose how to survive in this world and when and how to better themselves. If I'm making $X / month and $$$ when I deliver, I have a window of time and opportunity to improve myself, as opposed to commuting 3 hours a day to a minimum wage service-industry job like many of my friends. Or to not do so. But I fail to see how they are better off if deprived of the choice.
My comments are on the thread advocating for voluntary sterilization, not RH's post. I've not responded to it directly. That said, re surrogacy, I'm curious how much access potential surrogates, particularly the poor, have before signing a complex commercial contract.
What do you mean by "Access"? They have the set of life opportunities available to them, which are generally bleak.
If your position is that you'd want state or federal law to ensure a baseline of independent counseling and a set of acceptable and unacceptable parameters for a surrogacy contract, I'm on board with that, pending the details. Much like how we set parameters for child labor, or workplace safety, and so on - there's reasonable grounds for believing the free market does not sufficiently account for externalities or risks (humans are bad at estimating risk), and so there should be some ground rules. But that does not extend, in my opinion, as far as banning the practice entirely.
We need to understand the two types of surrogacy first, then then contractual agreement second. I do not support traditional surrogacy at all, period, full stop; I support gestational surrogacy in limited circumstances and only when the carrier is not compensated. The carrier is not genetically related to the child, but will be a special part of his or her life. Moreover, I believe independent surrogacy should be outlawed since the legal, financial, and emotional risks are too high.
"Children who are born through surrogacy have wealthy, responsible parents who wanted them."
So the most important thing for children is to have parents who have plenty of money, are responsible and wanted a child so badly, they would pay for one. What do we do about the people who are poor, irresponsible and don't want their kids? What happens when your pro-liberty and utilitarian beliefs are in conflict?
I'm unclear, what does one have to do with the other? Are you trying to argue that if we banned surrogacy, more people would adopt already-born children? If so, I'm a bit doubtful.
This is a sloppy article and dismisses principled objections as icky and trad con religious types and crazy feminists. Typical autistic man child comments. Lazy.
Also weak sauce on not baking and engaging with Mary Harrington.
Many US states allow surrogacy contracts to include forced-abortion clauses. As in, the purchasers can demand that the child be killed, even if the surrogate mother disagrees. An Internet search will turn up many examples.
If abortion and surrogacy were truly about "empowering women" to "control their own bodies," this would of course be grossly illegal, anyone who tried to force a woman to kill the child in her womb would face a lengthy jail sentence. But they don't, because it's not about that at all.
Some of these cases involve born children outside the womb: the woman is obligated to give birth prematurely, and then the contract forbids doctors from providing lifesaving care.
Enforcing contracts is just a small, if important, part of individual liberty. And there is no way forcing a woman to abort a surrogate baby is consistent with the "woman's body" justification of prohibiting bans on abortion. Just like you can say if you don't want a forced abortion, don't sign a contract for it, you can say if you don't want to have a baby, don't get pregnant (provided there is an exception allowing abortion after a rape).
Not saying you can't be intellectually consistent and want to allow forced abortion of surrogacy babies and also prohibit laws against abortion, but the justification for prohibiting laws against abortion can't be the "woman's body" justification.
That is certainly an important moral area, but I doubt that there are a lot of cases where the birth parents want the child aborted and the surrogate decides they want to keep it instead.
If the government banned such clauses from contracts would you then have no problem with surrogacy? Sometimes people make a logical sounding edge-case argument to hide the fact that their ultimate belief isn't logical at all.
I would still feel uncomfortable with it, but not enough to strongly advocate for banning it (by which I mean make the contracts unenforceable, we definitely should not restrict it further than that).
My current, weakly-held view (which has shifted slightly from when I wrote OP) is that we need to experiment. Different countries and states should try different surrogacy laws according to their own values; it will take decades, perhaps even centuries, before we have a full picture of the effects and unintended consequences. (We still haven’t figured out the full implications of contraception! These are fundamental changes to the most important aspect of human life)
When I was at Stanford, a couple had taken out a half-page ad in the university newspaper looking for an egg donor for a child. Requirements were: 5'8", blonde, blue eyes, and various intellectual requirements too (1400 SAT or something). Pay was 40k (which seems like nothing now, but was a lot at the time). I was torn between wanting to lecture them about the genetics of hair color and dying my hair blonde. LOL
Well said. I think surrogacy is something that feels sort of new and scary to some people, particularly the trad religious crowd. But it is such a net positive that I think it will just become more mainstream over time.
