Matt Yglesias

33 Responses to “Surrogacy and Inequality”

1. Freddie Says:
   December 1st, 2008 at 6:14 pm

   Huh?

2. SomeCallMeTim Says:
   December 1st, 2008 at 6:16 pm

   Differential financial power is objectionable enough that it provides a grounds for banning certain kinds of consensual transactions, but it’s not sufficiently objectionable that we should actually do anything to try to eliminate or ameliorate it?

   Um, what? I suspect it has to do with a certain “natural” conception of motherhood. Even if you disagree with it, it seems like an obvious cognizable interpretation of a conservative’s objection.

3. Cryptic Ned Says:
   December 1st, 2008 at 6:24 pm

   This seems like a situation where the “bias toward tradition” part of conservativism is overriding the “bias toward capitalism” part. The reverse happens thousands of times a day in the minds of conservatives, but this override only occurs in matters of bioethics.

4. Brad Says:
   December 1st, 2008 at 7:02 pm

   This post needs a major rewrite.

5. Thomas Says:
   December 1st, 2008 at 7:09 pm

   uhm, yeah? like we do with things like voting, for example. see, e.g, sandel on blocked exchanges.

6. vim876 Says:
   December 1st, 2008 at 7:15 pm

   There was just the one paragraph, right? I didn’t miss anything? There just isn’t much reasoning to back up the argument. We let people do far worse things to their bodies for money. (See injury rates in meatpacking jobs, people getting aid to participate in clinical trials.) It’s possible that in even without social inequality, some of these people would willingly volunteer to help others become mothers and fathers, but that the medical and other costs of pregnancy (such as missed work) make the financial nature of the transaction necessary. Ponnuru appears to have thrown an opinion out without really backing it up. As someone who, due to an illness that forces me to be dependent on multiple medications that cause birth defects, may be unable to have kids without gestational surrogacy, I find the glib treatment of the issue offensive. If we can’t regulate big business, don’t try to regulate something this personal. And adoption is not the same as creating a baby with your partner. Adopted children are just as important as biological children; that’s not a question. But there is something meaningful to many people in knowing that they and their partner have biologically produced a child together.

7. Hector Says:
   December 1st, 2008 at 7:19 pm

   Well, just speaking for myself, I think that we should do a great deal to eliminate many economic inequalities and ameliorate others. I’m also not a big fan of surrogate motherhood- partly on natural law grounds, but it’s certainly also true that it entrenches and symbolizes inequality in the ugliest way. (Whatever happened to adoption?)

   It’s certainly true that Christian tradition is not particularly compatible with capitalism, and trying to make them compatible with each other poses a dillemma for many conservatives. I’m not a self-described conservative, of course, so it doesn’t pose such a problem for me.

8. KCinDC Says:
   December 1st, 2008 at 7:24 pm

   Matt has occasional incomprehensible posts (usually caused by particularly bad typos), but I don’t see why people are huh?-ing about this one.

   SCMT, if Ponnuru’s objection is based only on “naturalness”, then why did he bring class into it?

9. gordon gekko Says:
   December 1st, 2008 at 8:05 pm

   …if Ponnuru’s objection is based only on “naturalness”, then why did he bring class into it?

   Probably to get broad support from liberals. As has already been pointed out above, surrogacy posses a dilemma for most conservatives. But I cannot see why cultural conservatives feel threatened. Surrogacy will always remain expensive and I doubt it would lead to more unfit parents (I use their definition not mine). It’s not like poor unwed single women can afford this or rich liberal same-sex couples would wants this (adoption is much more ethical). Of course they might have some weird religious reason but I haven’t heard any.

10. Gene Says:
    December 1st, 2008 at 8:08 pm

    The surrogacy question raises red flags for those of us who remember the case about 20 years ago where the surrogate mother decided that she didn’t want to give up the child. She was a working class person (maybe even had been a stripper at one time?) with kids of her own, the parents (natural father & wife) were upper middle class 40ish types (both doctors iirc) who had postponed kids because of their careers and then found themselves (herself, actually) unable to have any.

    The father said that if the mother kept the child he wanted nothing to do with him/her (lovely qualification for a budding parent).

