Is it ethical to outsource pregnancy?
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Anonymous
| No rich woman will ever agree to carry your baby for you. |
Anonymous
News flash: everybody does not see the world exactly as you do. Some women, yes, even financially stable ones, choose to be surrogates. If you are actually interested in the experiences of surrogates post-birth, there is plenty of information available. And if my daughter freely chose it, I’d support her. I don’t see “renting out your uterus” as fundamentally inferior to renting out your muscles or brain, if it’s a choice. You, of course, are free to see things differently. But it’s very narrow of you to assume that everyone agrees with your particular outlook. |
Anonymous
Uhm, not the PP but I’m a healthy and financially successful woman who would absolutely sign up to be a surrogate. One of my (healthy, financially successful) friends has done it and said she found it a really fulfilling experience. If my daughter wanted to, I don’t see why she shouldn’t. Please stop speaking for all women. |
Anonymous
So you’re just against paid surrogacy, full-stop. If it’s immoral for OP than it’s immoral for cancer survivors who had hysterectomies, right? It’s just easier for you to take potshots at women who want surrogates for non-medical reasons. |
Anonymous
There's a non-consenting BABY in this scenario. How do you know they won't feel harmed in the future? And my analogy about the animals is--just because you compensate someone well doesn't make a thing right. You said being well-paid was a criterion for it being ethical. And who in the world thinks buying human organs is ethical??? There are certainly grey areas about recipient choice but that's different. |
Anonymous
Potshots? Uh, that's who started the thread. 
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Anonymous
Same. I would do it but my age now makes it unlikely. I don't want any more kids of my own but pregnancy/childbirth made me feel so powerful and useful and if I could do it to help someone who really wanted to be a mom, I'd do it. And then use the proceeds to fund my own child's college education. I actually think my DH would take longer to get on board but ultimately will. But I would not feel at all coerced and if I was properly compensated (having been through it, I know what it's worth) I would do it. And same, if my daughter wanted to do it and it was really her decision, I'd support her. |
Anonymous
My primary criterion was that there were consenting parties who were consenting without a substantial power imbalance and the animal analogy fails that completely. Your point about the baby being a harmed party here makes me think we have vastly different views on a core fact of this debate. If we believe that the baby is harmed via surrogacy there are other ethical issues that I do not address. I do not believe the baby is harmed via surrogacy so those points are about a fundamentally different ethical question. One that does pose pretty stark and distressing implications to the world of adoption. There is a lot of debate around kidney donation ethics. If you have two people who are down on their luck for whatever reasons and one is able to donate their kidney for 100k and the other is not because of ethical laws in their country, is the person in the 'ethical' country better off? There is a lot of dehumanization there and removal of free will and decision making. How about all the other people in the 'ethical' society who are in kidney failure (something that effects the rich and poor). If there was a market price for a kidney and a bunch of people donated their kidneys as a result and improved their financial position while also saving a life would that really be unethical? Of course an 'organ farm' of poor people would be abhorrent. But there is a grey area there where the 'right' choice is simply not black and white. Real difficult ethical questions are generally not black and white. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/in-theory/wp/2015/12/30/the-moral-case-for-paying-kidney-donors/ |
Anonymous
Since you love reading about ethically areas you should read some of the stories about unhappy adoptees. Esp international ones- some of them definitely claim harm. And if you are so enmeshed in and accepting of an American Capitalist society that you find it OK that a human being should be so poor that selling an organ is tempting--- I don't know what more we have to say. That's not the answer to getting people out of poverty- blame the unethical society we live in not people that are trying to hold the line against further bodily exploitation of the poor. |
Anonymous
| I can think of 10,000 things that are more ethically dubious than an "elective" surrogacy so long as she is being paid well for the risk to her health (at least $50k). |
Anonymous
| No. You shouldn't be able to rent someone's body for 9 months just because you don't want to lose weight. |
Anonymous
| Surrogates usually get between 50-100k. Not bad money for a side hustle. |
Anonymous
Name 10 then that are legal |
Anonymous
I don't see how it's very different. You're essentially buying a uterus. Not for your own body, but to use. And there are plenty of people who would be just fine with a human organ market. Trust. |
Anonymous
You sound like someone who desires a world in which these questions are easy to answer or where they are being asked hypothetically in some utopia like situation. I did not say organ donation was the solution to getting people out of poverty (you have engaged in MANY logical fallacies here in the last few pages but this straw man/equivocation thing you have going on is the most annoying). You continually reframe what I say to something I did not say and then present it as 'obviously immoral'. You need to get yourself to a logic course or something because its very annoying to have a conversation with someone who is refusing to engage in good faith. What I said was that in the world as it exists today, the question of whether or not someone should be able to choose to donate an organ is not black and white. You twist that around to say, 'well if that's your only solution to poverty than I don't know what else to say.' Nothing I said was put forth as a solution to 'poverty'. What I did do was say that in a world where people need kidneys and there is a shortage of kidneys and there is on society that allows for the sale of kidneys and one that does not, it is is not at all evident that the society that bans profitable kidney donation is better off. They will have people in poverty who may have otherwise been able to escape and they will have people dying of kidney failure that may otherwise have survived. What would be needed to ensure that this process could be done in an ethical way would be an entirely different conversation, a hard and difficult and nuanced conversation. But because its hard and difficult and nuanced doesn't mean that it is de facto evil. You talk about the poor being exploited but what separates you from the housewife unwilling to hire a cleaning lady because she doesn't want to degrade the poor by forcing them to clean her home. That woman is doing nothing but denying the cleaning lady a day of hard work and wages. We want to set up a society where the cleaning lady is paid fairly and only performing tasks she is freely choosing to perform, but we don't want to set up a situation where helping the poor or allowing them paths out of poverty is seen as exploiting them so therefore we just outlaw all of that and do nothing. Sex work is another example. In countries where sex work is legal women are abused less and have greater control over their income and lives. When we make something illegal, we make a choice for another person and we frequently only accomplish transferring the activity to the black market where truly evil things happen. You also throw out a causal fallacy with your adoption argument. International adoptees are frequently harmed because they are removed from their culture and the parent does not embrace it and/or the child was traumatized in their youth and was always going to be troubled. But more importantly, we do not have particularly good information on alternative life paths. An African adoptee might be angry about their adoption but they also do not have a solid grasp of the choices that laid before them. They do not know what their life would have been otherwise. The many many successful adoptions show that it can work and again, I ask you what the alternative is. If you have children who are not being adopted in their home country, and the choices are not 'allow the child to thrive with their birth parent or ship them off' and are instead 'allow the child to be adopted by a financially stable and loving home or leave them in a Ukrainian orphanage' the answer is less clear. The world is not black and white, you would do well to start to see the shades of grey more clearly. |