It’s the same impulse as being against organ markets. In this case you are renting instead of buying an organ. People find it icky, and then use shitty arguments to rationalize their gut feeling.
Just curious: why is it also not as simple as your finding the 'restriction' of the interaction or agency 'icky' and then rationalizing some ideas like "free market" and "bodily autonomy" in response?
My point being that a human cannot escape human emotions, and the restriction of some free exchange in the name of autonomy is triggering disgust in you.
Indeed, the pro-dysgenics right masks its theocratic impulses in secular language. Call out these people at every opportunity! The Mary Harrington's of this world must be opposed!
Whatever position you don’t like is theocratic. We can ignore biological, cultural and moral objections and just tar those opposed to the commodification of bodies and sale of babies.
For the record I oppose egg donation too. Commercially should be banned. Cannot ban voluntary but can also jot enforce a contract.
The thought had occurred to me, but I'm sure he could make more money without the normies than with them. Plus this fits with all his other libertarian beliefs.
You push individual freedom too far. Some sacrifice may be need for society to successfully surmount the existential crisis of low TFRs. Surrogacy is a distraction. The issue is free-market capitalism, which fifty years have revealed to be fundamentally hostile to fertility. The hostility has flowed followed naturally as one’s job became the sole playing field for the innate game of status seeking. Amelioration will require cultural change such as would follow increasing the progressivity of the income tax and raising marginal rates.
???? It's not capitalism. We had capitalism before the fertility rate dropped (hell, we were in many (most?) ways more economically free before the birth rate started dropping.
It's multicausal, but if I were going to point to one thing it would be social security and related programs in other countries. It's a huge financial penalty on parenthood.
You may be right. Who knows? The experiment is too costly to try. I think you undersell the scope for cultural change. If we raised the progressivity of the income tax, over time women would decide that having children and a family outweighed being in the formal job market.
Again, I don't think the financial penalties are the only issue, just probably the biggest single one. But most people that talk about offering incentives offer pittances compared to the cost. How big are Hungary's incentives compared to the cost?
Daycare through 5 years old will run $35-40k in a low cost area in the US. I think a well advertised incentive of that nature would probably be the minimum to move the needle. That's still not touching the costs over all but the US generally still seems to be more interested in children than other developed countries.
I had not heard about anti-surrogacy idea. How strange that it has come out of the Right. It's "pro family," something that the "right kind" of people do and I thought that the restrictions that exist come from the Left on general anti-market principles, like compensation for organ donations.
I think anti-surrogacy probably has pretty distinct components but the ones I would predict seem to be likely to come from the right. Antipathy towards actual surrogacy seems like it would arise out of the same sort of Catholic mindset that birth control, IVF, etc. are bad (yes, plenty of catholics on the left, but the ones that actually believe all of the catholic teachings, and the protestants that adopt Catholic teachings on subjects like birth control and IVF are very likely to be on the right).
Then you probably have some people that probably aren't actually against surrogacy per se but think it's bad for society and the children involved for children to be placed in homes with same sex couples (or at less good than traditional families and to the extent it happens, it should be for children that don't have an alternative; we shouldn't leave some children unhomed while also creating children to be raised by same sex couples). Again, very likely to come from the right.
Then you have people that may not be against surrogacy used to help infertility, but view pregnancy as ideally part of motherhood, and that farming out the pregnancy for convenience as basically selecting for uncommitted mothers (I kind of agree with this in that I would predict that all things equal, these mothers probably are likely to be worse mothers, just not to the extent that when things aren't equal, it's a big enough effect to offset the advantages that come from being in a home that can afford to outsource the pregnancy). This is less clearly a left or right issue, but I would bet it's still going to be more prevalent on the right.
You probably have a good bit of the anti-surrogacy group that is not against surrogacy, but is worried about exploitation in commercial transactions and that are against organ selling, prostitution, and surrogacy for this reason. This would probably be more prevalent on the left, but not sure that would be by a significant margin.
Then you probably have a small segment of malthusian bent that thing surrogacy is bad because it increases the number of humans. That's obviously on the left but probably pretty small (although maybe a significant portion of anti-surrogates since that movement is also small and the malthusian, anti-human group will pretty much by definition be anti-surrogacy).
Then you probably have a small group that is against it because of envy and resentment that it's an option for some people and not them. That would largely be on the left but again, not exclusivly and probably a pretty small number of people and an insignificant number of people that would actually acknowledge this is driving their beliefs.
