Choosy choice
Not something to celebrate.
Single men, adopt by all means. Deliberately set out to take an infant from its mother so that you can have it for yourself, no.
I’m depressed to see what comes up when I google “single dad by choice via surrogacy” – part of the headline in Amy’s tweet.
Way too many people think women are just incubators. I have no problems with single parents adopting, or same sex parents adopting, but surrogacy has way too many problems. People seem to think there is no risk to a woman with pregnancy, and I will admit many fewer women die in pregnancy now, but there is still risk, plus a woman must give over 9 months of her life to a child for someone else to raise.
Yeah, anything beyond “my sister/in law” is willing to do this for me is way too much (and even then…)
I guess I’m having a hard time seeing the objection here. It seems to run counter to a woman’s right to control her body. Is it that you believe that all surrogates are being exploited and cannot possibly have given informed meaningful consent? I understand that in the context of prostitution, where the practical reality is fairly ugly, but surrogacy contracts aren’t generally reached on the streets at 3 a.m.
Because it’s a shitty thing to do to the infant, just for a start. Also I don’t see a woman selling her reproductive capacity to a man as controlling her own body, but more like selling control of it to someone else. I avoid using the “control her own body” trope mostly for this reason; it gives an opening to the “yay prostitution is awesome and empowering” crowd. Also I think the more people start to see women as baby-making machines, as useful and marketable as any other manufacturing device, the less they will think of them as mattering in themselves.
Also, it’s a shitty thing to do because a lot of the women being used as incubators are from impoverished communities, where a few pieces of silver may feed her family for a year, but the quality of healthcare may put her life at risk.
Screechy Monkey: because when giving women “choices” turns out with them doing things that harm themselves (pregnancy, egg donation, “sex work” etc) and that men love, then you have got to ask if this is indeed a free choice, an equal choice among equal choices.
But when and where are they made? The dangers of thinking about surrogacy as a transaction like any other are similar to those regarding prostitution and porn. Desperation for money doesn’t have to immediate and power imbalance can be coercive even if it exists in the full light of day. With surrogacy there’s the additional problem that a decision made in desperation cannot necessarily be easily undone later and either way, the consequences could be long-lasting.
As an adoptee, I’m tired of the “adopt instead” mantra. How often do you believe adoption is a freely made “choice” for the woman relinquishing her baby? Have you ever met a woman who would “choose” such a thing?
I think usually when people say “adopt,” they’re assuming there’s a child out there somewhere who needs to be adopted–maybe an older, “special needs” kid. Yet the newborn baby is what wannabe adopters want and expect, because it’s what adoption is to most people. That’s how it’s been sold since the sealed birth certificate was invented. Those who can afford to do so will go right on coercing and swindling poor women out of their newborn babies unless and until something is done to stop them.
Very few kids *need* to be adopted. If they really can’t be raised by their parents, why can’t they stay in the family? If they can’t stay in the family, why must they sacrifice their names and identities to get the decent upbringing every child deserves? Because people want “their own” baby, and if they can’t have one, they expect the experience of having their own to be replicated for them…no matter what that does to the child they love (or to anyone else).
Freedom is a tricky thing, not only in its application but also its categorisation. We’re seeing a lot of first-order bad-faith “freedom” rhetoric being thrown around with refusing to vaccinate (in general and, tragically, against the currently-raging pandemic), when ideally we *wouldn’t* have the freedom to refuse these vaccines, in order to guarantee our collective freedom in the future — namely the freedom from having to decide to get vaccinated in the first place, because the successful application of these vaccines now will prevent their necessity later. We have several notable examples of this kind of second-order freedom already, the most notable having been smallpox. Very few people younger than fifty have the pock-marked scar on their arm denoting their smallpox vaccination — I remember seeing an example on my (much) older brother when I was young, and being taken with anxiety over when I would need to undergo a procedure to get such a scar, which seemed so formidable to my inexperienced and overactive imagination.
Though I have since endured many more formidable trials in the intervening years, getting the smallpox vaccine was not one of them. For my generation and, if we are lucky, every generation afterward, there is simply no choice in the matter; vaccination against smallpox is neither necessary nor possible. We are free, in a very real sense, of the burden of getting vaccinated against smallpox, just as much as we are free of the burden of getting smallpox itself. This is a much deeper and more consequential freedom than the first-order freedom to accept or refuse the vaccination, which would have doomed us forever into having to make the same choice every generation.
