You're not wrong, exactly. But you should be aware that Marxist feminists were fairly systematically pushed out of academia a while back, not necessarily by consumerist ones, but by larger powers that be.
And then 2 questions - you can't have some sort of "nice capitalism" because the core dynamics veer toward dehumanizing commodification for profit, so are you a socialist now? Also, why are you lecturing feminists, e.g. what's your agenda that is genuinely aligned with feminism? Because, as with capitalism, "nice conservatism" isn't really a thing with respect to true equality for and liberation of women.
7
I was getting steamed reading your article, then you changed your point. Thanks. I agree with you.
Before the article turned I was getting so tired of your equating every issue with Left and Right. Maybe every issue IS on a left and right spectrum. But sometimes I just want to hear about the issue and why it is wrong or right, not if the right or left is wrong or right.
You sound weary at the end. I think we all are. Having so much horror coming out of the white house makes a difference in our baseline feelings. And, you are right in that everything is pulled and twisted away from the simple goodness of families and our best feelings for each other.
4
Many things are and for decades or generations or in some cases centuries have been over-commoditized, among them sex and reproduction. Douthat not unexpectedly tries repeatedly to pin the blame on feminists. But most of the people buying or selling sex or reproduction are not feminist. He should be more reality based, in his columns on personal morality especially.
4
"Christian moralism sustained...nonmarket institutions like the family and the church across the long ascent of global wealth." Dear Ross, this statement shows that you have very little understanding about feminism, the (free) reproduction of labor in raising families, men's abilities to work outside the home and the building of the church built on the backs of women.
Read more on feminism. Write less on feminism. Your columns will be better for it.
3
I stopped watching TV 25 years ago and all I can say after reading the first paragraph of this article is: how demented is this?
What is even more bizarre is that Ross spends more than a thousand words trying to analyze this. Hint: are most of the Trump voters actually watching this show?
Religion requires belief in the demonstrably untrue. Allowing yourself this leads to.. Trump - complete acceptance of the demonstrably untrue. Can anything possibly be more dehunamising than that?
2
Goodness! Imagine Ross Douthat explaining surrogates and feminists! Interesting that his argument is building around two gays who wanted a biological family. Of course, we've have a lesson in conservative family values this past week, haven't we?
2
It's weird to me to imagine that Ross thinks Feminism has more cultural power in contemporary America than religion. Seems tome that Mr. Douthat is throwing in the towel as a way of getting himself and his co-religionists off the hook. You have problems with the gross excesses of Late Capitalism,well, that's good to hear. But it seems to me you are practicing a lo-cal version of Rod Dreher's Benedictine Option. Don't retreat; join the battle. Don't leave it up to Feminists. Get out there and join the fray against Payday Lenders, Gentrification, the erosion of the public sphere, etc.
5
As Socrates is supposed to have, I abhor rhetoric. So I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume your column is free of it - or reasonably so. I agree with you. We, Norte Americanos, are injected with the virus of laissez faire capitalism (along with ten gallon hats and boots) at birth.
1
I will leave the surrogacy and prostitution to others
Sorry, as a child of the 60s, I see almost none of the good Catholics one of 6,7,8 children hoping to recreate that lifestyle by rhythmically trying to game their bodies fertility . So IUD and LARCs are just making sure women have the children they want rather than all the ones that God somehow might bless them with (5,6,7,8,9 ?) by granting them good health and nutrition and 20-30 years of fertility and destroying the earth in the process. There is no science to support the tripe that these cause early termination and they are both better than the pill, especially for fertile young women.
Leaning in is something both women and men who typically enjoy their careers do. 90% of people lean in so they can support their families. Few women in Silicon Valley. Egg freezing makes sense in more ways that just allowing careers to take over your more preferred baby momma path, like allowing for fertility after cancer or illness or, oh no, wanted children of non-traditional couples.
(The rather important female reality of motherhood, a Guardian essayist noted recently, “comes up in less than 3 percent of papers, journal articles or textbooks on modern gender theory.”)
Surely there must be a corollary that it would be helpful to see what male reality of fatherhood is .. and then maybe make child raising a pleasurable planned activity with 1 or 2 wonderful loved supported children as a result.
2
Has anybody else noticed that Mr. Douthat reserves his critiques of capitalism solely for his anti-feminist agenda? As long as we're critiquing the harsh ramifications of our uber-capitalist economy, where is your support for a Bernie Sanders "medicare for all" system? Where is your support for a one-year paid maternity leave with a guaranteed right to return to the same position? How about flex-time? Subsidized corporate day care? Curiously, these positions seem to be absent from your world view. Capitalism can be exploitive in so many ways. It's too bad you only criticize it when it confounds your retrograde, anti-feminist Catholic agenda.
11
Surrogacy makes my blood boil, and I think if someone has enough money to "buy" a womb or a child, then the government should take that person's money and give it to a poor mother or father who can then use it to take care of their child.
Because seriously, how is any of this "capitalist feminist" flim flam any different from the slave markets in olden times? It's no different at all! It's just rich people buying what nature won't give them.
Maybe it's time for feminists, and strong transies, to fight back and start pushing for more state intervention. Maybe it's time for people to just stop having kids, especially people who have too much money who are just going to consume their way through parenthood, thus making for even more environmental waste.
6
What he describes is a precipitant of Capitalism, not a critique of Feminism. Embracing Capitalism as an inherently moral system misses its essential mindlessness drifting toward commodification of all things human, and otherwise. That a brand of Feminism would syncretically spawn in the Petri dish of Western culture is not that amazing. But the essential phenomenon described can be isolated from Feminism.
5
You were 7 during Mary Beth Whitehead's case?
Wow.
That puts a lot of things in perspective.
I have to tell you, Ross, that there are a lot of things about life that you just can't learn without more experience.
And I know you write for the NYTimes, and I'm no one, but you must believe me.
One of the things you keep getting wrong is what's really driving the "dehumanizing and commodifying drift" of our society; and the whole world, really.
Hint: its not the left, and especially not feminists.
11
"cultural conservatism has always offered at most two cheers for capitalism, recognizing that its great material beneficence can coexist with dehumanizing cruelty, that its individualist logic can encourage a ruthless materialism unless curbed and checked and challenged by a moralistic vision."
Sounds just like a mainstream Democrat....
1
If a female writer wrote about men's sexuality, reproductive organs and ability to have children as often as, and in the same way as Ross writes about these issues for women, she would be fired. Enough with your patriarchal misogyny couched in conservative terms.
5
While I admire Mr. Douthat's desire to wave the flag for Christian based cultural conservatism, given the current state of Christian observance in America characterized by utter hypocrisy with its worship of the most blatantly immoral person ever to become President, I can't help thinking that anything coming from his pen in this vein would be met with laughter by any slightly sane human being.
1
No, you're right that mainstream feminism has become an amoral Randian consumer brand. But religious conservatism is going to save us? Umm... didja happen to notice prosperity gospel or the pastor's new jet or the ministers preaching tax cuts from the pulpit? It's not just the feminists who've been taken over by capitalism.
3
Lewis and Edward's attitude toward the mother of their child is appalling and disgraceful. I can see surrogacy for a woman who is unable to have a baby, but providing this gift to men with such foul attitudes toward women really makes me question surrogacy for just anyone. I personally would limit it to women unable to give birth on their own.
1
The gentlemen on bravo were cruel for the sake of ratings. I'm glad their surrogate is suing them. They diminished her humanity and the gift she was giving them.
Not everyone behaves that way. Nate and Jeremiah were very respectful of their surrogate. When she went into the hospital with complications they were worried about their son but they also genuinely worried about her health and safety also. They kept the delivery private as it should be.
There will always be jerks in the world. As long as women are free to choose to be a surrogate or for that matter a prostitute and are not forced into it then we are a long way away from the handmaid's tale becoming reality. When we keep these things shadowy and illegal because they are tabboo we set up an environment where the vulnerable are exploited.
I'm grateful to live in a time where I can choose to have kids or not, work or not, get an advanced degree if I want, travel without a companion to keep me safe. Men take for granted the freedom they are granted by the luck of their gender. Even our laws are skewed in their favor hence why we prosecute the prostitutes rather than the John.
Conservatives like Ross miss the point in the feminist movement. We want the freedom to live our lives as we see fit and as long as we're making the choice ourselves and are not being forced into them who are you to judge. Birth control and the #metoo movement are extensions of the desire for freedom of choice without harassment.
2
Ross makes a good point. We might say that surrogacy is the ultimate example of what Marx called the alienation of labor.
1
This generalized statement kills your whole argument: "Whenever there’s a dispute within feminism about a particular social change or technological possibility, you should bet on the side that takes a more consumerist view of human flourishing." Surrogates have a choice which would not have existed without feminism. And yes, it causes some other problems.
1
Most feminists are skeptical and questioning of surrogacy, though there is strong evidence that the US model is actually safer for women than the current underground system of surrogacy.
I'm not sure the renting the womb out bit is quite the moral ground you want to stand on since that is what all men do. They borrow a womb often with little consideration for the person who has it even if there are terms like marriage thrown around etc.
5
So Mr. Douhat believes that paying a woman to carry a baby is demeaning to her, but forcing her to carry a baby that she unintentionally conceived is not dehumanizing. I fail to see why wealthier families adopting the children of mothers who couldn't afford to keep them is any less of a manifestation of ruthless capitalism than paying someone to carry a child. Or care for the child while being separated from their own.
Unlike paying for organs, which could result in them being procured in very dubious ways, paying women to carry other people's fetuses is not something that can happen without a woman's consent. The practice should be regulated, and perhaps restricted to third party eggs, but there's no reason it should not be viewed as an altruistic act much the way we like to portray adoption.
4
Who woke up this morning wondering what advice Ross Douthat had for feminists? Anyone?
12
What is missing from this piece (and a lot of the comments) is the on-the-ground reality of why couples seek surrogacy in the first place. Most parents would much prefer to have their children 'the old fashioned way' but alas, young or old, the body doesn't always do exactly what it's supposed to - and many of us didn't find our spouse until later in life (and were unwilling to have a child out of wedlock). Surrogacy is often a last-resort option for women who are biologically incapable of carrying a child to term but whom very much desire to create a family (as one would hope a Christian conservative would encourage, given the pro-ported 'focus on families').
One can appreciate the expense of this option (here's hoping for a future where these incredible reproductive technologies aren't only an avenue for the financially secure), but looked at another way, it's an incredibly mutually-benefical and heart-warming arrangement: A woman voluntarily registers and selects a couple to assist, receives substantial compensation to support her own family, and the infertile among us have a fighting chance to also experience the 'miracle of life'.
We should be cheering for ways in which to HELP those who experience infertility. Aren't strong families and stable communities the very foundation of the Christian values Douthat prosethetizes from these very pages weekly?
4
Is the question whether the surrogate be paid for her services, or whether surrogacy be allowed at all? Mr. Douthat seems to confuse these questions.
The latter question is debatable on philosophical and moral grounds as Mr. Douthat claims, but morals are personal choices guaranteed by the first amendment. It is shaky emotional ground for all the parties involved, however, and should be entered into cautiously, if at all.
The first question is more clear cut. Pregnancy and childbirth are not only difficult under the best of scenarios, but can present serious risks to a woman's health and life. While it would be a woman's choice to provide such a service voluntarily, that would be extremely generous. If she were not recompensed monetarily, then how?
2
It's difficult for me to tell if Douthat sincerely wishes to find common ground with feminists or just pretend to do so while really making the case they naively have been duped by their capitalist masters. If the former, why pepper the column with cheap shots that (at least to my ear) sound so insincere? For example, rather than gratuitously refering to "this age of #MeToo inquisitions" and then adding he means the term in a good way, Douthat could have just referred to the #MeToo movement. (Maybe for a future column Douthat can find a use of "holocaust" in a good way.) If Douthat is trying to be sincere, it's too bad he can't help but use rhetoric which seems to have an undercurrent of hostility. Hardly a good way to engage across the divide IMHO.
5
Individual Liberty means that you have no right to tell someone else how to live unless it is causing you actual harm.......
1
Morality has always been relative.
"What is hateful to you, don’t do to another." is not the same as "do unto others as you would have them do unto you"...
1
You have to be a cruel person to humiliate a surrogate and especially the surrogate who carries your baby. Abusing people sells on Bravo. If what Alexandra Trent says is true, this case deserves more attention. Trent says that she did not agree to filming the birth. She says that she was filmed from behind a curtain and that both she and her doctor were unaware. Lewis said on the show, “If I was a surrogate, and I had known there was going to be an audience, I probably would have waxed. And that was the shocking part for Gage. I don’t think Gage had ever seen a vagina, let alone one that big.” Why would he humiliate her like that? Why would the producers allow it? Why would Bravo air it? Because saying mean and cruel things is what most of the Bravo shows are all about. They humiliate other people for laughs. I’m glad she’s suing.
12
It is men like Ronald Reagan, the Koch brothers, Donald Trump (and the Christian leaders who have apologized for his corruption), and the leaders of the GOP who have made wealth and power their gods. Margaret Thatcher is the only woman I can think of who might be included.
So: men are the apostles of predatory capitalism, and men have much more power to make the rest of us live in a world that is built for the rich and exploitative to the poor. But somehow it is feminism that is a handmaiden of capitalism?
The feminists Douthat disparages as "cultural Marxist" feminism have been speaking out against the turn to unfettered, dehumanizing capitalism ever since the Reagan-Thatcher era started down this disastrous path. Women have been calling for universal healthcare, better public education, protections for "third-world" women who are exploited by global corporations––as their voices have been ignored by powerful men, many of whom proclaim themselves religious.
6
We have filled the void left by moving away from traditional values ( many of them toxic and particularly anti-women) with consumerism and amoral capitalism. I sincerely hopes something more worthy takes over. Civilizations have been built on sacrifices of the voiceless many ( women, slaves, untouchables etc). Now that these traditional underclasses are are not available to exploit in western societies we have the new underclass-the poorer sections of society.
When will we all reach a collective consciousness where we all are prepared to contribute our fair share of sacrifice so all call live in peace and prosperity?