    It was grotesque and obscene and went to the courts over, essentially, who owned the child. And social and economic class issues certainly reared their ugly heads. And easy for me to say because I already have kids, but I would have been sorta comfortable with laws that outlawed surrogacy.

11. SomeCallMeTim Says:
    December 1st, 2008 at 8:19 pm

    SCMT, if Ponnuru’s objection is based only on “naturalness”, then why did he bring class into it?

    I think he’s just being snide: “Liberals like to imagine themselves as ‘of the people,’ but that doesn’t match up with their lived lives.” I don’t think any objection he has relates to class.

12. Hector Says:
    December 1st, 2008 at 10:09 pm

    Gene,

    I was under the impression that the laws do outlaw _binding contracts_ involving surrogacy. I was surprised to hear about this couple, but I assume that they’re taking the risk that the natural mother will choose to keep the baby.

    Gordon Gekko,

    While this is also objectionable on the grounds of class and economics, there are a couple of natural-law reasons while the act is wrong. I believe that the processes of conceiving, bearing and giving birth to a child are a natural whole, and should not be separated. Surrogate motherhood separates the act of conception from the act of gestation, and assigns them to two different people, it’s thus a violation of the natural order.

    It’s not quite correct to say that class has nothing to do with why Ponnuru opposes surrogacy. It isn’t the core of why he supposes surrogacy. But I would suspect he believes that like most evils, surrogacy will bring forth other unrelated evils in its wake. Morality is a reasonably self-consistent whole, and when we loosen one thread the other threads come loosened as well.

13. Snookered Says:
    December 1st, 2008 at 10:31 pm

    Wasn’t the NRO post just a chance to take a jab at hypocritical liberals who pretend to be about egalitarianism and then have slaves to bear and nurse their children?

    Any person in his right mind who looks at the NYTimes picture that the NRO post links to — http://www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2008/11/30/magazine/30Surrogate.2.ready.html — should be horrified. I don’t think the post was meant to convey a nuanced policy position but just to make the other side look bad.

14. djw172 Says:
    December 1st, 2008 at 10:40 pm

    Why is surrogacy a greater offence to “naturalness” fetishists than adoption?

15. Rich Overlord Says:
    December 1st, 2008 at 11:14 pm

    We need someone to bare children, incubate spare organs and service us. They get American Idol, NASCAR, cash and the comfort of living in the best nation on earth. It is win-win.

16. Hector Says:
    December 2nd, 2008 at 2:08 am

    DJW,

    Perhaps because adoption is a very ancient tradition in many parts of the world, and because it embodies the best aspects of human nature (i.e. the desire to ensure a child’s welfare by, one the one side, giving it up and on the other side, choosing to take in a child that you didn’t create) rather than crass commercialization and commodification. If people were routinely conceiving children for the express purposes of selling them to an adopting couple, then we could draw some analogies between surrogacy and adoption.

    Adoption separates the process of bearing a child from the process of rearing them. These two processes are usually linked, but they don’t have to be, and certainly they aren’t intrinsically as linked together as the processes of conception and gestation.

17. JonF Says:
    December 2nd, 2008 at 6:35 am

    Re: Why is surrogacy a greater offence to “naturalness” fetishists than adoption?

    Or for that matter organ transplatation, immunization, embalming, etc– all things that go against “nature” in some sense.

18. Rachel Says:
    December 2nd, 2008 at 7:51 am

    Gene, you’re referring to the Baby M case in NJ. I remember it clearly. The “surrogate” mother was in fact the natural mother. The biological father’s wife was the would-be adoptive mother. This was not a case of donor eggs. I remember the class issues that arose in that case. Personally, it was one of the pivotal, watershed moments in my thinking that really turned me off surrogacy. The way the New York Times, and other voices of the elite class, impugned the character of the girls’ biological “surrogate” mother — to justify taking her daughter away from her and giving her to the rich, suburban doctor adoptive mother — it made me sick.

    The ultimate result of the case was a joint custody agreement with both biological parents. The bio-dad’s wife stepped in as a traditional, good stepmother.

19. Rachel Says:
    December 2nd, 2008 at 8:18 am

    Rich, that’s really funny!

20. X Says:
    December 2nd, 2008 at 9:34 am

    Rich Overlord owes me a new monitor after making me spitlaugh coffee all over it.

