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20 sats \ 10 replies \ @fourrules 12 Dec \ parent \ on: A bunch of alarming shit BooksAndArticles
First try to understand why cannibalism is abhorrent, malum in se, and rather than just abnormal.
If you find yourself justifying cannibalism you'll be able to justify buying babies like IKEA furniture.
But the truth is that children from surrogacy tend to feel that their surrogate parent exploited their real mothers. These feelings are gaslit, and in extreme circumstances the surrogate parents cut off the children the way they would never have been cut off by real parents.
Bottom line is that people literally cannot be owned or bought, and if you try to buy a child you're only renting the experience of parenthood, not the real thing, hence those relationships are emotionally easier to sever from both sides.
Renting or buying a person's labour is not exploitation if the person is getting better at something, increasing their own capacity rather than draining it.
I still don't understand why you compare something that’s—in my opinion—pretty close to adopting children to people eating each other.
If parents don’t want their child and I adopt it, you think this is as abhorrent as me eating other people?
This is what I'm hearing, and tbh, it sounds quite ridiculous.
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Surrogacy is nothing like adoption if the parent isn't buying the child.
If you bought it isn't a possession. You own it. But that person you bought has free will, they literally cannot be bought, it's technically impossible. The relationship you have with the purchased child is nothing like the adoptive process for a child whose parents haven't had the capacity to raise them. The purchased child will silently or publicly reject the relationship in favour of the parent they lost, but the taboo against speaking out is enormous because the surrogate parents can and do withhold resources.
Purchasing the experience of parenthood is a scummy way to exploit people in poverty.
Notice that in adoption the adoptive parents are told to tell them that they have been adopted from an early age, and to explain the situation, and to enable bridges to their real parents if feasible. It wasn't like that in the past, but we learned. That's not the case with surrogates.
Listen to the video by Olivia Maurel.
Cannibalism is using a person as an object, consuming them. Modern surrogacy is a consumptive act, like buying furniture from IKEA.
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The relationship you have with the purchased child is nothing like the adoptive process
Have you been through an adoptive process? It's quite expensive. Significant amounts of money change hands before a baby ends up as the legal child of the adoptive parents. You don't have to like surrogacy, but the arguments you're making seem pretty tenuous to me.
I'm curious if you have similar feelings about broad swathes of the economy where people in dire circumstances take shitty jobs that nobody in less dire circumstances would ever take. For instance, there's quite the cottage industry in third-world countries paying people to adjudicate terrible videos of animals being tortured for fun, and the like. The psychological costs of this job are substantial, but presumably people in those circumstances think it's less bad than the alternative. Is this fine, or not fine?
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Being expensive isn't the same thing as purchasing a child, obviously.
If you're asking whether other forms of exploitation exist, then yes, obviously. You can exploit people for their meat, their attention, their wombs. None of these are categorically the same as offering a product or service that increases your own capacity and capabilities, your own power, the more you do it.
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Being expensive isn't the same thing as purchasing a child, obviously.
The distinction isn't as obvious to me -- or to most people, apparently -- as it is to you. Which is not itself a problem.
The problem would be if you think you've performed some devastating praxeological smackdown, which you have not. However, it wouldn't be my problem, so I'm content to let it alone.
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You're obviously trying to come to a conclusion that you want to come to. In adoption, do you pay the birth mother? Or do you pay administrators of the process? Are those administrators paid to deliver you a product or service, or to ensure that the child's interests are upheld which means potentially denying you the product you want to pay for?
This is obvious so what's you're agenda, why play dumb?
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Agreed, I'm not open to discussion on the moral acceptability of surrogacy. It's malum in se, categorically the same murder or cannibalism.