Luminar Podcast: Communal Wombs
In a new episode of Luminar Podcast, Deidre informs us about wonderful world of surrogacy and in quite off hand fashion demonstrates once again that feminism, especially in the hands of – oh, the irony – “merciless millenials” is the one aspect of posthumanism especially concerned with the destruction of women.
Interesting that the stated reason behind promoting surrogacy is to end “only caring for children we share dna with”. It reminded me of something I ran into a few years ago, I’m not sure how I got to it, might even be via KT.
https://aeon.co/ideas/if-babies-were-randomly-allocated-to-families-would-racism-end
I have a critique of your approach to this problem though. You focus on technical issues, such as health risk for the women serving as surrogates, depression due to hormones that appear during pregnancy, exploitation of economic hardship, you seem to agree with in my opinion utterly off the mark argument of surrogacy promoting racism and colonialism. I mean, if these issues would be circumvented, say mortality rate due to child birth drops further, treatments are devised to neutralize emotional harm of separation with the child, payments for the women are increased and entertainment and propaganda make it so that black or indian or east asian or whatever other races are more desireable than white, would you be fine with surrogacy? I guess not. Problem of surrogacy isn’t on that level, I think that the issues of this sort are merely symptoms that warn us of something more serious.
U zemlji gdje sam pokušaj kritike bilo kojeg oblika ludila, ma koliko obazriva ona bila, automatski povlači anatemu iz pristojnog društva, pa i šire obitelji, treba vremena dok se čovjek okuraži jednostavno pokazati srednji prst, pa onda neko vrijeme argument kruži kao mačak oko vruće kaše. U Hrvatskoj je puno lakše osloboditi se i uručiti luđacima jedno koncizno “odjebite” bez velikog okolišanja.
Hi Ante, I understand what you mean and I was aware that the argument I was making was based on the most obvious technical issues widely identified as being problematic with surrogacy. and I stuck with those in a way not to alienate people from considering the issue in the first place. If one attacks more fundamental root problems, regular people smell a ”God botherer” and they switch off :). Metaphysics is the most shameful thing nowadays. The racist element I included because a lot of people who are pushing for this kind of ”freedom” are very wary of their own white guilt, and it is a way to poke at them . The argument was initially made by Sheela Saravana who is Indian., and she has the right to make that argument because it is true in many ways. As it happens I don’t agree with surrogacy at all. I know there are compassion arguments that could be made for some kind of familial atruistic surrogacy, but even then one is endangering the life of the mother, and causing much deeper problems about what it is to be human. But as it is we have gone far beyond any question of familial compassion to basically factory farming babies on the cheap for any people who feel they have a ”right” to a child. Thanks for listening.
I didn’t think you yourself disagree with the practice on technical level, if I did I wouldn’t have commented.
Ironically, the racism complaint is probably the last part of normalcy in this whole story, since I assume it is mostly white people who chose to have children through surrogacy, which then means it is their cells that are being used, or at least those of people like them. The feminist author in question would probably like to do away with that, since the whole point is to end caring for children we share dna with. It is hard (although how things are going not impossible in some future time) to expect white people to want to explicitly have a black or Indian child, since in that case it wouldn’t be their child at all and they could have simply adopted instead, which is more akin to the idea in the article I linked, which has the explicit goal of ending racism. It is also the most easily solved issue raised, since all one has to do is say fine, we’ll use a non-white woman’s egg cell.
I admit I don’t know for sure how to approach this when trying to change someone’s mind. I’d just expect this easily gets bogged down in debunking and counter debunking, with audience split cheering for their teams.
Forgot to add, this Sophie Lewis person has herself offered a good argument, having broken cover as you said. So perhaps an approach that connects surrogacy with destruction of family and concentrates on that would have a better rhetorical effect. I don’t think there’s a place in the world where ordinary people would yet openly approve of such a thing.