Looking at those as a whole, it seems likely that any anti-surrogacy movement would mostly be centered on the right. If not obviously by numbers at least because the actual antipathy towards surrogacy itself and not some potential harm from it would originate from teh right.
I suppose where I come down, as a religious conservative, is that surrogacy is probably in many cases morally wrong or indicative of poor character (per your "uncommitted mother" comment above), but it's not clear to me that conservatives should be spending political capital trying to ban it. And for the most part, as far as I can tell, we're not. I've also never heard anyone voice an objection to surrogacy in real life. Though I've also never known anyone to use a surrogate in real life, nor have I known a male gay-married couple with children. Strong support for a blanket ban on surrogacy -- even of the intact heterosexual married variety -- seems Very Online, driven by opposition to rare events that the Internet informs us are happening to someone somewhere.
No one has brought this up, but I decided to look up what the map on surrogacy laws looks like:
According to this, most states are friendly to it. The handful of states that have more restrictions are more conservative-leaning (Michigan and Virginia are the exceptions, and they're "purple"), but funny enough, besides TN, not generally in the Bible Belt.
It's the way the contract is/can be negotiated that creates the issue. The recent case where a couple forced their surrogate to abort b/c she was diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant. The baby was fine. It was a pretty nasty situation. Unlike contracts for other unique personal services, surrogacy contracts are commercial contracts with more complex provisions.
Please stop spreading misinformation. The case you're talking about involved a straight couple; not a gay couple. The biological father of the disabled child didn't "dump her in Thailand", as was incorrectly reported by the media. He did try to take her home, but the surrogate objected and wanted to adopt the baby.
From Wikipedia: "Additionally, it was found Farnell and Li had attempted to bring Gammy home, but the surrogate mother initially had objections and had intended to adopt Gammy without Farnell and Li, so they had left Gammy behind in a mix-up of cultural and language barriers.[14]"
sounds like the Thai government needs to do a better job enforcing contracts. Or perhaps that some facts are being left out of the narrative. *googles* ...and, sure enough, the actual story is very different than this summary.
There's a semantic gloss on this issue, and quite frankly al discussions surrounding reproduction, that suggests everything is coming up roses. But that's not the case. When one denies the natural functions and bonds of biology, it's anyone's game. As someone who was adopted and found her birth mother, there's an entire web of emotions to sort through. It's just not as cut and dry as this essay suggests.
I have also studied the legal history of abortion in great detail and the one thing that stands out as both curious and disturbing is how little choice the pro-choice plaintiffs want pregnant women to have. The argument before SCOTUS sounds a death knell for a woman's agency in the process. At the end of the day, everything has a dirty underbelly. Arguments that don't recognize that are specious and shallow.
You cannot sell an extra kidney it you can sell eggs and rent a uterus. Sale of women’s body parts is fine and allowed. Sure you can sell sperm too but not nearly as invasive. Still terrible.
This is quite a dry, transactional approach. What does it mean for a women to bear a child? How important is it for a child to have a mother and a father, and ideally their real parents as their parents? Over the long term what is the most stable (and happy) form of family life? How do we best promote that as a society?
The stable and happy form of family life we want is one where the children are loved and the parents treat each other well and stay together. Which homosexual-parent households do just as well as heterosexual-parent ones. See e.g. (study linked within):
https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2023/03/06/kids-raised-by-same-sex-parents-fare-same-as-or-better-than-kids-of-straight-couples-research-finds/?sh=110e6b57738e
Just like how the pro-life movement is undermined by its supporters' lack of enthusiasm for any support for children *after* their birth, pro-family advocates who might otherwise win some people to their way of thinking end up focusing less on what can encourage parents to stay together, and more on their belief that gay people shouldn't be parents. Which makes people realize that it's not about being pro-family at all, but rather that's a thin veneer for hate. If you're actually pro-family, you want more kids born to smaller households who love them and can afford to take care of them and where the parents stay together. As the slogan of another movement has it: love is love. All other factors pale in comparison.
"Research finds". What else was it ever going to find!? There's a reason that sociology has a replication crisis.
And your evidence in reply is vibes-based, I'm assuming?
This is a data-friendly community. That which can be asserted without evidence can likewise be dismissed without evidence.
I'm a conservative - I think the burden of evidence for change lies with the person advocating for change. We have a set of normative social relationships established over [hundreds at least] years, that's the key piece of evidence. Rights based changes (not evidence based), followed by some random sociology study don't begin to constitute evidence to make the changes we've made.
