I talked to my boss when I first got hired about being pregnant and doing my job. It was a very physical job with long hours and could be quite dirty, but many women did it pregnant. He agreed with me that pregnancy was no hindurance to the job. For over a year I talked about becoming pregnant and he assured me it was okay. On the day I was supposed to fly out to meet the parents, he informed me that he would let me go if I went. I had my shift covered, everything was in line. I was dumb founded when he said that if I thought he was going to let me work there pregnant I was wrong. All that time he had been fine with it. So I prodded, trying to find out what changed his mind. His wife even did the same job while she was pregnant with their son! His response was "but she didn't sell the baby." He wouldn't let me explain, talk to him, or show him why he was wrong. He just told me to leave. I loved working there until that day and no amount of money could have brought me back after that. Selling my baby?? So far from the truth!
Based leftist boss fighting against human trafficking?? :so-true:
I mean, I gotta admit, like if someone's boss found out they were involved in selling children off to Little St. James and fired them, and I doubt anyone would fault them for it. And based on the thread we had the other day, it seems like a lot of this site believes that surrogacy is "literally buying babies" or equivalent to Murray Rothbard's "free market for infants" - or at least, a bunch of you think that's a reasonable position to have. So I'm curious if any of the 50 or so people who upbeared that thread see any problem with that boss's decision to fire his pregant worker for, as you would agree, "selling her baby." I'm curious to know if you'd make the same decision in his shoes, and if you see any problem with that situation - other than of course, that he couldn't hand her over to the cops as well.
I guess I'm just trying to better understand your positions. Like, is this something that you actually believe, or is it a superficial, exaggerated rhetorical flourish that you know is bullshit but use anyway because it provides a pretext for infringing on women's rights? You know, like "abortion is murder?"
I also wouldn't mind hearing from some centrists and moderates on the issue. Those who think both sides have a point, between, "Surrogate mothers are engaging in human trafficking by returning a child to their biological parent," and, "Surrogate mothers have a right to bodily autonomy." Is there one side that you think is more reasonable, or are you a true centrist, right in the middle of those two, equally extreme positions?
While I'm at it, I'd also like to open up the discussion more broadly. Is there anything else women's bodies do that you think is immoral, or maybe just plain gross? Anything else you think ought to be illegal? I'm really looking to hear from some men here, because I feel like we never get their perspective on that.
Anti-surrogacy is just anti-choice for anti-natalists.
I'm perfectly willing to engage with it. Give me the facts. Show me the stats. Show me evidence that the actual material conditions line up with your thus far entirely hypothetical and theoretical ideas about what might possibly be happening on the ground. Otherwise, no, I'm not willing to engage with "the material contradictions of surrogacy under capitalism" on the grounds that you haven't presented the material contradictions, only the hypothetical contradictions which may or may not have anything whatsoever to do with the actual, material reality.
And if you don't have sources for the material reality you believe exists - why not? Is it perhaps because you haven't looked into it, because you haven't thought too much about it before? Perfectly understandable! But if that's the case, then maybe start by reserving judgement, not jumping to any conclusions about how it must function, and instead try collecting data and learning about the situation, and only then thinking about how it might be improved. And hey, you know where you could learn about how it works? Maybe from the people actually involved in it.
I reiterate that placing your own preconceived, purely theoretical notions about what other people's lives are like above their own testimony regarding the same is incredibly chauvinistic, and if you don't agree with that then no, I will not discuss this any further because I disagree you with you on a very fundamental level.
do you not understand that rich people renting poorer peoples bodies is inherently an unequal thing under capitalism? all i really have to say on the issue is my original comment, which is just this one point ultimately. i'm not involved with surrogacy, i'm not antisurrogacy. i'm not really trying to have a debate about why you're the final authority on surrogacy. is this personal for you or something? do you have personal experience with the process of surrogacy in america? because from my perspective, and i'm otherwise disengaging on your post because i really just wanted to offer the most obvious reason people here would be concerned about the manner in which surrogacy would be practiced in america, you are unwilling to understand this singular and obvious point. are you telling me you need hard data to understand that workers need protections from the people employing me? that you need a study to tell you that black kids in areas the panthers operated needed food, that the peasants in china needed to overthrow their landlords? you can't argue from this position of data on the one hand and an appeal to a notion of a mass line on the other if you're not going to back up that example with like, idk, some study that proves that the kids that the black panthers were feeding were hungry or some shit. i don't need a study to tell me that. your notion that people here are actually meaningfully against surrogacy is just much more theoretical than the notion that rich people that don't want to adopt and are willing to pay for surrogacy could take advantage of the surrogate. because it's an inherently unequal social relationship. because of the patriarchy and chauvinism that is inherent to our society.