Sadly, it’s looking like the first-order nutcases have made such second-order freedom impossible for measles, and polio is at a tipping point, after some unfortunate complications involving American intelligence-gathering in Pakistan rendered the initial UN effort moot in Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is quite likely that people of my generation and the next will never have to get vaccinated against polio, but for the generation or two afterward, it is much less certain.
So vaccination is an excellent paradigm where “choosy-choice” rhetoric clearly fails to produce an optimal outcome. We can, all of us, make the collective sacrifice of getting vaccinated against a certain disease, and that disease will disappear — freeing up all subsequent generations from having the freedom of choosing to get vaccinated or get the disease in question. And it is clear that, other things equal, a world without smallpox, or polio, or measles, or COVID, would be more ideal than a world with those things.
I wonder if that isn’t the determining factor where first-order freedoms must give way to second-order freedoms in order to foster a more optimal result. Let’s say, for the purposes of argument, that it is; more clearly, let’s assume that if X is a given possibility, the first-order freedom associated with X is the ability to choose whether or not X occurs; this first-order freedom can be shortened to “freedom to”. Let’s define the second-order freedom associated with X to be the absence of X entirely, which we can shorten to “freedom from”.
The question then becomes, for a given X, are we better off allowing freedom to X, or demanding freedom from X? It’s also pretty clear that there isn’t a single, universal answer to this; even if you agree with me that freedom from getting vaccinated is obviously superior to the freedom to get vaccinated, you can fairly easily think of many examples where freedom to is far superior to freedom from. Access to libraries, no state or community or family coercion in religion, and free association are three right off the top of my head that I’m fairly certain nobody here will disagree with.
Under this analysis, then, the question becomes whether surrogacy belongs to the set of freedom-to or freedom-from optimisations. That is, would the world be better off if, other things equal, the choice of surrogacy were simply not available to anyone. Would the world be better off if the very concept of surrogacy did not exist in the otherwise-unchanged world?
I am not sure, but the answer is not clearly “yes”. I can imagine a better world, where other things *aren’t* equal, in which surrogacy occurs always and only between adults of similar (and adequate) means and is not directly financially compensated, where the “ideal” surrogacy story is one in which the mother and the legal parents are closely associated and all will be involved in the child’s life and the “worst” surrogacy story is one in which the mother’s choice is essentially identical to rendering an unborn child for adoption. It is not immediately clear to me that such a state of affairs would be radically unjust to the women who made that choice, nor to women in general.
In fact, the line between “choosing not to abort a foetus and instead arrange for the resultant child to be immediately adopted” and “offer to carry a child that will be raised by someone else” seems quite tenuous, differentiated only by the circumstances of the foetus’ conception. Clearly, the financial motive is corrosive to the real “freedom to” do something, as when the choice is “do X or starve”, there isn’t really a choice there; but, in principle, is gestating a foetus to birth and then allowing that child to be raised itself corrosive to human well-being?
I don’t know, but it certainly isn’t a straightforward question, either way.
Because sometimes there is no other option. My sister adopted several children; they were mostly older, special needs kids, and they desperately needed a home. Yes, society should be willing to take care of them, but society is not willing to do that.
I had a nephew who was fortunate enough (maybe not that fortunate, considering the life he ended up with) to be placed with family. That does seem awfully unusual, and for many families, that may not be possible. Some people don’t have a family to step in. Some people have a chaotic mixed up family that they don’t want to wish on a child (like mine – I would never have let a child of mine be adopted by any member of my family). Sometimes no one in the family will take them. There are a lot of reasons why some children will end up needing to be adopted.
Until we fix society, and fix our system of reproductive choice, this will continue to be a need.
I do agree that it is not a ‘choice’ in the way you are phrasing it; most women would prefer not to be in that situation. But the children are already here, and need a home, and it isn’t adding yet another exploited woman to the list of already exploited women.
@ iknklast–again, I don’t mean to say, and I never said, that there will never be any children who can’t be raised in their families. There will always be some–though not enough to supply the adoption industry’s demand.
What I really want to know is *why* the average adopting human will not raise a child that isn’t biologically theirs unless they get to put their name all over that kid and her birth certificate, deny his heritage, and, if she’s from another country, take away his language and culture. Why can’t we do better? Why can’t we even pretend we’re interested in trying to do better for children? Some other societies seem to manage it.
I agree that adopting children who have already been removed from their homes does not “add another woman to the list.” What adds women to the list are the “looking to adopt” couples who hover over poor pregnant women telling them their baby could have a pool (a pony, a big brother) and the agency workers who call girls and women “birth mothers” before they’ve given birth or made up their mind to relinquish. And that is what most people think of when they think “adoption”–a smiling happy couple holding a newborn. That needs to change.