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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]People are so effing crazy, as evidenced by this thread.

As others have said, if the surrogate is willing and not coerced and you compensate well then of course this is ethical. People die doing construction work all the time but no one questions the ethics of hiring a crew to build you something.

If everyone involved has free will and is being treated well, then all the consenting adults are making their own choices and everything is, IMO, fully ethical. [/quote]

Then why can't you buy organs from people? It's actually less risky to have part of your liver removed or a kidney fully removed than pregnancy and childbirth. Answer: it's exploitation of the bodies of other humans. We can't use the poor for organ farms and we shouldn't use them as womb rentals.

And paying a lot does not equal making things ethically OK. I have a bunch of money so I want to shoot endangered animals. Is that morally OK if I pay the animals' owners well?[/quote]

So if you pay a rich woman to have your baby and don't help any poor person your choice becomes ethically pure? Organ donation ethics are very complicated honestly. It isn't as easy as saying one thing is right and one thing is wrong. And of course your animal analogy makes no sense because the harmed party there (animals) is not a consenting being. [/quote]

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.
[/quote]

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/[/quote]

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.

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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.[/quote]

So you accuse me of logical fallacy- then equate having a part of your body permanently removed through painful surgery to scrubbing a toilet. Yeah, no. I'm not saying there aren't grey areas but can we draw the damn line before permanent body alteration??? I don't believe in free for all, unfettered exploitation of human bodies. (I already said I support sex work so I don't know why you brought that up.)

And there are plenty of unhappy domestic adoptees. You don't know for sure that a child of surrogacy won't feel harmed. [/quote]

[b]You are postulating that there is an inherent bond created in the womb. [/b]That is a serious concept that you have no proof for. Well, I will rephrase because I agree there is a bond created, but I disagree that keeping that bond intact is a universally positive concept. Or that it is necessary for the kids to have happy fulfilled lives.

Organ donation is body alteration that SAVES A LIFE. And currently, if you do it, you do it for free, 100% of your own volition. You seem to think people are more benefitted if they perform acts under a guise of pure altruism. This perfectionist morality harms more than it hurts.

I made an analogous situation where someone chooses to deny a person agency 'for their own good' but as a result that person is deprived of a benefit, because the person in a position of power decided that that choice was not one they were entitled to make. I disagree that a person should be denied the opportunity to make an educated and safe choice about their own body. I do agree that a society left freely to decide these type of things will lead to abuse of those less fortunate. It is always a balancing act. But doing nothing or just saying everything is bad because of the slippery slope frequently also injures the people you claim to want to protect.

Again you misstate my argument as I also do not believe in a free for all, unfettered exploitation of human bodies and nowhere in my posts did I say that I did. I brought up sex work because it is analogous, if you agree with sex work but disagree with surrogacy you are, frankly, a hypocrite.[/quote]

The bolded is not true I never said that, at all.

And having sex is more akin to cleaning a toilet- if done correctly- it's a non-harmful daily activity. Pregnancy and childbirth are massively different. Here's the test: tell someone you had sex or cleaned a toilet. Then tell someone you are pregnant.

Safe sex work and toilet cleaning don't risk your life. As someone who suffered a pregnancy complication that could have been fatal--thats not worth any amount of money. (I wouldn't have been considered high-risk- I would have qualified for being a surrogate I was young, normal BMI, no pre-existing conditions etc- these things can not always be predicted.)[/quote]

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