21. roac Says:
    December 2nd, 2008 at 9:50 am

    “If the rich could pay other people to die for them, a poor man could make a really good living.” — Old Yiddish proverb

22. Hector Says:
    December 2nd, 2008 at 12:38 pm

    Re: Or for that matter organ transplatation, immunization, embalming, etc– all things that go against “nature” in some sense.

    JonF,

    Come on….how can what is effectively buying babies be acceptable?

    You’ve mentioned before that as an Eastern Christian you reject the Platonic underpinnings of natural law. But St. Paul says in Romans that the laws of morality are evident from the natural order, so that even the pagans are without excuse. Therefore we can and should involve what we know about natural connections and natural tendencies in our moral reasoning. Natural-law reasoning has not only Platonic but also clear scriptural support.

23. American Citizen Says:
    December 2nd, 2008 at 2:59 pm

    Surrogate motherhood is not solely an economic transaction, and adopting isn’t the easiest thing to do either. I’m aware that part of the adoption trouble is that couples want the ‘right’ child, but prohibiting surrogacy to increase adoption rates seems like a round-about way of doing things. As technology marches on, non-traditional ways of doing things become possible, and as long as they meet some ethical guidelines (which I think were met in the Times article, obnoxious as the rich couple is), it’s okay. If the article were about two men hiring a surrogate mother, would people be so wound up about the class aspect of things?

24. JonF Says:
    December 2nd, 2008 at 7:59 pm

    Hector:
    Minor qibble first: natural law theory (in morality) derives not from Plato, but from Aristotle, at least in Scholastic and later Catholic philosophy. That’s one reason the Orthodox Church is chary of it, since Orthodoxy tends to reject the hyper-rationalist approach of the Scholastics.
    My own objections are more peragmatic:
    Natural Law thinking has been wrong about a many things– interest, dissection, smallpox innoculations, railroads (it’s true, at least one 19th century Pope condemned railroads as unnatural!), and, yes, contraception. At times it rather seems as Natural Law is simply invoked to justify some position that has no other senisble justification.
    More to the point though, it’s utterly unnecessary. The Gospel gives us a rule to live by, one so simple a child can understand it. We don’t need all that airy-faery ivory tower theory when we have “Do unto others…”

25. Hector Says:
    December 2nd, 2008 at 10:43 pm

    JonF,

    Right, I get that, and I get why the Orthodox condemn it. I wish there was another word besides ‘natural law’, since I’m really trying to invoke, not the specific arguments of Aquinas, but rather the general Scholastic approach of inferring moral arguments from the purpose evident in nature and from the facts of our physical, spiritual, and emotional make-up. As I say, I think that kind of general moral reasoning from Nature is referred to in Romans 1, so it has a more exalted pedigree than Aristotle.

    It’s true that people have said a lot of nonsense and justified it in the name of natural law. People have done a lot of evil things in the name of faith, and reason, but that doesn’t make faith or reason bad things. The problem with a precept like ‘First, do no harm’ is that it isn’t always clear what it counts as harm. Is it harming a criminal to lock him in prison? “Do unto others” is the basic precept of morality, true, but we need philosophers and theologicans to draw out all the implications. That’s what we need some kind of Natural Reason, Innate Intuition, or whatever you want to call it.

26. JonF Says:
    December 3rd, 2008 at 6:42 am

    Re: “Do unto others” is the basic precept of morality, true, but we need philosophers and theologicans to draw out all the implications.

    I very much disagree. I no more need a philosopher at my elbow to tell me what is right and wrong than I need a physicist at hand to tell me how to ride my bike. Riding a bike is a matter of using one’s basic sense of balance plus practice. Morality is a matter of using one’s basic sense of empathy plus, again, experience.
    We do of course encounter moral dilemmas, but not because we encounter situations where intellectual knowledge is needed, but because we encounter situations where there are multiple goods and evils entwined together. The answer (for Christian at least) in these cases is not to run off and consult some moral poobah, but to go straight to the Source via prayer.

27. surrogate mother Says:
    December 5th, 2008 at 8:29 pm

    Bangalore : When a 24-year-old pregnant woman loses both her baby and uterus in an accident, should she be denied being a mother again? This was the question raised by Kamini Rao of Bangalore Assisted Conception Centre at a panel

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