7
I like Ross’s phrase, conservatism’s “2 cheers for capitalism.” Conservatism gives 2 cheers to all its different poles—libertarianism, social values, family values, the free market, nationalism, etc. Unlike liberals, who are generally propelled by the forward momentum of progress, conservatives have to reconcile and balance contending, often contrary, ideas, and liberals are doing their job reminding us conservatives of our inconsistencies. But they are often wrong when they simply dismiss us as hypocrites.
2
Dear Ross, Feminists teach girls to be somebodies, not to be somebody's. I know the church has a difficult time grappling with this truth since it runs contrary to Christian belief that women purpose as the handmaiden of men. I am a feminist in a thirty five year marriage. My husband may be the head of this house, but I am his neck. He can't move in any direction without my cooperation. Both of us are deliriously happy with this arrangement. We raised our daughter to be self sufficient, self confident and educated before she married and had children. I gave her birth control orally. I told her under no circumstances would we raise or help her raise any children before her degree and marriage. She and her husband of eight years are deliriously happy, gainfully employed and now feel they are ready for children. I'm a liberal feminist or as my Trump Christians neighbors refer to me; a heathen.
8
Hahahaha! Jordan from Portchester, "mansplanation" indeed.... Mr. Douthat, I don't often (if ever) agree with what you write, but I am thankful that the NYT offers a thoughtful - and respectful - counterpoint to the echo chamber I am otherwise prone to bouncing around in. Whether it comes from a woman or a man, feminist argument (of which I am a devotee) was never meant to simply celebrate each and every action a woman engaged in: it means the freedom for women to engage in whichever behaviour they wish and have the resultant societal debate on its contributive value to society, just as men have always been afforded. Men AND women AND all other gender constructs together, neither in and of themselves monolithic groups, must build the society we wish to have. Along the way, we must converse and discuss and debate those corollaries BEYOND established basic human rights, if for no other reason than none of us, 'feminists' or 'conservatives', 'liberals' or 'libertarians' or what-have-you, can entirely agree on which are "right" or "wrong," "beneficial" or "destructive." This, among many others, is an argument for the preservation of the humanities.
3
Odd how infrequently Ross applies the same logic to the environment, tax policy, and a host of other issues.
5
Money and money alone talks in the circles where it matters and for those of use w/o the do re mi, too bad sucka! Take a hike.
1
What's the British phrase? "You got the wrong end of the stick"?
The changes you allude to aren't about capitalism although you did mention what they are about- libertarianism. The "liberal" society you often reference is in a broad sense about maximizing individual freedom and choices and minimizing state (and religious) interference in the instantiation of those choices when they are agreeable to the parties involved. Surrogacy, prostitution and sex robots are just examples of allowing individuals the freedom to enter contracts when they are beneficial to all of the principles. The "Flipping Out" suit is about one side violating implied terms of the contract and being sued for breach.
This isn't an issue of "capitalism" but of permitting consenting and competent adults to do what they think is in their best interest through contract. The change in feminist attitudes in the time between the surrogacy cases reflects that evolution of social mores.
6
I have been an outspoken feminist almost as long as Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, and for most of those years my primary issue was the rights of prostitutes, whom the movement changed to sex workers' rights to emphasize that prostitution, and any other form of sexuality in exchange for money is work.
I also engaged with other feminists in the early discussions of surrogacy, which seems to be a form of prostitution, but really is distinct since no sexual act, real or simulated, need be involved. It really has more to do with motherhood, and the nine months of pregnancy. It is a much more complicated issue than sex work, not least because of the bonding of the birth mother with the developing child. And also with the pressures on women to bear children (perhaps most vivid in the resistance to legal abortion and even to contraceptives).
For once Mr Douthat, I feel we are on the same page about women's bodies. Although I can speak from experience--I am a woman-- I gave birth.I honestly don't feel surrogacy is a positive for the woman who is carrying someone else's child. In fact I have no idea how a person can part with that child after the birth. I do think it's the ultimate in capitalistic exploitation. It's always the poor female who carries the child for the wealthier members of society.
I am a lifelong feminist and believe women should have the right to equal pay to raise their children and to feel respected in the workplace. Here's where we differ; I strongly believe women should have the choice of having their child.I gave birth to my son when I was 20 year old. I was lucky enough to finish college and support him. I had to work my son's entire childhood...luckily I taught, so I was able to have time with my child. Other women are not so lucky.
6
It is indeed possible to not bond with an unborn child and to therefore abort or put up for adoption. At least a surrogate mother can set contractual and payment terms for going through the trauma of pregnancy and childbirth - whereas 'birth mothers' receive nothing and are stigmatized.
As a psychologist in the United States for more than 30 years who has been interested in issues around fertility and the new technologies, I find it sad that only wealthy patients can afford IVF, donor eggs, surrogacy, and many other fertility procedures.
3
"At best, Christians may hope to build a counterculture, but in the wider landscape our ability to shape trends or resist them is at a historical low ebb."
Christians' influence could yet rise, if they stopped damning people and focused on saving and uplifting them instead.
Christianity's influence is on the wane because of its die-on-this-hill battle against abortion and feminism, and the resulting alliance with conservatives -- in contrast to Christians' historical position as progressives.
Evangelicals' opposition to abortion has morphed over time into an-ever more vehement opposition, not only to abortion, but to women's autonomy and sexuality. In the long term, that's obviously a losing proposition: Ireland, of all places, just made abortion legal. As evangelicals' influence continues to wane, they have starting clinging more desperately to any leader who they believe can save them from becoming utterly and totally irrelevant.
As a result, most conservative Christians are now in the awkward posture of supporting an administration which is cruelly separating children from their families and flirting with authoritarianism. They look on Trump as a savior from the horrible fate of civil rights for LGBT people and having to bake cakes for gay couples.
Perhaps if Christians positioned themselves as the champions of the downtrodden in society instead of allying with those stomping them down, they'd become influential again.
3
The Poor People's Campaign is being run by reverends.
Let's not paint all Christians with Pence's brush.
Just sayin' (I am not even Christian).
3
Are you familiar with the hashtag #NotAllMen and what it signifies?
Perhaps this is the equivalent: #NotAllChristians
No, not all. Just too many.
1
Rome is burning and you are spinning in circles about some issue you have made up in order to avoid seeing the flames. You will look back on these kinds of columns and be ashamed of your moral cowardice.
I almost expect your next column will be about "her emails!"
Nobody in their right mind is going to pay attention to what you say about feminism or women's rights, except to dismiss it.
Write about something you have actual expertise in, like conservatism, or GOP politics.
3
Really an amazing column - the points Douthat raises are serious and deserve far more sttention. A striking point for me is the fact that so many men are posting comments - many clearly off topic - and that there are so few women commenting. This addresses a serious womans’ issue.
6
Oh Mr. Douthat.
Trying out a new theory? Hoping against hope this version of controlling women's destiny will do the trick.
You make no sense. No sense at all.
6
Barbara, there are none so blind as those who will not see. The case makes great "sense" to those who understand the value of questioning the status quo. The status quo is never an endpoint.
3
Given the fact that the ERA, that old thing, has never come close to passing, you love to lay what you consider social ills at the feet of apparently empowered feminists. But the feminists of various types that you so relentlessly decry are not the ones making policy, nor are feminists a monolith. In terms of your reproductive handwringing, the schtick is wearing thin, and the contortions it must take to for you to basically argue that feminism would be more virtuous if it resisted capitalism are hard to imagine. Yet I somehow feel sure they involve an inversion of cranium and the end of the digestive system.
5
This is a very good column. This blue state liberal female Bernie voter agrees with you.
9
Of course, cuz slogan Sanders is anti choice.
Gee, you sound very much like the Pope you are so fond of deriding.
1
This may well be my favorite column of Ross's. The theme he speaks of here can be applied to almost any social justice movement- which is why any such movement must be staunchly anti-capitalist if it hopes to succeed. Otherwise, the promise of autonomy will always result in autonomy for the rich at the expense of the poor.
12
Yes, women everywhere should heed youe words, oh wise man. Without such mansplanation they would be rudderless.
7
The only way you can prevent women being exploited is eliminating gross inequality, and poverty. But a conservative like Ross Douthat won't even think of that. The rich would be worse off then, and that is something Ross can't bear.
2
Has Douthat written an article about the indignity of men using technology to get erections at later and later ages? If he did I missed it.
8
Adoptions from foreign countries like Russia, South Korea, Peru and China have dried up so the commodity market place of surrogate pregnancy has become more attractive to potential adoptive parents. My sarcastic side is now showing....We need an ongoing market quote for surrogate pregnancy costs and where to get them. Then if the foreign surrogacy quotes get into trade wars and tariffs, well the stock quotes may have a literal futures war. The name of this science reality show will be Baby Jail Mommas, just like the Teen Mama shows. And just wait until the foreign surrogate mothers want to come to the USA. And this is not the feminist car I drove in from the 1960's.
1
“I know that coming from a conservative columnist much of this reads like a long exercising in trolling.” Mr. Douthat wrote it anyways, maybe because he is well paid to write about anything.
Surrogacy has nothing to do with feminism but rather with prosperity driven entitlement. We do it because we can afford it. People spend more than 100.000 Dollars in several instances to buy themselves children that carry their genes. That money is enough to finance several families in Africa for decades and would open opportunities to have a decent education, an investment that would not stop giving. As long humanity produces a “surplus” of children who desperately need a better life with adoptive parents, surrogacy should be legally banned or socially shunned.
In that regard I agree with the author: capitalism endows members of our society to only care about themselves and to neglect the social good, like for example writing a meaningful column about the immoral separation of families at the border.
6
Being a thoughtful conservative brings you nothing but trouble these days. Most of those who are appalled by Trump will blame you for all that's wrong with the Republican Party and most of the MAGA folks will treat you as an enemy worse than the Liberals.
In our age of entrenched certainties, it is encouraging to see someone speak of his doubts and risk opprobrium.
5
"But the most serious form of cultural conservatism has always offered at most two cheers for capitalism, recognizing that its great material beneficence can coexist with dehumanizing cruelty, that its individualist logic can encourage a ruthless materialism unless curbed and checked and challenged by a moralistic vision."
You're kidding right? When has a capitalist ever acknowleged that materialism should ever be checked by moralisim? What a joke.
3
Capitalism needs to be checked by sensible regulations, not just a reliance on various religious moralities. Unchecked, we get what we've got -- rampant inequality. It isn't really about feminism or "Christian moralism" as if that's the only kind out there. Think bigger, please, and more inclusively.
6
How can conservatives and progressives jointly advance a human-centered culture, with human value and dignity at its core? Too often, conservative commitment to human dignity is contingent on their commitment to religious assumptions not shared by many progressives. Many conservatives seem to see "secular humanism" as a redundancy, but many progressives would never accept a humanism derived from theistic religious belief.
Can we achieve consensus on the meaning of "human dignity" across the political spectrum when our religious assumptions are so incompatible and lead to so many incompatible policy positions?
The very notion of capitalism is not good for this nation, as Investors cripple wages to earn dividends. Companies should avoid investment and pay workers living wages.
Just last week it was revealed minimum wage workers cannot even afford a two bedroom apartment. Affordability would end the despair that is forcing people on opioids.
The very notion of "gentrification" is truly a classist cleansing of neighborhoods, and that denies the egalitarianism that would eliminate homelessness, crime, and drug abuse.
So, thank you, Ross, for explaining that surrogate mothers are cheated and paid for birthing, resulting from cruel capitalism. It is time we avoid revolutionary struggle, but treating the poor as equals would avoid a revolution,
F.D. Roosevelt defused a Depression Revolt by creating the Civilian Conservation Corps, the WPA, and other national employment. It is time for New Deal programs.
6
This is a serious argument, but I think it is hollow at its core. You can't simply call for a feminist based morality in the sphere of reproduction. All that does is regulate women and their choices, without in any way addressing inequity or bias in the rest of our society, especially in the area of labor and employment, a status quo that, too often, makes surrogacy or even prostitution seem like the highest value activities a woman can engage in. Indeed, trying to enlist feminists to push the agenda of those who oppose feminism in every other way will only isolate "women's issues" as somehow tied inextricably to reproduction. Gestational surrogates deserve to be protected from exploitation, but that doesn't necessarily mean they need to be regulated out of existence "for their own good."
2
Thanks, Ross, for reminding us of the the more reassuring values surrounding childbirth—-motherhood, family, nature, life itself. Like so much else our progressive age is delivering all this up to the power politics of feminism, technology, soulless economics, careerism, personal convenience. My wife was both a successful professional and mother. At 72 she says, hands down, the latter has meant so much more to her that there is no comparison. I envy her her motherhood.
3
Quality, liberal education is far and away the best - and probably only - means for civilizing and humanizing a society.
Sadly, Douthat's Republicans have been systematically defunding and dismantling public education in America ever since Proposition 13 was adopted in California following Ronald Reagan's conservative administration.
Republicans, who always feared democracy, want an uninformed and disengaged electorate, a low-skill and low-wage labor force, and an obedient population amendable to plutocracy.
Keeping a population ignorant strips it of its humanity, hope and joy. Thanks to Douthat and other fake "conservatives," America is becoming the corporate dystopia that plutocrats bought for themselves.
Now, the Wall Street plutocrats merely need to get rid of the inconvenient dictator those ignorantly fearful masses installed in the White House. Just like the German industrialists so easily rid themselves of little Adolf?
2
Why is the Times still paying an writer who is vocally against women's bodily rights to write bad faith, concern trolling articles about what feminists ought to focus on?
4
I'm a hard-core leftist feminist and almost never agree with Ross but I think he's making an interesting and subtle point here. I'm not against surrogacy or IVF but I think it should be regulated as it is in most European countries. I'm not of the "lean in" white collar strain of feminism myself and find the renting of wombs or the purchasing of eggs from the young and poor to be morally questionable at best.
8
This has nothing to do with capitalism, it is about your bizarre obsession with the private parts of women and what they do with them. It's downright creepy.
7
It's articles like this one which remind me why I love Ross Douthat so much. Bravo, sir!
6
I don't think I have ever agreed with Ross Douthat on anything, but I agree with him on this. Surrogacy for profit should be made illegal for the same reason that we don't allow people to sell their organs. Poor and lower middle class women are being exploited so that wealthier people can have babies. This is outrageous.