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thanks for the bad faith discussion i guess, you're as equally unwilling to listen to an argument about why it would make sense to have protections for surrogates as whoever you're mad at from the other thread as they are to your arguments.
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This is what you want people to agree with, right? I agree with this, I have been agreeing with this. So yes, bad faith does include when you make a point to a person and the response is "source? source? source? facts? sources?" especially when they already mostly agree with you. Do you not think that bodily autonomy should include some protections for poor people so they don't get fucked over? We have this protection for medical interactions, for interactions with all sorts of other critical roles and services within society, why does bodily autonomy not get protected like that?
edit: As socialists, our basic notion of wage labor is that we need protection from our bosses. Why don't surrogates deserve some form of established protections for the labor they're doing, how they're treated during it, that they have some say in how it goes. It seems like you just want the process to fuck over women who get unlucky with how the people paying for the surrogacy treat them.
Yes, I do agree with that. I don't think anyone has disputed that surrogate mothers should be entitled to legal protections.
The reason I've been asking for sources and facts is because you led with "do you not understand that rich people renting poorer peoples bodies is inherently an unequal thing under capitalism?" and that is, again, a completely theoretical basis for whatever position you want to argue for, and without verifying whether or not it actually results in anything harmful - and if so, what specific harm it causes - it is completely impossible to have any kind of informed take on the matter.
I have gone back and read through your post and
This is just an absolutely ridiculous thing to say, I'm sorry. The Black Panthers didn't need a fucking study to see that kids were going hungry because they could see the hungry kids right there on the street! Mao didn't need a study to see that the peasants needed to overthrow their landlords because he went out and actually lived with the peasants, and when he returned to the Communist party headquarters, his perspective on their potential for mobilization was written off and dismissed because the rest of the party believed, on a purely theoretical basis that it was the industrial workers who would lead the revolution. And when that completely failed to materialize, when the Communist party was defeated, left in shambles, and forced to endure the Long March, then Mao was finally able to start doing his materially grounded plan, which worked in spite of the fact that he was in a much, much weaker position than before the rest of the Communists were crushed.
Have you talked to surrogate mothers? Do you know any? No? Then maybe you could start by reading through that AMA.
This isn't even just about surrogacy. It's about how we treat people, how we handle information, how we respect and learn from the people we're trying to help instead of fucking White Knighting.
Christ.
i don't need a study to support surrogate mothers, i want them to have healthcare.
ok, well i guess i'm built different, i don't need to actually read a fucking study or witness child labor to know it's wrong and exploitative. if you think that you can have that kind of class dynamic and it's magically without harm because you can't find a study for it, then you should probably think about how you treat people. i'm not white knighting. i'm doing nothing. i will continue to do nothing. how many times do i have to type that, it's not white knighting to recognize that a class divide will create material harm, it's basic human empathy. you're literally arguing from the perspective of libs while claiming it's materialism.
Materialism is when you base your beliefs on ideas without looking at the material world at all.
materialism is when you look at a class divide but the liberals haven't published a peer-reviewed study on how the beatings made the workers feel, so you can't have an empathetic take on it.
Materialism is when you see someone getting spanked and immediately rush in to save them while they insist it's consensual and demand you let them go but then you realize that, in order to have seen the situation you'd have to have observed the material world so you let them go in order to cover your eyes, and then imagine the whole situation happening again in your head.
I AGREE WITH YOU YOU DUMB ASSHOLE, WHY DO YOU STILL NEED TO ARGUE ABOUT IT??? WHY DO YOU WANT SURROGACY TO BE JUST AN UNREGULATED FREE-FOR-ALL THAT DOESN'T PROTECT WOMEN AT ALL???