The idea that normalization of "gay marriage" has been motivated by some kind of empirical evidence is beyond farcical. Surely you aren't trying to make such a claim?
I know this is late- but just according to the article, it’s an analysis of 34 studies taking place between 1989-2022 in several different countries with legalized SSM. Are you arguing that all 34 studies have been flawed in every country over a 33 year period? I’m trying to understand why this doesn’t pass your benchmark
I do think that we live in a world that "research finds" that everything is fine with gay people, regardless of whether or not that's true.
But if you believe we should infringe on liberty, you still need to provide actual evidence. More than vibes.
And if you want to prevent a class of people from reproducing, you'd better show that they make *particularly* awful parents.
If you're about to bite both bullets - to say that bad parents should be prevented from having children, and also that gay people make uniquely bad parents - that would at least be an argument. But if you're just vaguely asking "what is good?" then I don't see the relevance of your comments.
Gay couples can't have children or reproduce, by definition. I mean, I suppose they could reproduce despite their claimed sexual preferences, but if they then actually marry the person they reproduced with and raised their child together, one has to question whether they're really gay anymore at that point. In a typical "gay marriage," obviously the child can only be the child of one of the "parents," at best.
Are the Black Hebrew Israelites "pro-Jew" when they come along and proclaim themselves to be "the real Jews?" Would any actual pro-Jewish person go along with such nonsense, or would they condemn it as anti-semitism?
It's the same when cohabitating homosexuals come along and claim to be a "family." Accepting this claim undermines the entire concept of a "family," as it no longer has any meaningful qualifications. It would now mean just any combination of people who live in close proximity and claim to "love each other," totally disconnected from behavior, biology, or anything else tangible.
By this logic, we should encourage a re-flourishing of polygamy, as it is once again entirely compatible with our brave new definition of "family." Why can't one man and eight wives raise however many of their children? At least the kids of such an arrangement would actually be the children of the people raising them.
you seem to have a view of gay people raising children that regards it as comparable to the robots in the Matrix raising humans as a power source. I suggest you get out there and actually meet some real gay people, and see how they're raising children (i.e., as lovingly as any other parent, on average).
One proposed mechanism to explain why homosexuality evolved - in all highly social species, beyond even primates, and across all human societies - is that gay people are a social safety net to help the children of close relatives (called "kin selection"). There are also other evolutionary adaptations it is linked with, such as reduced male aggression and increased female fertility in kin.
https://english.elpais.com/science-tech/2023-10-03/homosexuality-in-mammals-has-evolutionary-utility-new-study-finds.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biology_and_sexual_orientation#Sexual_orientation_and_evolution
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/news/190987/scientists-explore-evolution-animal-homosexuality/
TLDR: Gay people were genetically engineered to be good at raising children, in a manner of speaking. It takes a village to raise a child. Highly restrictive notions of what a family is or is not do not reflect observed reality within human societies.
If we look at "observed reality within human societies," obviously you will find that the modern notion of "gay marriage" was non-existent until about 5 seconds ago, and remains non-existent among the majority of the world's population. So I wouldn't lean on that phrase if I were you.
If the idea that people are now doing it means that it is good and acceptable because it is now "observed reality," this is a tautology. Slavery was also an observed reality of basically every human society until relatively recently. This doesn't mean slavery is morally desirable.
It might be nice to pretend that we could somehow decide this issue with "data," but unfortunately, we live in a situation where so-called "data" regarding anything vaguely related to homosexuality is beyond untrustworthy. And if we're being honest, this is not a "data" issue. Just as the gay rights advocates of both decades past and the present day form their view based on moral priors first, then maybe search out data later, I also choose to base my viewpoint on moral axioms rather than attempting to sort through statistical analyses. You almost certainly do as well, if you were being honest about it. This is an issue of first principles, not of numbers on spreadsheets.
And yes, the notion of what a family is, is highly restrictive. Definitions of words are highly restrictive, by definition. Otherwise they aren't definitions and the words don't mean anything. Just as red is not green and men are not women, two homosexual people cohabitating with someone else's child is not a "family."
> its supporters' lack of enthusiasm for any support for children *after* their birth
What does this refer to?
This is a really weak take.
This is exactly the sort of article I signed up to read from RH originally. Clear thinking, incorporating both pragmatic and ethical lines of thought, without pre-existing partisan or groupthink bias. The more he writes stuff like this, and the less he writes about race (on which he has a screeching level of blind spot and groupthink imo), the more readers he'll gain among centrists and intellectuals. Which I gather is one of his goals.