21
Using the law to cut off people's right to make their own choices doesn't uphold human dignity. It destroys dignity. There is nothing dignity-promoting about putting women in handcuffs for selling sex. Banning prostitution doesn't make it go away, it just shoves its practitioners to the margins of society and makes them easy prey for exploitative pimps and corrupt cops. Nothing whatsoever about that promotes the dignity of women. Just because many, and likely most, women, myself included, find the idea of selling sex gross and degrading doesn't mean all women see it that way. I support the right of adults to sell sex if they so choose, without fear of being arrested, precisely because I favor human dignity.
2
Right on as usual Ross.
3
"Whenever there’s a dispute within feminism about a particular social change or technological possibility, you should bet on the side that takes a more consumerist view of human flourishing, a more market-oriented view of what it means to defend the rights and happiness of women."
Well i'll take that over forcing women who are unqualified to meet any humanistic definition of effective loving parenting: Therebye ontinuing the mass production of future sad adults (unfulfilled and left behind)
The bronze age conservatives - men who rely on a moral code adopted by nomads two thousand years ago (think our good christian AG -lol and his stance re those sad children; Do not care about the potential of a newborn -They are just counting souls for their vault of sin and redemption.
The same ghouls to whom women are just living placentas waiting in the wings for more live sperm.
2
What a crock. All you ever do is "defend the logic of capitalism," Ross. I knew you were a hypocrite, but this is a new low.
5
If you truly think that Ross has until now been just another cheerleader for capitalism, it's clear you haven't been reading his columns very closely, or at all...
5
The surrogate mother should have more rights with respect to the child.
3
Not a bad column, Ross. I, too, dislike the strain of feminism that, in ignoring class issues and underpinnings, often appears to be nothing more than an upscale lifestyle choice. But I would hardly blame surrogacy on women. Per your own example, many using this practice are gay men. I suspect that those in possession of their own wombs are less comfortable "renting" them....
5
You certainly brought up a hugely important topic. We're deeply lost as a society, in my opinion, and stand for nothing but individual rights and consumer choice. And we're deeply out of touch with the earth. It's a backdrop to our egos. It's no accident that we're headed toward environmental catastrophe.
11
I was in law school shortly after the Baby M case. The case was discussed in class only to illustrate contract principles. There was no wider lens, no legal or moral imagination about any humanistic implications. Indeed, in the logic of the free-market professor, to allow Whitehead to abrogate her surrogacy contract would render one guilty of paternalism (the highest crime in neolibertarian, anti-nanny state thought), because it would mean that the law would not recognize a contracting woman as fully responsible for her choices.
Even more shocking to me than the crimped moral imagination of the professor was the apparent lack of interest among the ostensibly liberal students. Discussing my moral qualms about the case after class with a feminist friend, she cautioned me "shhh, I know but we don't that to be used against gay and lesbian parenting." I had thought that liberalism meant sticking up for human dignity against the machine, as postwar anti-totalitarian lessons had taught, but in this I was hopelessly dated.
And so this business has continued all these years based on shared intense aligned interests of a wing of feminism/lgbt activism and the highly profitable fertility industry, without in my opinion ever a full airing of moral issues. Among other things, a classic case of what political scientists recognize as the public interest paradox: narrowly but intensely held minority positions tend to trump the broader but less passionately held public interest.
5
The author states...."For most conservatives this reforming vision is assumed to be religious — the Christian moralism that attacked the vicious capitalism of slavers and gentled the ruthless capitalism of robber barons and sustained nonmarket institutions like the family and the church across the long ascent of global wealth." While a minority of the religious fought slavery, a majority, especially in the south used their religion to justify it. And give me one example of when religion "gentled the ruthless capitalism" of robber barons or any other capitalist force in this country. The author makes a broad, sweeping statement and then rushes on, hoping I suppose, we won't notice, but "Wait....what? No."
3
There probably came a time in Ross' young life when he decided not to become a priest and felt he could do more harm as a columnist for a major newspaper. I wish Ross would not be so quiet about the harm done to children not in the womb but who may be separated from their families for some time. How the administration is going to reunite very young children with parents who only god knows where they are. Talk to us Ross!
5
" well, it’s their body and their money and their choice." This has replaced the Pledge of Allegiance as the primordial value for every American. This seems to me to be what makes any organized effort to counteract social problems (bias, economic need, addiction, mental attrition) superficial and even quaint. It is what causes nightly news broadcasts to feel forced to end each program with some bite of sentimental hogwash. As long as the primary American value is "my body, my money and my choice" our society - which requires public interaction - can only get worse. Neither political party really makes a difference.
2
There are some legitimate arguments here about surrogacy and the way it is handled, and there are definitely moral and ethical issues here. Is a surrogate mom a victim or someone who gets paid for carrying other people's babies? I don't think feminists have come down on the side of capitalists or capitalism, I think they understand the problems with surrogacy, but also understand that surrogacy can be an important service to people who can't conceive/or the woman carry a baby. More importantly, the problem is that once you start deciding what is right for someone else to do with their body, it goes well beyond that, and it does come down often to issues of religious morality. The religious have no problem with fashion models, who basically are making money using their body to sell an image, yet they insist that someone doesn't have the right to use their body sexually to make money, often claiming 'exploitation'..yet have these people ever read about what the reality of modelling is for a lot of women who aren't the single name superstars? The problem is that the religious and conservatives say "ban it", not because they care about the women, but because of their religious beliefs.
The real answer as with everything is that if a practice leads to exploitation, find a way to take that out of the picture. If women who are surrogates are exploited, find ways to give them tools to protect themselves, no different than a sex worker or a model.
3
Great comment. As I have explained to my daughter, it won't take long for any law on surrogacy to be enforced mostly against surrogates, the way laws on prostitution are almost always enforced against the workers themselves, even when they are underage.
Such an interesting and thought-provoking article. I really appreciate it.
3
I'm a liberal and a feminist and completely opposed to surrogacy, especially when there is a major power imbalance such as wealthy westerners using poor women in other countries as their incubators. It is a morally abhorrent practice.
20
Just curious what Roth can say about tax cuts and job growth, or the need to regulate toxic manure lagoons, or something about our society. Would he abandon conservatism for pragmatism? Or is he as clueless about the real world as he is about these social issues.
1
So which is it....a woman has a right to choose what she wishes with her own body (as in the case of abortion) or she doesn't (as in the case of preventing her from making a buck by being a surrogate)?
2
it's a bit daft as a premise for an article though, since it totally fails to deal with the basic fact that this acceptance of paid for surrogacy is uniquely American, along with mass shoot-outs in schools, and taking the scriptural instruction to "suffer little children, to come unto me".
Clearly elsewhere in the word, the "legal logic of abortions" did not lead in this direction. Neither did liberal feminism, nor in vitro or other bio-technological advances, nor advances in gay rights.
This is an American phenomena not a feminist one, capitalist, consumerist or otherwise.
2
Assigned roles for humans has been evolving significantly for many years now - back to the early 1900s.
With changes in industry comes changes in society and social roles & behavior.
WWII gave women opportunities to do more then their assigned roles per body function and work in roles outside of then social norms.
Many women want to experience physical child birth & women will continue to physically give birth no matter what options are available if they are unable or if the couple in the relationship cannot procreate children on their own.
Not all Women & MEN want children or want to be parents. That is not a cause for family destruction. Destroying families sounds like extremist code for social actions men don't like or the LGBT community or women who can't or will not be controlled by men.
Women are no longer under the control of MEN or the CHURCH.
We are no longer the individual man's or society's property that can be "sold" in marriage or forced to give birth or responsible for your masculinity or lack of manhood.
The tables have turned. Women do not have to settle for less or make do, men's lack of a social life or intimacy is not our responsibility.
Ignorance generates fear then generates anger followed by hate - i.e. our current political landscape.
Not all "feminists" are the stereotypical white, men hating, unshaven or trolls and don't assume we want to "destroy" in order to bring EQUALITY for all HUMANS in the world.
Only a supposed "intellectual" like Douthat could construe surrogacy as primarily a feminist capitulation to capitalism.
Capitalism is, at best, incidental to the many powerful and complex aspects of surrogacy. I suppose Douthat believes that when women use birth control, it is primarily a surrender to free markets, since they pay for it (or, in the old, better world, insurance paid). Or when a family adopts an other-abled child from a repressive regime, they are primarily endorsing free market capitalism, as they do indeed pay a fee.
To a hammer, every problem is nail. To a capitalist, every human transaction is capitalism.
2
Where Incells see sex as a right denied to them by an oppressive female class, sex is instead a function and expression of our biology, however we choose, or not, to express it, and our sexual identity, whether expressed for for reproduction or in relationship, is expressed within the context of community. The examples given by Mr. Douthat demonstrate the polls of potentially exploitive behaviors in the surrogacy process, but his argument is essentially reductive in regard to the impact of feminism on this question. Market based solutions that ignore community standards, and that fail to take into account the deleterious impact of market-based behavior on the wider community, should be of course censured. But achieving personal agency and taking individual responsibility for their bodies were founding goals of feminism, and they should still be the only principles required when making reproductive decisions about surrogacy.
2
Surrogacy for medical need should be distinguished from surrogacy for purely elective reasons. By definition, someone's mother (surrogates should not be nulliparous) could die carrying a pregnancy for a third party. Unfortunately, our free and capitalistic society has expanded the use of gestational carriers beyond what many would consider morally, or at least ethically, acceptable. There are guidelines issued by the relevant medical societies. Those who do not follow those guidelines should be publically identified as well as sanctioned.
1
If the ability of conservative Christians to "shape trends or resist them" is in fact at an all-time low, they have only themselves to blame. By allying themselves with the Republican Party since the days of Ronald Reagan, culminating in their unapologetic embrace of Donald Trump, they abandoned any pretense that they genuinely cared about the moral condition of the country (forget niceties like racial justice and equality) rather than the acquisition and exercise of raw political power. Young people searching for institutions in which they can explore and exercise their faith (not to mention liberal Christians like me who see their churches as platforms from which to work for social justice, not impose their beliefs on others with the help of Republican legislators) know hypocrisy when they it.
Christianity's loss of cultural power has been underway for so, so very long, the causes of that loss are so many and varied, and its reasons so, so much deeper than the Christian right's embrace of the GOP.
This is just another example of how free market capitalism eventually erodes all cultural rules that get in its way. Restrictions on gambling, interest rates, liquor sales, etc. all eventually get pared away in the soulless, cultureless, pursuit of profit.
3
"Something needs to pull our society back from its dehumanizing and commodifying drift."
That "something" is available if we all vote DEM this fall and years to come. We will get back on the right track when we get rid of the dehumanizing influence of a GOP that splits up families and locks kids in cages to score political points with its racist followers.
Otherwise this is just another Ross "Dark Ages" Douthat column decrying change and progress.
4
"sympathetic sort of unhappy celibate"
FYI: celibacy is the total lack of sx with anyone or anything including masturbation or the desire for the act with anyone or anything including blow up dolls, mechanical robots, etc. or masturbation.
SX with a blow up doll, mechanical robot, etc. is still sex it is still sex.
This makes the Baby M case sound like slavery, in which she sold her child and was unable to cancel the deal. In reality, she was carrying his child, and the fight was a traditional custody issue, just the same as if they'd been divorced during pregnancy, with a pre-existing consensual custody agreement in place that the court enforced.
With that false start, Douthat launches off into what he characterizes as the slave-like sale of women. Somehow he morphs that into concern for robots, perhaps just because somebody has sex.
Rolling back the excesses of capitalism is an idea I value, but I don't expect to see it from anything Douthat promotes. Pope Leo XIII he isn't.
We are not told that women's professional lives are more valuable than their other lives. We are told that they get to make that choice for themselves, one by one, year by year, as their own free choice. Douthat pretends to honor freedom, but such free choice isn't his concept of freedom.
He also mentions incels. They are an easy target today. However, I think their problem isn't what they say it is, what Douthat seems to agree. It isn't sex. It is crippled personalities. It is young men who can't relate to other people. They don't know how. They don't know because they don't do it. It takes practice, and they've isolated themselves.
The cure would horrify Douthat -- more free time spent in mixed company, enjoying real freedom. Get away from isolating technology, and ideology too.
3
Actually Mark, the surrogate mother of the Baby M case was the biological mother - this woman was artificially inseminated using the man's sperm because his wife was unable to conceive. She entered a contract with this husband and wife agreeing to give up the baby in exchange for money. After giving birth to her daughter, she changed her mind but the courts forced her to adhere to the contract and give up her (biological) child to the biological father and his wife.
‘Somehow he morphs into concern for robots. Perhaps because somebody has sex.’
Perfect! Conservative ‘morality’ in a nutshell.
2
Sallie -- My point is that the other person was the actual biological father, the sperm donor. That makes it a custody case between two biological parents, not just sale of a baby as Douthat termed it.
Interesting thought about conservatives having a jaundiced eye towards capitalism, that is an interesting topic. For example, your own faith, Ross, had a very weak record when it came to slavery and in slave holding states that had a lot of Catholics (Maryland, Louisiana) the church was often part of the power structure around slavery; and the record of mainstream protestants wasn't much better, the Episcopalians, Presbytyrians and Methodists weren't exactly abolutionist, any protest was tepid. It was the quakers and unitarians and congregationalists that made up the abolitionists.
Likewise, when it came to issues like labor rights and child labor, those same mainstream churches, including the RC, sided with capitalism most of the time, arguing that workers, children or adults, and their relationship was between them and God, religious figures argued that banning child labor was a sin. The RC was against evolution bc it could be used to justify the rich being 'special' (social darwinism) that of course happened.
Sadly, though, religious conservatives in their rush to embrace the GOP and their anti abortion/anti gay stand, embraced Ayn Rand as well and the gospel of the rich and big business, when was the last time, Ross, the church threatened to excommunicate Paul Ryan for pushing Ayn Rand like laws?
11
If one can use a dildo, why not a sex-robot. I don't see anything wrong about a surrogate for pay either. Supporting VoiceofReason.
1
Because rich women are using the bodies of poor women. How many rich housewives are offering up their uteruses for $30,000?
1
How many rich women are climbing utility poles on Christmas day to get triple overtime? How many rich women are working in daycare centers or as nannies or as home nursing assistants?