I don't and I never said that. I'm giving you shit because like I said, this isn't just about surrogacy. I expect a focus on evidence and testimony of vulnerable people to not only be respected, but to be actually practiced by more people on this website than myself. Yeah, we agree on the conclusion, but I disagree completely with you about the process of getting there, which is far more important than having a decent take on one specific issue.
I understand when I am and am not doing something with a material impact. We are on a website with 200 concurrent users. I'm a burnt out, overworked researcher. I know that I don't need to read a study when the class dynamics are this transparent. And do you know what happens when I'm wrong? I change my mind. You're giving me shit because you're angry more people haven't researched this and don't want to. I don't need to change my mind because I don't and won't have political power over surrogates. If it becomes an issue where I need research to point to people for them to believe me, that's when I look it up. I have yet to be in a situation where I couldn't find some. I center human beings empathetically as a moral center, and that has yet to steer me wrong in my understanding of the likely nature of abuses on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, etc. Now what are you going to say to the person that did actually have the bandwidth to go find some good evidence of surrogacy tourism? You gonna shit all over them too? I'm sorry people in your life need to have data to empathize with people who are vulnerable, but I've learned to empathize without that data.
I totally respect not doing the research on in when you not doing something with a material impact. I do. I imagine that's most of the people on this site in regards to the topic. But in my opinion, in that case, it's better to just reserve judgement and stay out of the fray.
I do apologize that I've been abrasive in this thread. As I've mentioned, I'm quite frustrated because, when I asked for sources previously, people attacked me without providing any, and when I found my own, and asked directly if they had any better sources that would refute what I found, I got more of the same. In this thread, you've weighed in to criticize my pursuit of information, and that caused me to get frustrated with you.
Now, thankfully, I have finally, finally received what I originally asked for, which is some source, just any amount of evidence whatsoever so I can see if there is any truth to what the people I've been arguing with have been saying. I am certainly not going to shit on the one person to finally provide something to back up their claims, obviously. But I don't know how I'll respond yet because I'm still reading through them.
I think, rather than "empathize," you mean "sympathize." I've been arguing for listening and learning from vulnerable people, not just feeling pity for them. Yes, I do need to collect data about what they express and how they feel in order to understand and empathize with them, because that's part of what empathy is, fundamentally.
I hope I can be clear that from my perspective, commenting on the class divisions at play and leaving it at that is what constitutes reserving judgment and staying out of it.
Fair enough. I apologize for the same. I don't think you have come across as actually seeking further knowledge. Rather, you seemed to be attacking me rhetorically for not having a study or a testimony to specifically point at, which does constitute a bad faith form of argument. I realize you're heated because of some people saying unhinged shit in that other thread, but it really did not seem like you actually wanted some real examples, and I'm way too autistic to not just keep arguing a point on merits I think are reasonable.
I think perhaps I mean something in between then, because you are correct that I am simply and fundamentally unable to empathize with them because I cannot experience surrogacy myself, but I also don't simply feel pity for them. My feeling toward the vulnerable is a sympathetic solidarity. It's the same as my feeling of solidarity with historical socialist projects, and with existing socialist projects.
I do appreciate that, and I should've taken that into consideration more than I did. I singled you out for a broader trend of people weighing in with various takes without having anything to back it up - something that the format of the internet encourages, and which I find frustrating (especially in the context of women's rights) - but it was unfair considering that your take is very restrained. I'm sorry for that.
Crunching numbers doesn't prove workers are exploited. You literally have to have a theoretical framework with which to understand the problem, and that's more important than a study at this stage.
It kinda does though. There's plenty of facts and data that you can point to that leads to the conclusion of workers being exploited. People without a socialist, or even leftist theoretical framework, can still realize that workers are getting a raw deal. I'm not saying that a theoretical framework isn't important, but that theoretical framework should be derived from observations about the world, and routinely tested against observations and refined to better reflect reality.