I assume that's why he wrote an extensive letter here on Substack after getting roundly critiqued in the national conversation for his former pseudonymous publications, a letter about how he used to hold shitty views on race and gender when he was a younger, angrier man, and now he doesn't think that way anymore.
But hey, I'm sure RH will "come around eventually" too, huh?
"There are a lot of women in the first world who are scared of being pregnant and reasonably don’t want to take time off from their high paying jobs"
They are going to take time off from their jobs, unless they are also planning on paying someone to look after their baby too. Hard to see that any significant number of fertile women would actually do this.
"and many poor women without marketable skills who would happily carry their children for a mutually agreed upon price."
I think you are underestimating how important it is to mother-child bonding to have the baby in her tummy first, and also how painful it is for the surrogate to lose the baby, something she will only find out about afterwards. You can say that every voluntary exchange is ipso facto justified, but this is like saying the crackhead who lost his job, his friends, his wife and kids and now lives in a motel is acting in his rational self interest because right now he cares more about getting high. This doesn't necessarily justify a ban, but safeguards, like a mandatory counselling session outlining the risk for the surrogate mother, seems reasonable.
The question is, can individuals make their own choices about the importance of mother-child bonding or does the government need to step in to protect someone's rights? I think in this situation, both the surrogates and the parents are always going to understand the risks perfectly well.
Surrogacy is buying people; barely disguised facsimiles of slave markets from the 1800s.
The big difference is that the child is not a slave. Therefore it's probably not best to compare it to 19th century slave markets.
Nor is the surrogate a slave; nobody will force or even strongly encourage them to agree to a surrogacy deal. It has to be very much worth their while, which is why the going rate is somewhere north of $100k for 10-11 months' work.
Nobody is being auctioned, nor forced to indefinite terms of labor. Indeed, in most cases the surrogate has a right to decide to keep the baby in lieu of payment. The analogy to slavery is equal parts wrong and disgusting.
Nope, you’re wrong. Children have diminished rights. They are subject to the whims and objectives of the parents. We accept this with children conceived by the parents, because we all believe that biology guides the parents to have, in total, THEIR children’s best interest in their hearts. With surrogacy (liberally seasoned with the techniques of in vitro fertilization - also an evil practice) you have a situation where some children (conceived embryos are treated as less than human, meaning placed in a freezer to most likely die of neglect) are treated as much less than human, and a few selected children get denied the right to grow up with their biological parents because one or several adults paid to remove the child from their parents. VERY much reminiscent of a slave marketplace.
You seem to be advocating against adoption, not surrogacy. In most cases a surrogate is carrying the baby that is genetically derived from the couple who hired the surrogate, so it will be "related to them", which seems to matter to you (though it wouldn't to me). I fail to see how this is an argument against surrogacy.
Also, this is moving the goalposts from your initial critique comparing the practice to slavery, which you did not address.
So, the surrogate, carrying a human they are not related to, what are they experiencing for nine months? Pregnancy? Yes. How did they get pregnant? IVF? I believe IVF is plainly immoral (I have direct experience with this industry - don’t get me started). A father copulated with the surrogate?(not his wife)? That’s also plainly immoral (at least it was until five minutes ago).
I addressed the slavery characterization - re-read carefully. Slave markets denied the humanity of the slave. Surrogacy markets deny the human of conceived human beings.
You're calling an embryo a child?
Correct. It’s not a giraffe. It’s not a whale. It has the metabolic activity of a living creature. It is a human in the earliest stage of development.
However, in the same way that a slave is denied agency, the child here is transacted for money with no choice in the matter. If they grow up questioning how they feel about their mother giving them away for money, too bad, so sad for them. That consideration is apparently irrelevant.
So you are opposed to adoption of any kind? What about fostering? Should we bring back orphanages or simply kill any kid who has lost their biological parents?
Some thoughts ...
Poor people can change their circumstances - poverty isn't genetic. But do people know that?
Also, what level of education do these people have? Are they literate? Do they have mental capacity to understand what they're doing, or what their opitions are? Do they even understand how babies are made? How much agence do they have against a system pushing for population control.
The welfare state was manufactured by the government, it needs to be unmanfactured.
Finally, I was born into poverty to a 14 year old, and was adopted out of the nightmare. I am grateful to have been born (as are my parents and my husband) and given up so I could have a better life. I have been able to tell that to my birth mother too.