1
Interestingly, the show that Mr. Douthat references portrayed, self-consciously and poignantly, the issues of commercial surrogacy. And speaking of surrogacy, unlike that particular episode of the show, with a female showrunner and writers, Mr. Douthat chooses to write about this issue as a surrogate for a greater political and cultural war using those same tired old terms and categories. Perhaps it is time to hear from women about this issue which, although is not exclusive to, is particular to women. Perhaps they would not choose to couch it in terms of economic theories and political power but the personal and even sacred dimensions touching the individual parties, both the benefits and the costs, as the writers of the "Handmaid's Tale" chose to do. After all, isn't that what matters in the end?
5
Commerce involves law and contracts.
Not all contracts are enforceable. Murder for hire and indentured servitude are examples. (And if analogies just occurred to you there are probably other analogies that work the other way.) I understand it used to be easier to convince a court to refuse to enforce an arbitration clause or a covenant not to compete. Some contracts, like insurance, are heavily regulated. Sometimes contracts have been strictly construed against the party that was in the stronger bargaining position.
But the freedom to contract is also important. There have been times when “liberty of contract” was considered so important that it was constitutionally protected by the courts under the due process clause to the extent that laws protecting the well-being of people in the workplace were once struck down on the grounds that those laws interfered with the freedom to contract.
So this is going to remain complicated and uncertain. Laws and customs interrelate. Advocate for change in one area and one might face corresponding changes that one disfavors. Advocate for freedom and one might encounter a resulting situation where one would benefit from regulation. Advocate for regulation and one might encounter a resulting situation where one would prefer freedom.
Our ability to reasonably work through complexities like this seems to be at a low ebb right now.
4
It is not just feminism but the gamut of entire American society that cedes morality in the face of capitalism. Tax cuts for the rich and budget cuts for education. Welfare for corporations but not for the poor. Profits for polluters over safe water and air for people. The list goes on and on. Why single out feminists?
14
Why single out feminists? Because feminists are one of the favorite boogy-women of the right.
2
Glad to see this piece published. I consider myself a liberal feminist but I’ve become disgusted with how capitalist feminism has become. I am also troubled by the surrogacy industry. There are many gray areas. What if a woman cannot have a child and uses an altruistic surrogate, how do we reconcile with that? How do we reconcile with the misogyny, contempt and lack of gratitude with which Lewis and Edwards, and certainly other couples in their position, view women’s bodies and birth? I am most disturbed by “social surrogacy,” when women don’t want to go through the inconvenience of being pregnant, “getting fat,” “sacrificing their career,” so they just hire up a womb to do it for them, before even making any attempt to get pregnant in the first place. Where mainstream feminism went wrong is it’s ended up just reinforcing all these dark aspects of capitalism, rather than breaking down the interconnected web of oppression that sexism, racism, class and inequality reinforce through capitalism. The Left can be just as dark as the Right; on the Left we preach diversity and opportunity but we still support our own systems of oppression, we just reconcile them through liberal consumerism, where the only acceptable way to express an actual moral / ethical platform is through our purchasing habits.
9
Liz, I think part of the problem may be that many elite feminists - those who write columns and successful books- probably have never met a surrogate, or thought about the desperate financial conditions that lead someone to become a surrogate.
Too many just look at the smiling faces of the Elton Johns and "Flipping Out" couples and don't think of the women who had to go through 9 months of pregnancy and give birth (which is no picnic by the way!).
And I agree with you that the disrespect the gay couple from "Flipping Out" showed this woman is repugnant.
I don't know whether American feminists as a rule support for-pay surrogacy, but if they do, they should be ashamed of themselves.
5
Yet again, a social conservative professes sympathy with a liberal cause to encourage society to adopt *surprise, surprise* more socially-conservative positions on the developing issues. Sure, its poorer rather than more affluent women that offer themselves for surrogacy....just like its poorer rather than more affluent women that offer themselves as restaurant servers, electricians, plumbers, etc. The underlying assumption that surrogates are somehow being "commoditized" in a way that other laborers aren't grows directly out of the traditional Judeo-Christian "family values" that has always sought to control women's sexual and reproductive freedom. The surrogate (or, for that matter, the prostitute or stripper) is only dehumanized in the process because of those old, outdated preconceived notions restricting women to the roles of wife and mother. If you reject the notion that women's sexual and reproductive lives must be contained entirely within the traditional nuclear family and heterosexual marriage, and accept the idea that decent, honest women can engage in such things as surrogacy, then Douthat's big "concern" for feminism and surrogacy evaporates. If Douthat wants to do the liberal or feminist cause some good, he'd be better served lending his support to real family values like helping people form family units (ie: gay marriage), and be better parents (ie: increased minimum wage, expanded access to health care, and mandatory paid family leave laws).
15
Its always interesting to see a conservative float the "capitalism is dangerous" balloon and then pull back with the tacit assumption that it is impossible to conceive of a non-capitalist alternative. It is impossible because no one but a conservative is so blind that they cannot see the obvious alternatives that we should be following. When conservative go beyond the bland notion that there "might" be something wrong and come down with true understandings that the rest of us have had for generations then I will take these trite excursions of rhetoric a little more seriously. But since Mr. Douthat did not hint at the obvious, let me sneak some of it in:
Legal reforms that eliminate the preposterous tyranny of corporate personhood, minimum wages that represent a living wage and that are pegged to the inflation rate, free four year college education for all at state universities, breakup the banks that hold monopoly power over government, government focus on demand side economics, and confiscatory tax rates for the uber rich. These are a few simple solutions to get the ball rolling. One good point to consider is that they have all been successfully used before to the benefit of society proving that we can do everyone of them without adding a tax burden on anyone (except the rich criminal class which must be brought to justice.). These suggestions are not socialism, or communism, they are all good old fashioned capitalism that once had the blessing of conservatives everywhere.
10
Douthat seems to take a horrible surrogacy story and run with it to somewhat absurd conclusions.
Douthat may believe he knows best, but it is not for one person to decide for others what goals (capitalistic or otherwise) they will pursue or what their communal role is to be. Further, Douthat does not introduce any limiting principle on most of his statements. Take, for instance, his assertion that "substitutes for intercourse are bad and deadly and dehumanizing." That covers far more than his introductory comment on robots and strays deep into puritanical territory.
Douthat's critique of IUDs is similarly strange. Why would he be upset that IUDs give women the option of foregoing childbirth to pursue whatever goal they wish to pursue? He seems to feel their lives would be more meaningful pursuing a communal (read: domestic) life, but what business is that of his, what does it have to do with IUDs? Even if IUDs didn't exist a woman could use other contraception, abortion or abstinence to avoid child birth.
"Intercourse" is not the only acceptable outlet for sexual desires. That's just insane. Douthat's further attempts to make reproductive technologies into some sinister plot against women are only rational if one accepts his all but expressly stated premise that they'd be better off raising children (which I, at least, do not). I might suggest that Douthat would be happier as a deep sea fisherman. What of it?
5
Readers, so many great comments today, to address this weak column-- by Mr. Douthat, with whom I rarely agree, but usually can appreciate for expressions of another point of view. Little to add except this. The second to last paragraph is concerning to me, as a feminist, starting with this line"...it is a grave mistake for feminists to assume that because the moralism of the past was patriarchal and sexist..." Ross is no feminist (though it IS possible for a man to be one) and thus I question his ability to advise those who are, as to appropriate and logical next steps for a movement which has moved slowly, with great resistance and push-back, and many detours along the way-- throughout our history. Frankly I do not think his central core allows him to opine about feminism in either the macro, or the micro as he did in this column. I for one do not need him to scold us as to what our "mistakes" are.
6
I think he is right to question why so many feminists are okay with poor women selling their bodies.
Lectures on feminism from a Republican.
Oxymoronic.
The issue has always been and still is that a woman has the right to control her own body.
That's what feminism is.
Any other alternative is not.
Douthat has always opposed feminism.
This column is no change.
14
Ross associates abortion with feminism, but abortion exists in all societies and in all times, so it has only a small relationship to feminism. Feminists brought abortion out of the shadows. The numbers, however, are nearly the same, if one uses a serious data analysis that factors in D&Cs that were the way abortion hid in the pre Roe v Wade world.
8
He might remember the days of coat-hanger and backroom abortions, often botched, expensive and difficult.
For true spirituality, this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOgFZfRVaww
[Imagine, John Lennon]
Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people living for today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people living life in peace
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people sharing all the world
You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will live as one
2
"I suspect enlightened liberal opinion will end up welcoming them. "
Scholars of such things can probably trace so-called liberal opinion from decade to decade. As such things evolve, are we to understand that 'Liberals' persist but their opinions change or do we identify 'Liberals' based on their 'Liberal opinions' which have a life of their own? We agree on 'Left Turns on Arrow Only' and 'Right Turns on Red.' But to we know what the essence of being a Rightist or Leftist is? If so they can be identified even as they flip and flop from one side of an issue to another as fashion dictates. Of course, ideologues believe that their beliefs are based on bed-rock principles and that people of sense will believe the same reasonable things as long as there are reasonable people.
They and their ilk are a curse. They are slaves to the fashions of their tribes and are eager to kill in service of their ideals. Today's Rightists long for the glories of WWII and agitate for the nationalism that will bring its sequel. I suggest that Ross renounce ideology and learn radiative heat transfer, fluid mechanics and thermodynamics. Then he will know that the future of our ideology-besotted species depends on avoiding the worst outcomes of climate change rather than our style of begetting.
Let the contemplation of reality be our default mode of thinking and musing on ideology be the pastime of imprisoned arsonists.
4
Excellent suggestion! Well put:
"know that the future of our ideology-besotted species depends on avoiding the worst outcomes of climate change rather than our style of begetting.
"Let the contemplation of reality be our default mode of thinking"
1
I guess Douthat thinks it’s impossible that people eventually accepted surrogate motherhood because they realized the alarms about it were overstated and its benefits outweighed its detriments. And that capitalism had little or nothing to do with its acceptance. I think the same could be said for gay marriage, young people living together before marriage, and even the legalization of marijuana, though capitalism almost certainly influenced the latter. I guess I’m also curious about what he meant by referring to the #MeToo movement as the Inquisition, but “in a good way.” Does he think the Inquisition was in any way, shape, or form, “good”?
8
Or Frank, maybe people decided that surrogacy was okay because we never took the time to think about the women who become surrogates and why - usually due to financial desperation. we only see the happy (wealthy) couple who now have a beautiful baby.
1
For tens of thousands of years, humans have been evolving ways to manage themselves and their societies. The goals have been less chaos, less "raping, pillaging and burning", more peace and harmony and, always, the creation of environments in which children could grow to adults less threatened, more balanced, potentially happier.
We are, at base, uncivilized. We live short lives with disease, hunger and loneliness abundantly available. All human perception, aside from intellectual projection, begins and ends with our own skin. All the world consists of barging strangers, unless we make it otherwise through a nurtured sense of larger community and some varying degree of caring.
Through relentless pursuit of science, we now have the ability to fracture the arrangements built on biological realities. Of course, hiring women to bear the babies of others is a form of exploitation. All about us, there are many other forms of these practices and we accept them because we run our lives based on money. We worship it. In most cases, it is only when the exploitation becomes grossly and obviously unfair do we even notice it, like at present with the govt. mandated kidnapping of children from their parents.
We have to carefully consider each of the new arrangements being wrought. Instead, we just roll along, hoping for the best, but knowing in our hearts and minds that the best will not come on its own.
5
This 1980's style feminist agrees wholeheartedly with Mr Douthat' s assessment of the feminist perspective on selling woman's bodies. In 1980's I would have depended on my religious morals to support these views, but I have evolved into a secular humanist, and still feel the same way. And Christianity as it is now expressed in the US is no moral compass. In the last election the Religious Right threw morals out the window in order to get power. (Some have told me "God works in mysterious ways. Trump would not have won the election if God did not want it!!!) We are going to have to create the moral foundation from the ruins we now have.
10
The commodifying drift of society begins with its economic structure. As long as we are sellers of our labor, our ideas, and our images and consumers of the world around us, all mediated by money, commodification rules. Religion is always torn between attacking existing society and serving to maintain its authority, and usually winds up attacking certain aspects of society while supporting the powers that be in general. So the Church attacks divorce while preventing abused women from using the law to gain relief, and preaches against sex outside of marriage while protecting its own pederasts.
A true moral vision has to be willing to take on any authority, including the state, the dominant forms of economics, and the authority of religious institutions and their (received interpretations of) sacred texts. This is a dangerous thing to do, and has often gone astray and wound up serving other powers; not doing it is also dangerous in the same and other ways. If we give moral power to tradition, religion, or reason narrowly understood, we have chosen to do so, and this choice will be problematic if we understand it as final. Our increasing powers give us new problems -- world population, designing children, the personhood of robots -- that demand answers that can grow and change as they do.
7
So women should bear the burden, so to speak, of "communitarian alternatives" as opposed to market capitalism, regarding matters of sex and reproduction but when it comes to environmental stewardship, pay equity, income distribution and c-suite compensation, job protections, etc., communitarian alternatives don't apply? Republican hypocrisy at its best.
10
I stopped reading when I came to "my body, my choice" being described as taking feminism into a libertarian direction. Since when is having jurisdiction over your own self, your own guts, your own flesh and blood seen as a political statement? Mr. Douthat, you are way out of bounds.
12
Having control of your body and your life is a fundamental libertarian belief.
1
Only you, Douthat, would look at all the complicated Impulses and motivators in paid surrogacy and decide the critique should put *feminism*, of all things, front and center..?..
6
I heard there's maybe going to be some 2,300 children ready for adoption soon - already here in America and going cheap!
7
"Something needs to pull our society back from its dehumanizing and commodifying drift."
This article is offensive on so many levels. But mostly because Douthat's ostensible sympathy for women is actually cloaking his mentality about them (and not that well). Yeah Ross, place the blame of society's devolvement solely on the female quotient.
10
Ross jumps the Shark. AGAIN.
4
As a leftist-liberal gay man who has lovely gay friends lovingly raising kids born through surrogacy, I'm 100% with you. Lewis and Edward are supremely easy to dislike, just as my friends are supremely easy to like, but surrogacy remains a trade in women's bodies. There's no right to parenthood, and no right to buy it. We need to come up with social forms that let the involuntarily childless channel their parenting energies toward beneficial ends. (Such forms presumably existed and exist -- the church, for one, which isn't for me -- I suppose we need new ones.)