You already need an idea of what exploitation is, and what moral or social or political weight it has. People in the antebellum American south sometimes genuinely thought the enslaved Africans were benefiting from their labor, not being exploited, same can be said of many industrialists, and even fellow workers, in factories during the jndustrial revolution.
Sometimes thought. Generally, because they were operating with an incorrect theoretical framework which came from propaganda, social pressure, and sometimes material interests, rather than from actual observations of the material world. People didn't see an enslaved person getting whipped and think, "Huh, I wonder whether that's helping or harming him, unfortunately, nobody told me what exploitation is so I guess I'll never know." They saw it, and it troubled them, but then they fell back into the brainworms they had carefully cultivated to make peace with it. It's not a case of lacking a theoretical framework, it's a case of the obvious and readily apparent truth being concealed by a deceptive and false theoretical framework.
In any case, what are you even arguing? That materialism is wrong? That socialism shouldn't be scientific? This isn't up for debate.
What I'm arguing is that you need to already have an idea of what's right and wrong before making any moral judgement. The other person you were speaking with was making the case that exploitation would be bad, and you asked for evidence of exploitation, which missed the mark.
And I disagree with that. When slave traders packed enslaved people onto ships like sardines, knowing that many of them would die on the journey, they did not need some moral philosopher to come over and explain to them that what they were doing was morally wrong. They knew it was wrong, because the wrongness of it would be immediately obvious to any human being.
What policies you support should not be based purely on hypothetical imaginings. That's like chuds on Twitter being like, "Oh no, what if the chatbot needs to defuse a bomb and the password is a racial slur?" If it's not a real situation that actually happens, then it doesn't really matter.
Nobody is arguing against the idea that, if exploitation is happening, that's bad. Obviously, that's a given. If that's all they're saying, then what they're saying is irrelevant to what should be done. "If this policy causes the the earth to explode, that would be a bad policy" is true of every policy but contributes nothing to the discussion.
No. You do need an ideological framework for right and wrong. That's why you saw such debate at the time and into today about whether it was right or wrong.
Anyway, the other person wasn't suggesting a particular policy, nor am I here, just a statement that you can't say it's blanket fine when it works out well for the majority of surrogates. I mean, wage labor has worked out fine for a lot of people, and we really want to change that on this website.
No, that is incorrect. The reason that you saw a debate was because material interests incentivized the creation of false narratives and rationalizations meant to soothe people's consciences while they made shit tons of money. Your position on this is absurd and idealist.
There is no material basis for "hurting people is bad." And saying people "just know" is stupid. They also just know the sun revolves around the earth and the stars are very small and their culture is better than other cultures. None of these things are true.
Hurting others or seeing others get hurt is observably and obviously detrimental to psychological health.
Lemme just ask, where the fuck do you think knowledge comes from? Do you astrally project to the plane of existence where platonic forms float around and bump into things until you learn stuff?
I'm literally just describing how the scientific process works and for some reason you're making me argue it. All of those incorrect ideas you mentioned were corrected because they were tested against material observations and changed to better reflect reality. This is such a ridiculous conversation.
If I got a massive psychological health boost from hurting others, would that make it okay? Are the actions of psychopaths who don't feel remorse always justified because if this? At a certain point you do have to turn inward and ask what is good and why. And that's not science, that's philosophy. I try not to hurt others because I think it's wrong to hurt others, even if doing so would bring me pleasure or any other benefit. This is because I accept as an axiom that hurting others is wrong. With that done, then science can come in to determine what I should do about that, but not before. Science is dependent on you agreeing the world exists and works in regularly established patterns, which isn't true as a given. You have to assume those axioms first. So when the initial point was raised, "if exploitation was going on that would be bad," badgering for proof of exploitation missed the point of that argument.
Again, the question "If there's exploitation going on, would it be bad?" was never something that was remotely in question.
Hey, here's a quick question for you: what's the correct response to, "Assuming trans people actually are molesting children, would that be bad?" Is it, "Yes, that would be bad," or is it, "It doesn't matter because it's not happening, and also fuck you?" Should we allow the conversation about trans rights to be dominated by hypothetical speculation, or should we insist on grounding it in actual facts? Like what other topics do you wanna try your bullshit approach on?