I know many in my circumstance as well. There are thousands of couples waiting to adopt or foster, but the red tape is awful. Challenges around transracial adoption, in particular, abound. Yet, we are working to make adoption harder, not easier.
Sterilization isn't the solution.
Nobody here advocated for sterilization.
Most would agree - certainly RH would, given his writings - that we should make adoption easier, particularly cross-border adoption.
Let's take one of your dilemma's horns here: If an adult is not literate, their ability to earn a decent living is very much curtailed. Surrogacy provides one option for them which is far more attractive than most things facing them at that moment. Risk-wise and money-wise, it beats the hell out of being a lumberjack, or many other careers open to those who can't read. Their agency is their ability to choose how to survive in this world and when and how to better themselves. If I'm making $X / month and $$$ when I deliver, I have a window of time and opportunity to improve myself, as opposed to commuting 3 hours a day to a minimum wage service-industry job like many of my friends. Or to not do so. But I fail to see how they are better off if deprived of the choice.
My comments are on the thread advocating for voluntary sterilization, not RH's post. I've not responded to it directly. That said, re surrogacy, I'm curious how much access potential surrogates, particularly the poor, have before signing a complex commercial contract.
What do you mean by "Access"? They have the set of life opportunities available to them, which are generally bleak.
If your position is that you'd want state or federal law to ensure a baseline of independent counseling and a set of acceptable and unacceptable parameters for a surrogacy contract, I'm on board with that, pending the details. Much like how we set parameters for child labor, or workplace safety, and so on - there's reasonable grounds for believing the free market does not sufficiently account for externalities or risks (humans are bad at estimating risk), and so there should be some ground rules. But that does not extend, in my opinion, as far as banning the practice entirely.
We need to understand the two types of surrogacy first, then then contractual agreement second. I do not support traditional surrogacy at all, period, full stop; I support gestational surrogacy in limited circumstances and only when the carrier is not compensated. The carrier is not genetically related to the child, but will be a special part of his or her life. Moreover, I believe independent surrogacy should be outlawed since the legal, financial, and emotional risks are too high.
Which components are those?
Are you arguing causation or correlation? Can you share some studies/data with me? Thanks.
"Children who are born through surrogacy have wealthy, responsible parents who wanted them."
So the most important thing for children is to have parents who have plenty of money, are responsible and wanted a child so badly, they would pay for one. What do we do about the people who are poor, irresponsible and don't want their kids? What happens when your pro-liberty and utilitarian beliefs are in conflict?
I'm unclear, what does one have to do with the other? Are you trying to argue that if we banned surrogacy, more people would adopt already-born children? If so, I'm a bit doubtful.
Opposition to surrogacy isn't only from conservatives. Many left-of-center feminist oppose it as well.
This is a sloppy article and dismisses principled objections as icky and trad con religious types and crazy feminists. Typical autistic man child comments. Lazy.
Also weak sauce on not baking and engaging with Mary Harrington.
Many US states allow surrogacy contracts to include forced-abortion clauses. As in, the purchasers can demand that the child be killed, even if the surrogate mother disagrees. An Internet search will turn up many examples.
If abortion and surrogacy were truly about "empowering women" to "control their own bodies," this would of course be grossly illegal, anyone who tried to force a woman to kill the child in her womb would face a lengthy jail sentence. But they don't, because it's not about that at all.
Enforcing contracts is basically what individual liberty means. You might have other values, but that’s not inconsistent at all.
What contract did the baby sign?
Yeah you’re bringing in a different value now, which is an unborn child has liberty rights, which I don’t agree with.
Some of these cases involve born children outside the womb: the woman is obligated to give birth prematurely, and then the contract forbids doctors from providing lifesaving care.
Enforcing contracts is just a small, if important, part of individual liberty. And there is no way forcing a woman to abort a surrogate baby is consistent with the "woman's body" justification of prohibiting bans on abortion. Just like you can say if you don't want a forced abortion, don't sign a contract for it, you can say if you don't want to have a baby, don't get pregnant (provided there is an exception allowing abortion after a rape).
Not saying you can't be intellectually consistent and want to allow forced abortion of surrogacy babies and also prohibit laws against abortion, but the justification for prohibiting laws against abortion can't be the "woman's body" justification.
That is certainly an important moral area, but I doubt that there are a lot of cases where the birth parents want the child aborted and the surrogate decides they want to keep it instead.
If the government banned such clauses from contracts would you then have no problem with surrogacy? Sometimes people make a logical sounding edge-case argument to hide the fact that their ultimate belief isn't logical at all.
