Genuine question: why can you buy a baby in this country when you can't buy an organ? I would not be allowed to sell one of my own children and yet it would be entirely legal for me to sell my genetic material and rent my womb to create a child for someone else.
It would seem to me that on the scale of things you should not be able to purchase, a kidney would rank far lower than a human.
I am confused by the logic here.
7 comments:
Well, the womb would be a rented service, not a purchased property, right? Like renting someone's labor for a wage, just in this case the labor is like LABOR.
We can't stop people from selling their gametes (esp. if they're male), so that's a hopeless endeavor. We can stop people from selling kidneys. I remember working on this years ago at the bioethics council. Those people would've liked to ban it all, essentially. But such is the futility of tech ethics vs. actual tech.
Sure, you can't stop dudes from selling or giving away sperm. That's a biological reality and the nature of dudes.
But plenty of countries have made surrogacy, and even selling your eggs, illegal. Both of these things are as medically complicated as extracting a kidney, and therefore not hard to regulate or stop altogether.
I'm not saying we should, ban it, just that if we ban selling organs then to be consistent this should also be banned, right? If anything, wouldn't creating people and selling them be more ethically questionable than selling an organ? I feel like I'm missing something.
Well, surrogacy is a service, not a product. The baby is made from the gametes of the couple (or the gametes they purchase), not the surrogate. It is deeply creepy, yes, but I think categorically different from selling the actual gametes, and much of the creepiness arises from the fact that the surrogate is not carrying her *own* baby and then just giving it away after birth but is literally a vessel.
Either way though, Americans seem to have zero appetite for banning any child making technology or exchange short of literal baby-selling. It’s interesting, given their much greater ambivalence about abortion and even the destruction of “extra” fertilized frozen embryos, which is a byproduct of the use of these reproductive technologies. One reason is that most Protestants have totally embraced these technologies, and Protestants are most of the religious people who might otherwise form a baseline of opposition. Jews also approve it, and only Catholics oppose it. Nonreligious people have no principled objections and mostly favor, except occasional reactionary feminists who are like, hmmm is this maybe oppression…? So why don’t Protestants or seculars find it problematic? Bc they believe babies are such a central life hood that they should be obtained at any price so long as it’s not the price of someone else’s chance to have a baby? I do suspect that there is some kind of perverse pro-natalism at work here, in addition to the obvious elements of laissez-faire “to each his own”-ism.
Ehhh, is it a service? Creating a human doesn't seem like a service, and you can't create a human without a womb. I understand you can't create a human without genetic material, either, but surrogacy just doesn't seem the same as getting your legs waxed or having your house cleaned. It seems a lot closer to selling a kidney (you don't need 2 kidneys, after all).
Maybe surrogacy is like prostitution? But while also creepy, sex as a transaction seems more feasible than gestation as a transaction. If nothing else, the consequences of surrogacy (making a person) seem a lot more serious than the consequences of sex nowadays, given the ubiquity of birth control. And of course prostitution is illegal, so I guess any similarity helps my argument.
I see your points overall, though. I get that there is no appetite to ban this, and I don't think making people is bad, despite what the environmentalists say. But philosophically I see no difference between buying a kidney because you need one to stay alive and buying a womb because you would like to have a child. If anything, getting a new kidney when you need one seems like it would be more pressing.
Soon, soon, Julia. We will have human, but no womb, just like Shulamith Firestone wanted. Problem solved!
I'm not sure historically what the answer is - organ donation came before the advent of large-scale reproductive technology, during a time of much greater state regulation of everything, and it was much easier to regulate b/c people couldn't transplant kidneys secretly in their basements, so black markets were unlikely (at least inside the US). So maybe it was just a matter of circumstance - timing and the nature of the process in question. There was also an ethical justification - scarce lifesaving goods would be rationed more fairly if cost was not an issue, and the poor were less likely to be exploited if there was no market incentive to sell your organs. Eg, you are MORE likely to stay alive if you need a kidney this way than if we had a free market for kidneys. Since reproductive technology is not lifesaving but more like a luxury choice, there was initially less concern about fair distribution, and there's just never been much regulation of the industry at all.
I don't think making people is bad either. That's why I think the lack of caution about these technologies is a kind of perversion of pro-natalism, not just an outgrowth of it. Pro-natalism is fine, I am very pro-natalist generally, but is having a baby SUCH an unqualified good that it should be facilitated in any possible way, so long as everyone involved consents? Or could there be ways of obtaining babies whose pursuit would undermine the good of having babies in the first place? It's like Tocqueville's suggestion that too much democracy destroys democracy.
Like we mostly agree that literally selling children would do that, right? If children were a straightforward market commodity, then they would lose at least some of the qualities that make them valuable - they are ends in themselves, our permanent connection to them, our understanding of them as fruits of a marital union, our permanent obligation to them, etc. But, you could say adoption also erodes some of these values but adoption if fine and even noble. So then you have to adumbrate the claim and say something like, adoption is making the best of a bad situation, but we wouldn't encourage people to regularly give away their children when not under duress. But that is sad for adoptive families, they are less preferable than biological ones. But if we start erasing all such rankings and hierarchies, then it becomes quite hard to make any principled case against any form of baby-acquisition that is not oppressively coercive to someone, since all forms have to be ranked as equally good. You end up with the pro-natalist premise (babies good) but no qualifications that could possibly lead to a preference hierarchy of either means or ends, and then surrogacy is good too. But you're also right that it's not a big stretch from buying gametes and a surrogate is good, to buying a kid is fine, so long as its owners are voluntarily selling it. The unqualified good consumes itself.
Yes, that makes sense. I think you're right about the perversion of pro-natalism and the inability to form a preference hierarchy aside from babies = good.
All this is also probably related to the inability to form a preference hierarchy around family, too. When family is not linked to biology or any other hierarchical structures it's hard to say what permutations of families are good or not as good. So buying progeny might be sort of NBD if families are entirely mutable and situational.
I guess at base I really struggle with the idea of children as commodities, which is how that article seems to treat them. To me a kidney is much more clearly a commodity than a baby.
And oy, Shulamith Firestone! As much as I hate being pregnant, I hope I'm dead before her version of the future comes to pass.
Right, how you get the baby is indifferent and who raises it is too, only HOW you raise it evokes hierarchical preferences. Over the how, we will dispute mightily.
Do you think kidneys are more commodifiable just b/c we have two and we can lose one without major ill effects? B/c most other organ donations presuppose that the donor is dead, so the price for him is a lot higher.
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