11
It's up to a woman whether she uses her body to make a living.
No one else has the right to make that decision for her.
6
Of course, Jerry!
But can't we BOTH affirm the woman's right to rent her womb AND discuss whether it is "right" to do so, morally? Are all discussions about right and wrong, and attempts to reason along these lines obliterated merely because we recognize that an individual has a right to do with her body as she pleases? Surely there are plenty of things you would allow someone to do which you would still argue is wrong to do.
Funny enough, your post reinforces the point of Douthat's piece.
Why is it that Christians like Mr. Douthat, assume that if you are not religious or a Christian you cannot be a moral and ethical person? Why is it so hard for them to accept that it is possible to be a good human being and treat others as one would like to be treated, without accepting the belief that all moral guidelines must come from some omnipotent all-powerful god? Mr. Douthat's examples of how Christian moralism ameliorated the "hard edges" of capitalism fail to include the fact that his fellow Christians used the Bible to buttress their arguments in favor of slavery. If Christianity is supposed to be the means by which "ruthless capitalism" is "curbed and checked", how does he explain the ruthlessness and hatefulness of many Christian fundamentalists who totally support Donald Trump's war on immigrants and their children and his worship of crass materialism? I have no such illusions that Christians will form a counterculture that will make the capitalist economic system more humane. If this were likely, it would have already happened during the 300+ years that Christians have inhabited North America.
21
Amen, "Dude"! From my agnostic, feminist view, I am a moral and ethical human being who believes in the sanctity not the human being. Ross, stop dlineating all liberals as whackos, just because they don't believe in your way of life.
2
Some Christians have long ago formed a counter-culture, such as the Sojourners' community, or the Catholic Workers' communities scattered across the US. The problem is moral inertia and the enormous destructive power of the capitalist system with its control of most media, which is grinding us down.
2
I read this Douthat column a bit differently. His conclusion seems to me to express the hope that secular feminism might improve on his Church's record of countering certain inhumane consequences of capitalism .
3
The real problem is that "female" is seen as different from "male" when "male" is the default, the standard. Males do not have to forgo fertility (IUDs, LARCs) in order to make a living (careers). So the real capitalist issue here that employers want a workforce that doesn't cut into profit margins by needing time off for children or healthcare for childbearing---men or their equivalent, women who don't become pregnant. In other words, as long as women's bodies are seen as capital liability, they will be treated like a capital asset whenever possible. Both are wrong of course.
7
The history of Christian, especially the Catholic, churches history with Slavery is not the best. If one includes the placement of children in monasteries and abbeys over centuries against the will of those men and women it actually is even worse.
The abolition of slavery certainly had people who based that stance, in part, upon religious arguments. Like just about every political disagreement to this day. But the slaveholders were also Christians and at the time were generally respected as such.
This might all just be history to Mr. Douthat. But he made historical claims that were warped enough to be grotesquely incomplete, a lie by omission that he, I am certain, was aware of.
2
I can actually agree with much of this column, as a critique of capitalism. As with many of what have been turned into forefront issues for sexual minority communities, well off white guys have driven the agenda. While I worked hard for marriage equality, when it came to starting a family, my husband and only considered domestic adoption. Of course, as Black men, there are plenty of boys who look like us in the care of social services agencies. The greed that courses through the entirety of American history has always ground up the majority of people, and it is getting worse. I would welcome a return to the cry of "bread and roses".
6
These women have a CHOICE; they are not enslaved like Handmaid's. Or forced by the state to carry to term. There in lies the (huge) difference.
That said, I think we can all agree that Jeff Lewis is a terrible human being.
But there aren't laws against awful people parenting.
5
Wealthy and middle class women do not become surrogates and no matter people say it isn’t done out of an altruistic urge. It is 100% the commodification of women for some one else’s gain. All you need to do is look at wealthy Chinese families hiring surrogates in the US or Israeli men shopping in Nepal to carry their offspring. It should be outlawed and illegal.
9
It's no one else's business what a woman decides to do with her own body.
I don't know why some of you cannot understand this basic truism.
You're looking for reasons to punish someone for a victimless crime.
You don't really have much of a choice if you have a family already but can't support yourself and it's the best option available.
1
"But the most serious form of cultural conservatism has always offered at most two cheers for capitalism, recognizing that its great material beneficence can coexist with dehumanizing cruelty, that its individualist logic can encourage a ruthless materialism unless curbed and checked and challenged by a moralistic vision."
Mr. Douthat, the cheers have long drowned out any conservative critique of capitalism. Please name one influential conservative thinker in the past 50 years who has characterized the market as anything less than a god that will cure all ills. The most trenchant critiques of capitalism have come from the left. I think you make a number of valid points here, but you refuse to recognize how conservatism has helped bring us to this point--an unwillingness to accept full responsibility for your ideology's effects.
12
Thank you, Jay U. Could't agree more. Even as feminists are having honest debate about complicated issues around reproduction, conservatives are promoting ruthless materialism at its worst. The Evangelical right's position on health care, i.e., healing, about which Jesus had a lot to say and do, is basically "If you're not rich, die already." Because free markets, that's why. Because insurance industry profits.
1
At the very least it is a grave mistake for feminists to assume that because the moralism of the past was often patriarchal and sexist, they must always choose “consenting adults” individualism over a more holistic morality, a presumption for choice over a defense of human dignity, the logic of the market over more communitarian alternatives, a consumerist interchangeability of the sexes over a social architecture that respects their differences.
******
Let's talk about that choice for a moment. I *chose* having a baby whey I got pregnant at 17, and I *chose* to be a homemaker/stay-at-home mom once it became economically feasible. So why is it, Mr. Douthat, that you think me having a choice always results in what you see as the wrong one? Refusing to recognize the autonomy of women will not make the world a better place. If you want more women to make the choices that I've made then provide the support for them to choose the things that you want them to choose. Don't remove their choices. Universal Healthcare would be a good start. Living wages so that one parent in a two-parent home can *choose* not to be in the workforce. Early childhood education so that *all* children have the opportunity to learn in a social setting. The argument that my autonomy defies human dignity is *still* patriarchal and sexist, and it is still wrong.
19
As Ross points out, "my body, my choice," is starting to sound a lot like free-market individualism...when will this contradiction play itself out? In the near future where pregnancies are outsourced to 3rd world countries rather than a woman trying to pay off student loans? Isn't this free agency just once again an optimistic way of viewing treading water in an increasingly inhospitable capitalist environment? The question shouldn't be whether or not you have the right to sell your body for money, it should by why you need to in the first place.
11
Your conclusion is that "selling your body" is by definition a last resort, bad thing.
Agreed, it should not be a choice out of desperation. Working people need a much better deal in a ruthless oligarchic society.
But the principle has always got to me "my body, my choice."
1
I cannot tell for sure (Your intelligence may well be far above my own.), but you seem browbeaten by feminists. You concede them the moral high ground as they destroy family, motherhood, masculinity, and markets as they march inexorably towards their totalitarian matriarchal dystopia. How can they choose a morality for living when it is solely about their unquenchable search for total control?
3
Respectfully, you may have misread Mr. Douthat's column. I believe he's saying that feminists, like perhaps all of us, have been co-opted by market forces. He also seems to be praising old-school feminists who resisted such co-optation and is hopeful they will return to counter this trend.
1
Ross exhibits the inate dilemma of Catholic moral teaching. Far too often it distorts all moral issues by viewing them through the lens of the church's peculiar distaste for human sexuality. While sex may not formally be considered the 'original sin', it seems to serve that role functionally.
The results of that functional distortion are to ground all the church's traditional moral teachings, no matter their individual merits, on a base of puritanical dyspepsia.
7
Saddened by the example of gay couple. Saddened but not surprised that gay men would uphold tradition of denigrating women. That's always been clear, demonstrated by so much women bashing. Not PC to draw attention to transparent sexism.
7
Gay men are in the main liberal and do not denigrate women.
It's clear that you have no gay friends.
Rush Douthat writes:
"At best, Christians may hope to build a counterculture, but in the wider landscape our ability to shape trends or resist them is at a historical low ebb."
Do you know what the most perverse surrogacy of all is, Rush? Forcing millions of women to bear children they don't want, children they can't afford to raise, children who will be neglected, in return for delivering our nation to fascist rule.
"Christians," and you're one of them, did that, Rush. But you have the gall to write this column.
11
What comments are coming from women and men, feminists and chauvinists on this article! Great to have this issue intellectually laundered and brought to the fore for all concerned or not. Despite your opinions as such, I applaud the airing of this issue and particularly liked your Atwoodian reference. The Handmaid's Tale continues to have relevancy in America's Trumpian right- wing days and should be read by women and men as part of 'it can't happen here"
4
It might look like capitalism, Ross, but hasn't it really been about a woman's right to control her own body? And especially about her right to keep conservatives from taking that control away?
Ross, you raise a number of complicated challenging questions. The surrogacy practices (why call them "California-style," as they happen all over the country) do, indeed, to a degree, resemble Gilead--in good part because of the socioeconomics.
It is worth noting that universal health care--which could include surrogacy--would possibly fix that, in that everybody who needed surrogacy irrespective of socioeconomic class would be able to afford it, under proper regulation.
Some of this is based on the fundamental unfairness of the workplace. When it comes to careers and aspirations, women are penalized for getting pregnant or having children.
We can look at all of this through a lens that is broader than "Christian moralism," though those early Christian advocates were impressive. Just plain moralism will do, along with decency.
It is worth noting that modern Christian Conservatives gave us the present president who is wreaking havoc on the nation and the world. They cannot really claim any connection to those early abolitionists and others.
It is a sad reality that many who become prostitutes do so because of abuse, violence, drug abuse, and poverty. In that case, however, isn't the real problem that our country has failed to address abuse, violence, drug abuse and poverty?
6
So you think that paying a woman to bear a child is dehumanizing and commodifying her, but you gleefully advocate that women should be *forced* to bear children. You have never once considered that that might be commodifying and dehumanizing? Hint hint: this sort of hypocrisy is how we know you don't actually care about women.
Moreover, if all of the NYT readers "misinterpreted" your last column, the problem is clearly you and your reasoning/writing. I understand that you feebly attempted to own up to it in this column, (although I think you just chose to backpedal your terrible arguments) but there really is no excuse for someone who has a rare voice on the NYT editorial page to write a column that apparently all of us wildly misinterpreted.
9
Thank you!! The very idea that it is "dehumanizing" to fairly compensate a person for their labor and the use of their body, while somehow sacred or ennobling to expect (or require!) them to labor and sacrifice their body for free, is preposterous on its face.
It continually astounds and depresses me that religious/conservative male ideas have effectively convinced so many women, for centuries, to actually believe that it is "degrading" to profit from and capture the value of their bodies by selling sex, but not to give it away for free or allow men to make arrangements for how it is used. It's like convincing the poor that it's ennobling to labor for the rich. I get why men enjoy and propagate these ideas, but I can't understand how so many women have bought into them.
The only problem with surrogacy is that the going rate is too low. It should be subject to minimum wage laws, and since a pregnant woman labors 24 hours a day to grow and sustain a baby, she must be compensated at least in an amount equal to minimum wage at 8 hours per day plus overtime wages for 16 hrs per day, for every day she is pregnant. That should be the minimum, with the rate going up from there.
So, let's see if I have this right. Douthat denies having said what he clearly said about using women to provide sex for low-quality males, blames feminists for labeling surrogacy as a commodification of women, then suggests women be used as a commodity by men and, into the bargain, Mr Staunch Catholic says using sex dolls to replace women is a good idea. If I didn't already know he hates women and is a situational Moralist and Catholic, this column would convince me.
9
Ross Douthat, I suggest you check out "The View".
Women have always struggled, and motherhood is part of it. Lambasting "feminists" and libruls is easy; understanding human history requires more of you.
Jesus had some excellent teachings about women; modern "evangelicals" don't follow him but claim his authority for a bunch of stuff he wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole.
Who sups with the devil must use a long spoon. Women are people, as varied and interesting as men. Keeping them in their place is not a good plan.
9
@Susan (allo luv)
Imagine if we took all of the ''good'' things from all religions from around the world and applied them in a humanist way equally and fairly to all.
Yeah, I know. Crazy idea. carry on.
3
FunkyI, darlin' boy, yes, that's what we hope to become. I got a heavy dose of it in my youth with one Swami Satchidananda (our retreats were led by a monk, a rabbi, a sufi, and Baba Ram Dass (Richard Alpert as was). What a time that was!
2
Surrogacy strikes me as wrong on so many levels, including that a child’s relationship with its mother begins in utero and that biological connections matter.
I’ve seen so many adoptions where things became problematic — the child not fitting in with the adoptive family, medical histories unknown leading to disaster. Society has just gotten over forcing girls to give up their babies and now we’re rushing into surrogacy?
We don’t let people sell their kidneys; in Canada we don’t even let people sell their blood. Why should we let them sell their bodies to be hostage to a dangerous 9 month mission that includes risks like death, permanent incontinence, physical pain, and even emotional problems related to severing the relationship with the baby?
None of us have a ‘right’ to parenthood. If couples’ circumstances are such that they cannot naturally have children there are lots of other ways to include positive generative and loving roles in their lives. Sometimes that might mean adoption (if babies and children are available, which hopefully will continue to decline). But adoption is not for everyone, I know. For many people, including myself, a biological connection is important.
Nevertheless, we can’t always have what we want. I suffered with infertility for nearly two years and at one point I made my peace for a life without children. We are called by our circumstances to do different things with our lives and we should accept that.
7
C is misguided on so many levels. "I’ve seen so many adoptions where things became problematic — the child not fitting in with the adoptive family, medical histories unknown leading to disaster. " Scratch out the word "adoption and adoptive" in her thesis statement and it would describe many, many families-- bio AND adoptive. Just a fact of life, that parenthood has many mysteries along the way. Her beliefs do not change that a bio family is not by definition a happy one. Moreover, there is no scientific evidence that a "relationship" develops in utero, between a non-viable human and a bio mother. As an adoptive mom of a 22 year old son, I can assure all that our relationship began at his birth (but could have started later if that had been our circumstance) and continues to evolve in an open and loving way as he matures and I age. It is for the best that C decided to accept a "life without children." People with such firm ideas on what constitutes parenthood do not make the best parents.