I would still feel uncomfortable with it, but not enough to strongly advocate for banning it (by which I mean make the contracts unenforceable, we definitely should not restrict it further than that).
My current, weakly-held view (which has shifted slightly from when I wrote OP) is that we need to experiment. Different countries and states should try different surrogacy laws according to their own values; it will take decades, perhaps even centuries, before we have a full picture of the effects and unintended consequences. (We still haven’t figured out the full implications of contraception! These are fundamental changes to the most important aspect of human life)
When I was at Stanford, a couple had taken out a half-page ad in the university newspaper looking for an egg donor for a child. Requirements were: 5'8", blonde, blue eyes, and various intellectual requirements too (1400 SAT or something). Pay was 40k (which seems like nothing now, but was a lot at the time). I was torn between wanting to lecture them about the genetics of hair color and dying my hair blonde. LOL
Well said. I think surrogacy is something that feels sort of new and scary to some people, particularly the trad religious crowd. But it is such a net positive that I think it will just become more mainstream over time.
It’s the same impulse as being against organ markets. In this case you are renting instead of buying an organ. People find it icky, and then use shitty arguments to rationalize their gut feeling.
Just curious: why is it also not as simple as your finding the 'restriction' of the interaction or agency 'icky' and then rationalizing some ideas like "free market" and "bodily autonomy" in response?
Often the disgust impulse steers us right. This is not one of those cases.
We'll see whose disgust wins out!
My point being that a human cannot escape human emotions, and the restriction of some free exchange in the name of autonomy is triggering disgust in you.
Indeed, the pro-dysgenics right masks its theocratic impulses in secular language. Call out these people at every opportunity! The Mary Harrington's of this world must be opposed!
Whatever position you don’t like is theocratic. We can ignore biological, cultural and moral objections and just tar those opposed to the commodification of bodies and sale of babies.
For the record I oppose egg donation too. Commercially should be banned. Cannot ban voluntary but can also jot enforce a contract.
The pro-see of babies left in full force.
From the comments I wonder if Hanania isn't just trolling his regular readers to increase his creds with normies. :)
The thought had occurred to me, but I'm sure he could make more money without the normies than with them. Plus this fits with all his other libertarian beliefs.
You push individual freedom too far. Some sacrifice may be need for society to successfully surmount the existential crisis of low TFRs. Surrogacy is a distraction. The issue is free-market capitalism, which fifty years have revealed to be fundamentally hostile to fertility. The hostility has flowed followed naturally as one’s job became the sole playing field for the innate game of status seeking. Amelioration will require cultural change such as would follow increasing the progressivity of the income tax and raising marginal rates.
???? It's not capitalism. We had capitalism before the fertility rate dropped (hell, we were in many (most?) ways more economically free before the birth rate started dropping.
It's multicausal, but if I were going to point to one thing it would be social security and related programs in other countries. It's a huge financial penalty on parenthood.
And yet the “huge financial penalty on parenthood” seems resistant to even significant, e.g. Hungary, financial incentives.
You may be right. Who knows? The experiment is too costly to try. I think you undersell the scope for cultural change. If we raised the progressivity of the income tax, over time women would decide that having children and a family outweighed being in the formal job market.
Again, I don't think the financial penalties are the only issue, just probably the biggest single one. But most people that talk about offering incentives offer pittances compared to the cost. How big are Hungary's incentives compared to the cost?
Daycare through 5 years old will run $35-40k in a low cost area in the US. I think a well advertised incentive of that nature would probably be the minimum to move the needle. That's still not touching the costs over all but the US generally still seems to be more interested in children than other developed countries.
I had not heard about anti-surrogacy idea. How strange that it has come out of the Right. It's "pro family," something that the "right kind" of people do and I thought that the restrictions that exist come from the Left on general anti-market principles, like compensation for organ donations.
I think anti-surrogacy probably has pretty distinct components but the ones I would predict seem to be likely to come from the right. Antipathy towards actual surrogacy seems like it would arise out of the same sort of Catholic mindset that birth control, IVF, etc. are bad (yes, plenty of catholics on the left, but the ones that actually believe all of the catholic teachings, and the protestants that adopt Catholic teachings on subjects like birth control and IVF are very likely to be on the right).
Then you probably have some people that probably aren't actually against surrogacy per se but think it's bad for society and the children involved for children to be placed in homes with same sex couples (or at less good than traditional families and to the extent it happens, it should be for children that don't have an alternative; we shouldn't leave some children unhomed while also creating children to be raised by same sex couples). Again, very likely to come from the right.
