The Seven Stars has changed - it’s behind the High Court, and sets aside a table for judges.
So far as surrogacy goes, the concern the regulations/bans go to is couples who don’t need it using it for convenience. The idea is that people (in reality, and relevant to the counter-argument, women) shouldn’t be able to shift certain burdens onto others; there should be a limit to what money can buy. The underlying moral desiderata are solidarity (ensuring everyone has broadly equivalent lives, thereby fostering mutual sympathy, allowing society to better cohere and reducing the gulf between classes), egalitarianism and justice (in the Hellenic sense; the price for having a child is a pregnancy, and trying not to pay the price incurs a moral debt).
There’s another line of argument that it allows the sale of children (less coherent with implanted embryos, but “surrogacy” gets used more broadly than that) and separates them from their birth mother, but I don’t think these survive a sufficiently precise and robust regulatory framework.
These arguments wouldn’t appeal to a utilitarian or libertarian, but most people are neither.
> no similar articles by men lamenting the downsides of male promiscuity
It's complicated because it overlaps with the AIDS epidemic but there definitely was a backlash to the culture of extreme promiscuity and general incontinence in the 60s/70s gay community within just a decade after Stonewall, even before anybody had heard of "the gay plague". Larry Kramer's "Faggots" comes to mind. I still think it is pretty clear that men are better-adapted to a high promiscuity lifestyle than women are, but the example at least suggests that cultural and historical factors can push people to be more promiscuous than otherwise in ways that they come to regret.
A man and a woman looking for gestational surrogacy show themselves to be wealthy and vulnerable. They seek children, hostages to fortune. At least one of them is infertile, and therefore wussy. They have enough money to hire a woman for nine months of hard labor.
The stationary bandit side of government is well known.
Suppose I work at a university or for media and I'm not bright or sensitive. The life of the mind, for me, is orthodoxy sniffing and whipping up moral panics against the vulnerable. I have an incentive to sniff around seekers of gestational surrogacy, accuse them of moral irregularity, and try to whip up a moral panic. If I succeed I get higher status and the pleasure of damaging the lives of people who may be smarter and more sensitive than me. Perhaps I get a government job, or connections with powerful bureaucrats in the government.
The Seven Stars has changed - it’s behind the High Court, and sets aside a table for judges.
So far as surrogacy goes, the concern the regulations/bans go to is couples who don’t need it using it for convenience. The idea is that people (in reality, and relevant to the counter-argument, women) shouldn’t be able to shift certain burdens onto others; there should be a limit to what money can buy. The underlying moral desiderata are solidarity (ensuring everyone has broadly equivalent lives, thereby fostering mutual sympathy, allowing society to better cohere and reducing the gulf between classes), egalitarianism and justice (in the Hellenic sense; the price for having a child is a pregnancy, and trying not to pay the price incurs a moral debt).
There’s another line of argument that it allows the sale of children (less coherent with implanted embryos, but “surrogacy” gets used more broadly than that) and separates them from their birth mother, but I don’t think these survive a sufficiently precise and robust regulatory framework.
These arguments wouldn’t appeal to a utilitarian or libertarian, but most people are neither.
>I have read a number of articles by women who had followed it and were now unhappy at the results
Anecdata!
(Seriously - writing those kinds of articles get attention; editors aren't going to run articles saying "Sisters, I'm promiscuous and loving it!")
> no similar articles by men lamenting the downsides of male promiscuity
It's complicated because it overlaps with the AIDS epidemic but there definitely was a backlash to the culture of extreme promiscuity and general incontinence in the 60s/70s gay community within just a decade after Stonewall, even before anybody had heard of "the gay plague". Larry Kramer's "Faggots" comes to mind. I still think it is pretty clear that men are better-adapted to a high promiscuity lifestyle than women are, but the example at least suggests that cultural and historical factors can push people to be more promiscuous than otherwise in ways that they come to regret.
Re: "natural" - it was natural to have life expectancies of 25. Nature sucks; a key point here
https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Religions-half-failed-airplanes-basketball-ebook/dp/B0BGJGC5D3/
It was natural to have high infant and child mortality rates. Once through that, quite a lot of people lived to the sort of ages now normal.
A man and a woman looking for gestational surrogacy show themselves to be wealthy and vulnerable. They seek children, hostages to fortune. At least one of them is infertile, and therefore wussy. They have enough money to hire a woman for nine months of hard labor.
The stationary bandit side of government is well known.
Suppose I work at a university or for media and I'm not bright or sensitive. The life of the mind, for me, is orthodoxy sniffing and whipping up moral panics against the vulnerable. I have an incentive to sniff around seekers of gestational surrogacy, accuse them of moral irregularity, and try to whip up a moral panic. If I succeed I get higher status and the pleasure of damaging the lives of people who may be smarter and more sensitive than me. Perhaps I get a government job, or connections with powerful bureaucrats in the government.
Bari Weiss’ Free Press had an interesting report about surrogacy earlier this month: https://www.thefp.com/p/motherloading-inside-the-surrogacy
Interesting, in part for the comments.