4
Hi Karen, I did eventually have children. For me, though, I was glad we had that bio connection because they had learning disorders as I had had, and I felt I was more easily able to understand and work with them because I had gone through it. This is the joy of a biological connection.
I did not mean to imply that adoptions don’t work out or that bio families are necessarily happy. Just that maybe adoption is more difficult — from the bio-mothers who might have trouble letting the child go, to children who might understand less about themselves. Also, just because a relationship starts in utero certainly doesn’t mean a new relationship can’t start at birth or any time. Often adoption is the best outcome for the people involved
Surrogacy, though (often now with the use of donated eggs) combines the worst aspects of adoption and the organ trade. In alluding to adoption I just meant to highlight that. In homes for unwed mothers so many young women suffered. What might third world surrogates have to say in thirty years, if we could hear their voices?
Our choices are not ours alone but arise from circumstance — poverty, lack of education and so on.
We have to have prescriptions for dangerous medicine; we have to wear seat belts. Not everything is “allowed” because it’s our “choice.” It’s our body but we have to wear the seatbelt anyway. I think it should be the same with surrogacy, because it’s not a good thing for the bio-mothers or the infants involved.
1
I wonder what your position might be if that 2 years was 20 years.
1
Just checking in to see if Ross had left the GOP yet. The courage watch continues.
12
Is Mr. Douthat trying to divert our attention from horrible situation his conservative friends have created at Mexican border or is he unable to or not willing to condemn Miller, Sessions, Nielsen, Kelly and Trump for their inhuman policy?
15
This seems like mansplaining at its worst. Ross' version of feminism is a straw-woman. Stick to what you know, Ross. This subject isn't it.
7
Does Mr Douthat realize his own complicity in the individualism he criticizes? As long as conservatives blame members of specific groups -- in this case women -- for the circumstances that shape their choices -- they -- conservatives -- will deny their own part in shaping those circumstances. Instead of blaming women (and gays!) for surrogate motherhood and pornography, why not ask: what can straight men do to help?
4
Really? This topic is what you choose to write about when your party is destroying America?
Honestly, this piece was so convoluted I had a hard time figuring out what the point was.
Please stick to holding your political party accountable, rather than pontificating on feminism.
13
When people like Ross have been brainwashed by the church much before puberty even a moderate to liberal Catholic pope like Francis can't get into the deep recesses of his mind.
As a center-left man, I applaud R.D.'s wading into this issue and I interpret his point as extremely valid: we depart from moral considerations of the ways actions are dehumanizing at the peril of undermining the social fabric.
8
Article choice is a reflection of morality and character. That Douthat chooses this barely significant reality-tv inspired culture war subject today tells us a lot about him. When the week's story is about the complete moral failing of Trump's strategy of kidnapping refugee children, he chooses to write about this.
The strategy is plain as day. Douthat wants to distract from an important moral issue with this insignificant one. He doesn't even offer a solution. Ban all surrogacy, including medically necessary ones and those for gay parents? Heavily regulate it? Scold but keep a libertarian policy? Who even knows what he thinks on the subject.
I suspect Douthat doesn't really care. He just wants us to think about anything but what his team is doing to refugee children.
9
Some of us, and Mr Douthat is among this group, have the ability to think about more than one issue at a time. It is a shame that others do not share that level of intellectual competence.
3
Tell that to the kids crying for their parents.
Mr. Douthat unfairly lumps the sex trade with gestational surrogacy, this is insulting. He also seems to be advocating "identity politics", which is confusing coming from him.
1
Really? Women are for sale in both instances. As a second wave feminist I am strongly against both.
2
Stay on the interment of the migrant kids Ross. We can debate all sorts of things after we have stopped the country's slide into outright fascism. If we don't stop it we aren't going to be debating much of anything, with anyone, except the camp guards.
11
I am not sure ultimately what the answer should be, because as a feminist man, I have always had the idea that a woman has absolute dominion over her own body.
Having said that, my only thought is that we might be ''debating'' all of these related issues in the context of puritan laws having been carried down throughout history from almost exclusively men.
It is only in recent history that women have begun to scratch the surface in dictating their own destinies through ''conceiving'' and administrating the laws.
It is only in recent history as well that organized religion has seriously been on the wane, allowing (not only the women) but the men not be shackled in coming up with laws that are equitable in human rights for all.
One need only look at me own country, where abortion rights, gay rights, and the like have finally broke free from their religious yolk.
I don't have a problem with a life being brought into this world to be parented properly by a loving couple that cannot have one, but then to treat the child as property with no contact to the birth mother (or the history/relations) leaves a bad taste in me mouth.
8
I think that as a legal matter, the choice should be available, but as a social matter it should be discouraged. That's the only way I can thread that needle.
2
@Anonne
I tend to agree. Thanks for the feedback.
What is it about observant Catholics that so fascinates them about Abnormal Psych? I mean, that IS where you go to study sex robots, isn’t it? Inquiring minds really have to wonder what the priests put in those wafers.
I always supported feminism strongly, so long as I didn’t need to interact too extensively with its most vocal exponents – they tend to be disagreeable people, and I like friendly barbecues. But, apparently, it didn’t permeate our society enough, so we needed to invent pretexts out of whole cloth to jump-start REALLY outré discussions, like the extent to which feminists favor market-based opportunities, modalities and protocols in the extended sex trade. I guess we’re SO jaded that plumbing the depths of Donald Trump’s empty but pitch-dark soul simply has become boring. And no danger of Seattle being incinerated by a North Korean nuclear warhead can compare to the perils of social destabilization attendant to boring Americans.
But Ross has no equal at the Times when it comes to observing social interactions at a macro level and expressing a gentle if palpable snark in apparently curious terms. The man is a nuanced satirical wonder to read.
9
You know, I, too, can think of a broad political movement that I'm not a member of, that once had some different strains within it, not all of which were comfortable with every aspect of the logic of libertarian capitalism, the moral superiority of the rich over the poor, and the merger of white ethnic nationalism with conservative politics. In fact, that movement -- religious conservatives -- once had a subgroup that even supported social programs that aided the poor, including children AFTER they were born, and even if the poor were of different races!
It was a different time. Very, very pre-Trump. It's too bad we don't have a really high-profile opinion writer in our public culture, say a columnist for the New York Times or something, who might actually know something about this and be able to make the case for how badly the religious conservative movement has gone wrong and how it might be set right. Instead all we've got is some avowed not-feminist guy wishing that the current strands of feminism he more agrees with would win out over the strands he less agrees with (and couching the ones he less agrees with as though they're dead, which they're not); this makes perfectly fine reading but doesn't really touch any part of the power coalition that is actually controlling more or less the entire politics of the United States. For that we'd need an analysis not of disagreement within feminism, but of what might help religious conservatives rediscover their moral core.
18
Mr. Douthat: You challenge Feminism to come up with something to "pull our society back from its dehumanizing and commodifying drift". But it already exists: that old warhorse Socialism, with all its features, bugs, and maladies that you're more than familiar with, through at least a century of experience, currently running, in one way or another, in all industrialized countries. Instead of calling for a new ideology, with unknown problems. Would it not be properly conservative to try to build on what we already know, and work around what we've discovered doesn't work? Would it not be properly conservative to take a cue from your Pope, and put your Catholic shoulder to the wheel, to find better ways to merge the best of religion with the effective machinery of Socialism.
4
"I know that coming from a conservative columnist much of this reads like a long exercise in trolling."
Hey it's good to see some self-awareness! (Perhaps it's telling that Ross flexes on the handmaids metaphor so often, when the rest of his body of work suggest the he might actually love it in Gilead - aside from the fact that they aren't Catholic! More to the point on this metaphor - the handmaids are sex slaves coerced into ritualized rape by an elaborate social order/police state. Surrogate mothers are free individuals being paid for their labor (literally!) and have all the rights and privileges of free individuals (including legal recourse, as you cited in your own piece). I'm not so sure that a handmaid is in a position to renegotiate the terms of their contract.
On surrogacy - really who is it hurting? And what percentage of pregnancies actually go the surrogate route? This is not some sinister plot to dilute the human experience. Ross - you make reference to how religious leaders were also once against slavery (well, some of them at least) and gilded-age excess. Those were problems that actually harmed people and society on a large, tangible scale. Two parties agreeing to have a baby via a surrogate arrangement is not quite on the same level, wouldn't you say?
6
Hey Nick-
Would you be willing to rent out your body to fulfill the reproductive dreams of others? What if you had myriad other choices to survive financially?
Because I bet no one engages in surrogacy for fun. It is capitalistic slavery- breeding children for money.
The last thing modern feminism is concerned with is the flourishing and well-being of women.
2
Why choose "feminism" as your topic of the day, when clearly you have problems with "feminism" and seek to advise on feminists on their behavior, moral core and methods. Do you seek to motivate women to save the world? On that I kind of agree. But there is something off in this articulation of your "solution" when you end with some suggestion of "what feminists should do is....or what feminism should be is......." We seem to be sinking as a society into an uncaring, corporate driven, morass of increased inequality and growing absence of decency and honoring of the value of every human being. What is our way to turning that around? It's not feminism nor feminists that are the culprits or the savior for our sliding society. The Handmaids of Capitalism? Really. I think you can do better than this. Please, give it another try.
5
So feminists have sold out to capitalism on the issue of surrogacy? Americans as a whole have sold out to capitalism on the issue of surrogacy. Biological, emotional, and legal ties don't matter when there is money to be made. No one thought any of it through and asked if this is something that is healthy for all involved.
4
It seems Ross' misogyny has its birth, ironically, from his mother. Though it does help in understanding Ross' negative point of view on life. Unfortunately Ross' religion won't help him, it too is misogynist.
5
"I know that coming from a conservative columnist much of this reads like a long exercise in trolling."
Nice that he acknowledges it, but he's going to troll anyway. Where's the basis for labeling support of surrogacy "liberal"? Nowhere to be seen. This is not a position on any discernible "liberal" political agenda. It's an issue that divides people along complex lines, which registers not one blip on any survey of American voters' priorities. But I'd be willing to bet just on socioeconomic metrics that those wealthy enough to pay for surrogates are more likely Republican than Democrat. Once again, Douthat vents his spleen at strawmen and, more typically, strawwomen in his one-man anachronistic Culture Crusade to Make America 13th Century Again.
13
sounds like Westworld to me!
1
It is easy to criticize consumerism for being dehumanizing, but I don’t see how the alternative would be better. The desires for parenthood and sex are hard-wired into most humans and also not achievable for many. We can either make sex and parenthood more accessible to more people using technological and market solutions, or give into the Darwinian state of nature where these things are reserved for the fittest. I personally would rather live in a world where sex and parenthood are as widely available to everyone as modern consumer products than in a world where those things are sacred and rare, and therefore unavailable to many people.
This guy is trying so hard to be a latter-day George Will with his wacky, overblown prose and name-dropping that it's hard to see what his point is. The first half of the essay was: "surrogacy=bad, gays=destroying Western culture". The second half was: "word soup"
7
Wow, what utter hogwash this? Where to begin? Douthat offers no documentation at all for his gross and incorrect generalizations regarding an imagined feminist consensus in favor of surrogacy, pornography, and prostitution. From what I see and read feminist thought ranges broadly in this regard and defies consensus as does conservative opinion. Douthat is right that feminists ardently believe in their right to control their own bodies and fertility. That is what birth control is for ("temporary sterilization"is a particularly contorted and insidious locution to describe an IUD). For more generations than we can count, women have been slaves of their fertility; until the dawn of modern medicine, many died in childbirth, or were desperately weakened by many pregnancies and many births. That women chose control of reproductive choice is natural. Douthat manages to conflate almost every thought a modern woman could have (including the ironic, witty, and nuanced New York mag piece) with an imagined transactional motivation. This is false. Stop the mansplaining now; your ignorance shows.
44
"Non-market institutions like the family and church". These two institutions are the epitome of market. The church always raising money, the family having no choice but to work for money. Both of the institutions vying for their place in the economy. Anyone following Religious Institutions will discover just how rich most of these institutions are, the Catholic Church possibly leading the pack. Families are an economic unit, whether they remain a family or not.
Let's not paint the Feminist movement as a consumerist group. Just because they have been the moving force behind equal pay for equal work, the right to vote for women, the outrage of rape, harassment and abuse of women and yes, Pro-Choice The irony of the movement is that they are painted, even by other women, as a fringe group. They are not. They are now mainstream
Does this mean that every woman who is a Feminist believes in every issue that is promoted by the leaders. I would say that the answer is no.
So why you choose to write about a woman who gave birth to a child for two Reality stars, who took it upon themselves to video her and make rather lousy remarks has nothing to do with Feminism. It has to do with the privacy rights of said woman and the choice she decided for herself. Leave her and Feminism alone.
7
Before there was surrogacy, or in vitro fertilization, men routinely sold their sperm to sperm banks. I don't remember (admittedly, it's been a while) much concern about the commodification of male bodies then; nor was there any call for men to be the moral guardians of uncommodofied reproduction.
That being said, I agree with much of this. It concerns me when the wealthy get to treat the bodies of others as means to an end. Wet-nursing comes to mind as well in this context.
2
RD's straw man argument for a more holistic morality pits a libertarian transactional capitalism, in which bodies are sold, against the benign and communitarian utopia where human dignity is defended, communal alternatives are embraced and there is a social architecture that respects gender differences. In this vision, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Except it isn't. It is the same patriarchal, theocratic and economic oppression feminists have been try to escape the gravitational pull of for centuries. First wave feminism had a skeptical view of capitalism, and for good reason. The marketplace is no place for the powerless. In RD's christian utopia women are, ultimately, barefoot and pregnant and once again under the thumb of men. One need look no farther than our southern border to see how this plays out.
2
What have we got going on of significance in our country at the moment:
1. Trump insulting and threatening our closest allies.
2. Trump initiating trade wars.
3. Trump incarcerating children at the border.
What does Douthat come up with, his usual smoke screen, sex.
35
He's Catholic, he can't help it. Everything to him boils down to how sex isn't regulated enough, i.e. that women aren't.