Then you have people that may not be against surrogacy used to help infertility, but view pregnancy as ideally part of motherhood, and that farming out the pregnancy for convenience as basically selecting for uncommitted mothers (I kind of agree with this in that I would predict that all things equal, these mothers probably are likely to be worse mothers, just not to the extent that when things aren't equal, it's a big enough effect to offset the advantages that come from being in a home that can afford to outsource the pregnancy). This is less clearly a left or right issue, but I would bet it's still going to be more prevalent on the right.
You probably have a good bit of the anti-surrogacy group that is not against surrogacy, but is worried about exploitation in commercial transactions and that are against organ selling, prostitution, and surrogacy for this reason. This would probably be more prevalent on the left, but not sure that would be by a significant margin.
Then you probably have a small segment of malthusian bent that thing surrogacy is bad because it increases the number of humans. That's obviously on the left but probably pretty small (although maybe a significant portion of anti-surrogates since that movement is also small and the malthusian, anti-human group will pretty much by definition be anti-surrogacy).
Then you probably have a small group that is against it because of envy and resentment that it's an option for some people and not them. That would largely be on the left but again, not exclusivly and probably a pretty small number of people and an insignificant number of people that would actually acknowledge this is driving their beliefs.
Looking at those as a whole, it seems likely that any anti-surrogacy movement would mostly be centered on the right. If not obviously by numbers at least because the actual antipathy towards surrogacy itself and not some potential harm from it would originate from teh right.
Probably a good summary, honestly.
I suppose where I come down, as a religious conservative, is that surrogacy is probably in many cases morally wrong or indicative of poor character (per your "uncommitted mother" comment above), but it's not clear to me that conservatives should be spending political capital trying to ban it. And for the most part, as far as I can tell, we're not. I've also never heard anyone voice an objection to surrogacy in real life. Though I've also never known anyone to use a surrogate in real life, nor have I known a male gay-married couple with children. Strong support for a blanket ban on surrogacy -- even of the intact heterosexual married variety -- seems Very Online, driven by opposition to rare events that the Internet informs us are happening to someone somewhere.
No one has brought this up, but I decided to look up what the map on surrogacy laws looks like:
https://familyinceptions.com/new-201120-interactive-us-surrogacy-law-map/
According to this, most states are friendly to it. The handful of states that have more restrictions are more conservative-leaning (Michigan and Virginia are the exceptions, and they're "purple"), but funny enough, besides TN, not generally in the Bible Belt.
It's the way the contract is/can be negotiated that creates the issue. The recent case where a couple forced their surrogate to abort b/c she was diagnosed with breast cancer while pregnant. The baby was fine. It was a pretty nasty situation. Unlike contracts for other unique personal services, surrogacy contracts are commercial contracts with more complex provisions.
Please stop spreading misinformation. The case you're talking about involved a straight couple; not a gay couple. The biological father of the disabled child didn't "dump her in Thailand", as was incorrectly reported by the media. He did try to take her home, but the surrogate objected and wanted to adopt the baby.
From Wikipedia: "Additionally, it was found Farnell and Li had attempted to bring Gammy home, but the surrogate mother initially had objections and had intended to adopt Gammy without Farnell and Li, so they had left Gammy behind in a mix-up of cultural and language barriers.[14]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Thai_surrogacy_controversy
It's ridiculous that Thailand banned commercial surrogacy over this.
sounds like the Thai government needs to do a better job enforcing contracts. Or perhaps that some facts are being left out of the narrative. *googles* ...and, sure enough, the actual story is very different than this summary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Thai_surrogacy_controversy
There's a semantic gloss on this issue, and quite frankly al discussions surrounding reproduction, that suggests everything is coming up roses. But that's not the case. When one denies the natural functions and bonds of biology, it's anyone's game. As someone who was adopted and found her birth mother, there's an entire web of emotions to sort through. It's just not as cut and dry as this essay suggests.
I have also studied the legal history of abortion in great detail and the one thing that stands out as both curious and disturbing is how little choice the pro-choice plaintiffs want pregnant women to have. The argument before SCOTUS sounds a death knell for a woman's agency in the process. At the end of the day, everything has a dirty underbelly. Arguments that don't recognize that are specious and shallow.
You cannot sell an extra kidney it you can sell eggs and rent a uterus. Sale of women’s body parts is fine and allowed. Sure you can sell sperm too but not nearly as invasive. Still terrible.