1
You make a valid point that because technology makes more things physically possible, it therefore has a tendency to move society toward libertarian, and usually capitalist, directions. But it's not only feminists who are so tempted.
By every indication, the consumers of cyber-sex and broadband porn run the full gamut of political persuasion. Just ask Stormy Daniels.
6
I remember a year or two ago, a wealthy but barren woman wrote a long blog in the New York Times Magazine about how she hired surrogate mothers. She hired two surrogates, to hedge her bets in case one of them pulled out of the deal. They didn't, but one enraged her by going into a labor at an inconvenient time.. Numerous readers were shocked at her cynicism and 1% attitude.
Has the Times become more sensitive nowadays, or is it just the commentator?
1
In true white male conservative fashion Ross Douthat sees all problems as the fault of feminism.
10
There is a difference between supporting something and supporting someone's right to do said something. It is too simplistic to equate those two things, especially when the one passing judgment is not a stakeholder in the issue in question (e.g. men judging issues related to childbearing).
3
Men should hereafter go into a shameful silence on all issues in which their bodies are not immediately, directly involved.
I believe the above "Iguana" is sadly and wildly mistaken in the notion that approving the potential for others to X or Y is different in important ways from doing it yourself. We are all in the same rowboat.
Mr. Douthat's column is moving, but contrary to what he argues, it has very little to do with feminism. Instead, it has to do with ethics and morals, and the Roman Catholic idea of what is "natural." He glosses over the fact that throughout history and across cultures, and even in the modern age, men have used "ethics" and "morals and "nature" to relentlessly control women--either through brutal means or subtle ones. In fact, in most if not all cultures, the very meaning of being a man is wrapped up with the idea that a man is superior to a woman; male gratitude at not being born a woman is ubiquitous. Yet this psychology of superiority is never enough for men, and men like Ross Douthat even like getting in there and philosophizing about how women should be in the world. So yes, Mr. Dougthat is right that surrogacy is about commodification, but strange as this may seem to him, it's also about the thrill women feel when they free themselves from male control. As an aside, Mr. Douthat should have acknowledged the paradox at the heart of capitalism that was identified a long time ago: It's an economic system based on freedom that carries within it the seeds of its own destruction.
3
While I'm all for female autonomy, it is true that legalizing many forms of the 'flesh trade' would actually serve to codify and legitimize the social imbalances that led to the markets for women's bodies in the first place.
It can be a fine line between empowering women to make bad choices and pigeonholing them into those bad choices. Especially for poor and underprivileged women, for whom the flesh trade pays better than many other jobs they could get, pushing only this type of body autonomy while failing to also address other issues like education access and racial discrimination is tantamount to pushing them into the flesh trade.
Imagine a wealthy white woman who chooses a flesh trade profession over other socially acceptable options: then you might argue in favor of autonomy and her right to choose. But then imagine a poor, unskilled, minority woman who sees this as her only option, and can't get another type of job. If it's legal it falsely appears to be a deliberate choice on her part to work in the stigmatized flesh trade and therefore the poor unskilled women would be even further stigmatized as women who 'choose' to sell their bodies.
Capitalist feminism has historically been a white-woman-centric movement and this thread of the argument is no different.
5
Amita. What do you call it when upscale wealthy white women's are kept in apartments and a life style by married men. Just asking?
1
Interesting and thought provoking Not sure where I stand but I do see a contradiction. One can rent a womb sell a baby etc but it is frowned upon legally to sell a kidney or a lung. Essentially it is the same thing living tissue is a commodity that can be sold commercially or it can't ????
3
Please, Mr. Newspaper Man, tell me more about what women should be allowed to do with their bodies.
13
Academic feminism, rather than instagram feminism, is generally against the marketing of the female body.
2
Ross - In an earlier column, you referred to your parents as "industrial strength" Catholics (loved the terminology), so I just assumed that they always had been. What happened along the way from liberal feminism?
Don't be ridiculous. Many feminists question surrogacy. I know I do.
5
I think you missed the whole point of feminism. It’s more nuanced than “surrogacy is always good!” In fact, it’s not so much that feminists unconditionally support surrogacy as it is that we oppose paternalistic laws that regulate the ways in which women can use their bodies. I may wish women considering using their bodies to carry another person’s child would choose differently, but it’s not my place to force them to abide by my wishes. I also wish women considering using their bodies to attend a pro-Trump rally would choose differently, but I can’t stop them from doing that either.
11
Good article...there's a side issue, though, that I've really been wondering about. It's kind of central, a question of capitalism; "its individualist logic can encourage a ruthless materialism unless curbed and checked and challenged by a moralistic vision." I've been wondering when Mr. Douthat will put that vision into the center of his thinking and writing.
1
As always, Mr. Douthat comes through with analysis that is both sharp-eyed and deep, he is quite likely the finest conservative thinker since Buckley.
However. I must disagree with where his commentary here leads. In brief:
1. Railing against the absorption and use of technology by other people has no effect in the long run.
2. Restricting access to anything useful makes it more desirable and actually increases its demand in the short run.
3. Seeking to compel or restrict others against human nature is a strong authoritarian impulse that has always failed in the long run (this cuts across any definitions of Conservative or Liberal). Those seeking unfettered access to technologies of any kind do not care if Luddites choose to live without them, but the reverse is not true. The arch-religious moralizers desperately want to stop whatever technology or science that offends their sensibilities, the free-thinkers and techno-hedonists care not if others choose to spend time reciting the mantras of Iron Age belief systems.
The end results of all this? The Luddites ultimately slip from memory, their crusades mocked and then forgotten. Every time.
1
The timing of this article extolling traditional values and the importance of motherhood is almost comically bad, in the context of what is going on with family separation. Yet, it isn’t, because there is absolutely nothing comical at all regarding separating children from their families.
This article also fails to mention laws many states have regarding commercial surrogacy, like Michigan and New York that ban it outright.
6
More Christian angst about other people's private lives, with the subtext always, always about sex and reproduction. Meanwhile the author's party is imprisoning refugees and detaining their babies in "tender age" facilities and citing the Bible as justification. Gross. Grotesque. Disgusting. So much for Christian morality.
12
Oh please. You’re forgetting the other side of this old debate; selling your body v. selling your mind. At every point in your argument, substitute man for woman, mind/brains for body. At every White House press conference, we watch the cattle-barn sales of minds- male reporters obsequiously pandering to known liars, day in, day out, to supposedly bring us the news of this President’s views. For a pay check. For advancement of career. No boycott, no turning of backs, no taking of knees....a sale of brains...years in the making, college degrees, internships...all working towards the sale.
No moral questioning (at least feminists did that part) , no examining of what you might be becoming in this charade of bringing us the latest twist, latest justification, slur, gutter views. It’s your job.
And substitute that penguin straight-jacket (aka, suit and tie) for a prostitute’s spike heals and cleavage. Dress for success. All the same, every day. Had to laugh at today’s companion article on celebrities wearing the same formal gowns...sooo daring! But men in the news, politics, have become so mindless as to pull the same tired suits on every day. To sell their brains, their thinking in the same Stepfordesque parody of ....professionalism.
The one reporter that dared ask Sanders to stop with the lies- what a hero. No. Like a calf that escapes the chute, he’ll be captured, sent on to the sale. And the sale of minds, of, perhaps souls, will move on.
12
Note to world: when you're hoping to learn what feminists think, Mr. Douthat is not your most reliable source.
56
"But I am not under any illusions about the cultural position of my own faith in the late-modern West."
But you are under some pretty serious illusions about the ways Christianity influenced Western culture. I think you can argue that as we lose religion that what fills in the gaps will be awful, that maybe the most decent mode of living we ever will achieve will be some mingling of Enlightenment values with Christianity, and even argue that we've passed that optimum point are are now in decline. The problem is that such a balance was never stable and was a just transition between two states of which it isn't clear to me which is going to be worse. But, you need to deal with the fact that the history of humans treating each other with more decency closely followed the decline of the Church and that is not just a coincidence.
But that isn't really what this column is about. Actually it's one of the few you've written that liked. You're talking to a wall however.
1
I am halfway thru the Handmaiden's Tale, so your column caught my eye. I reaad all the way to the end. I fell that I have two choices. When an article has this many buzzwords I am inclined to think I am too dumb to get it or that it's all buzz and no honey. Somy second thought is to ask you to unpack this piece make it into four or five columns each one focused around one issue and preferably a person. Respectfully
1
What? Earth to Mr. Douthat: “English”, please. I read the whole thing twice and I still can’t make sense of it. Help!
2
So how can I commodify my dissent?
Being a surrogate mother is no different than being indentured, a practice that has been abandoned as too close to temporary slavery, There is something distasteful about the practice, nevertheless it is the only way for women who cannot carry to term or a gay man to have a biological child to be raised by two gay parents. So there will always be a demand for it. In some perhaps not too distant future a technological fix will probably exist in the form of artificial wombs. Will Mr. Douthat object to that as not being the way GOD intended?
Should it really matter as long as children carried to term in artificial wombs are no different than any others?
1
Ross states "social conservatives" have always opposed commercialized reproduction. Wrong. Social conservatives have often upheld taking infants from unmarried mothers to place them with two- parent, supposedly "good" families. The often religiously based commercial adoption services received the financial remuneration - not the mother. During the VP debate, Mike Pence said his state, Indiana, was very successful in counseling single mothers to make "adoption plans" which would be a blessing to childless couples seeking to build families. Such "counseling" is generally financial and emotional blackmail by stigmatizing social services. And the term "illegitimate" marginalizes pregnant women who conceive outside of a marriage whether by failed reproductive planning, rape, or choice. Once a mother is socially marginalized, it is easy for systems to take her child supposedly for the good of that child. The term "birthmother" relegates the mother to the position of disconnected vessel. I find commercialized surrogacy dehumanizing and distasteful, but speaking as one who knows, social conservatives and organized religion have stolen many mothers' families in the name of family. Margaret Atwood said there was nothing in "The Handmaid's Tale" that hadn't already happened somewhere. Ross, read the 1995 re-issue "Of Woman Born," by Adrienne Rich. Many of us feminists think about motherhood.
14
An astute column by Mr. Douthat, reminding us of one of the worst tendencies of unfettered capitalism, namely, the transformation of everything and everyone into a commodity with a sale price attached. That said, he ignores another feature of capitalism which helps explain the debasement of human beings which he so abhors.
Although any free society will coexist with some economic inequality, the American version of capitalism, as MJ suggests, leaves millions of people stranded without financial means adequate to meet their needs. Douthat, himself, notes that surrogate mothers generally belong to the working class, while their clients enjoy a much higher income. Public policies which compensated for the free market's failure to ensure hardworking Americans an adequate standard of living might sharply reduce the incentive for women to rent out their wombs.
The same analysis applies to Douthat's distress over the commodification of sex, although in this case his critique comes several thousand years too late. The debasement experienced by most prostitutes, nevertheless, might be avoided if our economy offered more dignified occupations to the women who sell themselves out of desperation.
No feasible economic reform could solve all the problems described by Douthat. But changes in a market system that disdains the concept of a supportive community in favor of a stark reliance on individual responsibility, might help ensure that women enjoy true freedom of choice.
2
It's he church that controlled ruthless capitalism? No, it was the law. And now that Repubs aren't bothering with antitrust any more, no one is.
It's always about sex with social conservatives.
This is a tiny issue and affects only a small number of people. yes, it's an interesting column, but if you really want to do something about commercialism crack down on corporations. Fence them in. Set boundaries. Focus on their buying of the government. Make them pay taxes: REAL TAXES not just tokens.
Yup. Interesting as a philosophical discussion but we have so much bigger fish to fry.
Perhaps you haven't noticed but the country is crumbling around us and if things keep up the way they are only the 1% will even be able to consider such an option.
11
Sex robots are “deadly” and “dehumanizing”? Please Mr. Douthat, stay out of our bedrooms. A sex robot is no more deadly than a blender or a toaster, except in your mind.
1
When People Are Scared of the Human Body...This!
Ross comments that sex robots are dehumanizing (yes, they are) but repeatedly pens long, exhaustive screeds pushing for compulsory childbirth. The cognitive dissonance dazzles...
5
Marxist feminists have always criticized bourgeois feminists as fatally limited.
Bourgeois feminists wish to end the exploitation of women. A great goal!
But the only possible way to accomplish this (according to Marx) would necessitate a social revolution that would end ALL exploitation of the poor by the rich. This would remove the economic foundation of sexism (& racism).
But the bourgeois feminists here draws back. Revolution is going too far!
So there is definitely an implication of moral hypocrisy as well as intellectual inconsistency in the Marxist critique of bourgeois feminism.
What is bizarre is that this traditional from-the-left critique of the American middle-class section of the global women's movement being delivered by one of your most ferociously anti-Marxist commentators.
1
To me, surrogate motherhood for pay smells of moral decay, eugenics, and almost creating life in a test-tube. The reaction of the Roman Catholic church is inconsequential: all the Christian religions and Judaism have erected superstructure on the simple and straightforward foundation of the Ten Commandments, to strengthen their hold on the faithful. Besides, surrogate motherhood, except for wet nursing, could not be known in Biblical times, so that this issue must be dealt outside of the ecclesiastic rules.
1
The irony here. Why all this focus on feminism? The critiques, the snarks about wide differences of opinion , the idea that "someone needs to pull society back from it dehumanizing commodifying drift" and it might yet be feminism, WAIT A MINUTE!!! The author has already given the Christian religion a pass on this task. So now this dirty (uncompensated) task is being handed to the feminists!!! (Familiar behavior, like the dirty dishes.) We live in a world controlled by men, predominantly old white men. If they broke it, let them fix it.
My morality (limiting choices) is better than your morality (infected with capitalism).
1
Right....
Desperate Doubtaht wil fish wherever he has to to somehow come up with something that proves his point. This is not a very good pond for him to try from.
Just where and when does he draw the line on his new debut of the horrors of capitalims? Does he address it to the Koch Brothers?
I thought not.
3
I luv the way your articles expose the crude meanness of your conservative thinking. So feminist women are dupes of consumerism? But what is capitalism without consumers? And besides, what about men? And anyway isn't capitalism a conservative totem? Actually though this is just a cover to attack a woman's right to choose abortion. You would defend to the death a woman's right to remain barefoot and pregnant. But to be pro-choice, that's corrupt you say. And once you bounce down that road you tie yourself into knots that force you of all people to condemn capitalism. This paper would get a D and a required rewrite at any serious high school.
2
Father Douthat the world is bad because of women and liberals. Will you write a piece telling the world that? And that capitalism is the greatest thing since the Middle Ages because The US invented everything and liberals cause all the trouble!
I’m with Socrates.
"Consenting adults" just means that the two of them are no wiser than the one of them. Women are not men, and never will be. That said there's little to be gained by women trying to emulate the other sex who has sex ever on his mind. Male satyrs are not looking for the lasting, caring relationship that a wiser woman wants. Don't get used and abused in the name of feminism. It's really foolish-ism.
2
Capitalism is primarily about allocating resources in the most efficient manner. There are many contexts in which efficiency reigns supreme. But then there are many other cases when efficiency is not the primary motive, or even a motive. Other motives supersede it.
Douthat muddles through his column with no particular agenda other than to troll liberals and feminists. Maybe he should start by calling for an end to corporations being equated with people.
1
Mr. Douthat, in this feminist's opinion, sex robots and prostitution and surrogacy and pornography are pretty whacked out. Take a look at our lawmaking body today, however, and then explain how those old, white, hypocrites should govern any of these issues and I'll likely throw up. Perhaps if women were paid properly and our safety net were strengthened, 3 of the 4 would hold no monetary sway over women. I suppose THOSE ideas make YOU want to throw up.
3
I have noticed of late this tendency of conservative writers to blame any perceived blight on mankind on liberals and feminists. Backlash to Obama is responsible for the Trump presidency despite the fact that it is the conservative electoral college that put him in office and the fact that over 80% of the GOP voters according to polls are strongly supporting him and liking him just fine and dandy. If Al Gore had been in office we are told by the right there might not have been a Iraq war or a 911 and its the feminist fault for supporting Clinton during impeachment. Yeah, but who made sure Gore wasn't in office - conservatives on the Supreme Court. The current border mess is the Democrats fault although the conservatives control all levers of power in this country. Now Feminists are responsible for surrogacy and the technological changes that make surrogacy possible- really!! Have you actually taken the time to talk to feminists about their position on this issue or do you just assume they support it? Have you taken note that it is feminists leading the charge in Nevada to get rid of legal prostitution and its feminists writing about the degradation of porn? You want to talk about the evils of unfettered capitalism, well which ideology has made the celebration of free markets a national religion? Conservatives want to be the dominant ideology and the GOP the daddy party- well baby daddy its time to start owning up to your share of the responsibility.
2
It's time for feminists to re-read "The Sexual Liberals and the Attack on Feminism" which makes the same connections between dehumanizing reproductive technologies and prostitution. Feminists cannot afford to be libertarian because then the market forces win and women are bought and paid for.
4
For those who need this piece boiled down to a sound-byte, consider: money talks, morality walks.
3
Gimme a break. This country makes everyone a slave to capitalism, whether man, woman, or feminist.
3
Ross, You might want to start with telling Trump to stop separating parents from their children on the border as as start to the dehumanizing thing. What a fluff piece when your standard bearer, Trump, is doing his best to dehumanize and commodify our own country. This is the problem with conservatives today. They continue to worry about liberals, when in fact the problem lies within. Have the guts to take on conservatives for their awful destruction of morality, decency and a just humanity. Then, when you get that fixed, you can work on liberals. Until then you have no moral high ground on which to stand.
3
"Never confuse who you are with what you have to do to survive."
Ross, you have written a truth about American society, not just feminist or other group attitudes toward surrogacy. to wit..."you should bet on the side that takes a more consumerist view of human flourishing, a more market-oriented view of what it means to defend the rights and happiness of women."
American today, across political or ideological lines will take the consumerist side. It has been drilled into our DNA...buy, buy, buy...make a buck, flip a house, a new car after only one year?...yes!
...on and on... the true American litany. And now we have a "businessman" in the White House where everything is transactional. No morality there for sure.
Yes Ross, thank you for pointing out perhaps the greatest ill in America today. I agree, "Something needs to pull our society back from its dehumanizing and commodifying drift."
3
Well, you finally got around to the "trolling" aspect of your tedious column, but, seriously, most women don't pay any attention to you, mainly because you're a man and don't have a clue.
It's an amazing thing that women who can't carry a baby to term can now rely on a relative or close friend, or, oh horrors, a surrogate to help them. It's a miraculous, wondrous thing for those women. I'm sure your little ole' conservative heart is just fine with that.
Pushy, strong-willed Silicon Valley women freezing their eggs because they're too busy making a ton of money or have other priorities or just don't feel like reproducing just yet? Well, you're certainly getting all worked up about those selfish women who are shirking their biblical duty to be fruitful and multiply. Here's a suggestion--why don't you just sit quietly and let us make those decisions.
The reason why the "rather important female reality of motherhood" comes up in less than 3 percent of papers is that, until recently with the advent of birth control and abortion, there was NO OTHER REALITY. Now, women can plan their families. The simple fact is--you don't like how we're doing it.
Tough.
7
"I know that coming from a conservative columnist much of this reads like a long exercising (sic) in trolling." Yeah, it does. Ross Douthat is really, really annoyed by feminism. The Handmaid's Tale in particular gets under his skin. Why? Because he can’t argue logically against women being treated as full-fledged human beings capable of moral agency and equal to men. The ancient doctrine of complementarity of the sexes is indefensible, but that's what the Catholic church and other conservative religions teach. So Ross has to resort to using a bizarre anecdote about two gay men from an obscure cable TV show and a 31-year-old surrogacy case to attack feminists. The New York Times is better than this. Or it should be.
6
Sorry but while your people are engaged in separating babies from mothers, you have no high ground to speak from.
6
I think Ross means well, but any argument against either sex or money is bound to be a two-time loser.
2
Why are all these religious conservatives obsessed with other people's sex lives?
2
Ah yes, it's the feminists that are making life miserable for women, Mr. Douthat.
Actually, the people who are making life miserable for women are the five conservative male justices on the Supreme Court, specifically a most recent action of theirs, a 5-4 decision with your pal and conservative Gorsuch proving to be the deciding vote. Why it was even written by Gorsuch.
In the ruling, the Court declared that employers can force workers into arbitration, and essentially deny employment to anyone who refuses to waive their civil rights to participate publicly in class-action lawsuits. From the employee perspective, this means that if you’re experiencing issues such as poor working conditions or wage inequities, your employer can keep you from taking the matter to court.
What this ultimately means, is that by enabling companies to force arbitration, the Supreme Court is oppressing and silencing untold numbers of employees who experience sexual harassment.
Somehow corporations are people and the Republicans always put corporations first.
I breathlessly await your next column demanding programs for children of working mothers, paid maternity and paternity leave, equal pay for equal work, and a change in federal labor laws led by the Republican Congress, that allows sexually harassed women to bring class-action lawsuits against corporations, Mr. Douthat.
6
The commodification of people, of babies, is not limited to gestational surrogacy, of course. We have the de facto purchase of the babies of poor third-world mothers for adoption by affluent Americans. And we have the sale of sperm by and from sperm banks. Unlike the sperm released in sexual encounters, most of which no one hopes will result in impregnation and birth, sperm bank wares are expressly intended to make babies. Men who sell sperm are selling their own potential -- likely -- children, with whom they will have no relationship and for whom they will bear no responsibility. This also immorally negates essential human obligations. The mothers are guilty as well of designing fatherlessness for their children. Sure, there may be parental men involved. But that's not actually the same. And knowledge of who one's biological parents and relatives are is a core element of human identity. Adoptees and sperm donor babies go to great lengths to obtain this information, scant and unsatisfying as it may be.
This is an injury, a diminishment of our essential human bonds. When these injuries occur by misfortune, it's a tragedy, and bravo to the adoptive parents and single mothers who care for the babies who need them. But our society has also endorsed willfully creating these circumstances so babies can be bought. It's not okay, and the kids are not as "all right" as we want to believe.
2
I suggest the perspective of humans as a species, thus ‘skirting’ the feminist (or not) perspective. When I was young, the general opinion was against eugenics. However, now, gene or genome editing of human fertilized eggs, will soon be acceptable. See for example: “First U.S.-based group to edit human embryos brings practice closer to clinic,” by Kelly Servick, 2017. The difference between gene editing, and eugenics, is little? The richer will have access to genome editing, sure. But I’m unsure the “logic of capitalism” is the main driver of these so-called choices—whether surrogate wombs, or designed genome—which we are making as a species.
3
Sorry, Mr. Douthat, but it wasn't just Christians who opposed slavery and the excesses of robber barons. And many slaveholders were regular church goers. Even the first cleric at Savannah, Georgia's firat Episcopal church was a slave holder and I'm sure he wasn't the only one. Many "Christians" wh romote "right to life" also support capital punishment and see nothing wrong with neglecting children born into poverty and deprivation.
You say that the "moralism of the past was often patriarchal and sexist" but I'm sure I'm not the only person who finds your columns moralizing to be rather patriarchal and sexist, and when you say that social architecture should respect the differences of the sexes it hints strongly of "keeping us in our places."
And then, at a time when right wing "Christians" are taking over the courts and many government offices you whine that the ability of Christians to shape or resist ideas and trends is "at a historical low ebb." When JFK was running for election he had to promise that the Vatican would not dictate his policies. You, on the other hand, would bring back the philosophy of Popes like Pius who hid out in the Vatican and didn't try to help those sent to gas chambers, since they were "other" and not really Christians.
4
You can count on Douthat to twist any story into a morality tale about the evils of progressive values. Here, in a bizarre twist, the apologist for the patriarchy calls to feminists to join him in a journey back to the past. To reject " a consumerist interchangeability of the sexes (and embrace) a social architecture that respects their differences."
In Douthat's world surrogate mothers are commodities, much like sex workers. They are "dehumanized" when they fail to use their bodies for the sole benefit of their husbands and instead exert decision making authority over their own bodies. Are men dehumanized when they become professional athletes and make money off their strength and speed? Sports teams "own" their predominately African American players, yet Douthat doesn't see that as a threat to the natural order.
"Respect" for the differences between the sexes is, in Douthat's mind, respect for male control over women's bodies. "Cultural conservatism" he claims has always held capitalism at arms length," recognizing that its great material beneficence can coexist with dehumanizing cruelty." Funny, I thought it was the progressives who fought for child labor laws, Social Security and safety net programs. "Cultural conservatives" fought capitalism only when its "dehumanizing cruelty" took the form of releasing women from the bonds of male ownership, freeing them to work, seek an education and make decisions about their own bodies.
Thanks but no thanks Ross.
2
Can it be monetized? Is there a buck to be made? Yes? The genius of capitalism, American style, is it co-opts everything, including anti-capitalism, in its path - including Christianity, Ross.
2
I am a bit bothered by your article. It rambles around using terms like liberal, libertarian, feminist, conservative, capitalism, Marxism etc. in a word salad that seems to be about women choosing to have children when they have infertility and calling it capitalist, meaning consumerism. Maybe I should read it again to see if I get a different message, but I think I'll not. You do demonstrate that we live in a complex world and that simplistic terms and polemics just make it more complicated. I know that for many infertile women, having children strikes at the heart of their self worth. Honoring that is not a bad thing. Stealing babies is and abusing unwanted babies is really bad. Leaving women with no recourse in our modern world is also bad. Transplanting body parts seems dehumanizing also.
1
Instead of lecturing libertarian feminists about the moral danger inherent in the nexus between biological autonomy and capitalism (who may be in need of a lecture, but probably not from you), why not turn that same argument on your natural constituency: conservative Catholics. If ever there was a group who had lost its way it's them, and every one of them who pulled the lever for Trump is living proof. You make some valid points, Dr. Douthat, now heal thyself.
1
An article about feminism, capitalism and women's bodies and nothing about the absence of universal paid family leave? Clearly this is another chapter in the story of how feminism let down women in the marketplace. In this case it is the perennial failure of middle and upper class women to take notice of the working poor.
CEO pay and glass ceilings, great! But what about the McDonald's employee who had to leave her daughter unattended in the park while she worked her shift? The talk wasn't about staggered shifts or subsidized day care, but the cultural problem of helicopter parents..."Why can't kids be kids anymore?"
1st Wave/2nd Wave/3rd Wave/Me Too wave (where is the outrage over sexual predation on third shift custodial jobs and migrant-farming camps?) Here are your handmaids of capitalism.
Ross apparently thinks that an individual's ability to make decisions about such things as forming a family in any structure than portrayed in a 1950s sitcom is dehumanizing. Recognizing that the rest of the world has moved on and that his religion is feckless in its ability to turn back modernity, he calls upon feminism to do his dirty work. Good luck with that. Because women want to be told that they don't know what's good for them. Or not. Come to think of it, neither do men or nonbinary people.
1
Best wishes for the surrogate mother's lawsuit against Bravo and (I assume) Lewis/Edward. Sounds like her contract did not include having the delivery filmed and aired - a clear contract violation.
As to the humiliating remarks made by Lewis and Gage, that reflects upon them, their show and whomever is part of their audience. (Here, Mr. Douthat is where morality should play a role to stop the dehumanization of individuals.) Decent viewers should turn away from the show not because they had a baby by a surrogate mother but because they chose to exploit and dehumanize the child's mother.
Mr. Douthat, you deride this 'brave new feminist's world' in which women may use their bodies to make a living. "Selling their bodies" is a derogatory phrase used to dehumanize a sex worker by a self-elevated moralist. Would you say football players "sell their bodies?" Would you say bricklayers "sell their bodies?" Is body labor itself, not using your body to make a living?
Is a sex worker (male/female) using their body to make a living dehumanizing? The answer is yes, only if the sex worker is coerced/forced by someone else to do it. If it is a freely made, safely made career choice then it is society's puritan hangups that should be the subject of scrutiny not the sex worker's choice.
Mr. Douthat, do you not "sell your mind" to make a living? It is your beliefs, views, education, writing talent, but it is not so different from selling what each of is gifted with to prosper in this life.
"... Something needs to pull our society back from its dehumanizing and commodifying drift. ..."
So it follows that 60 million should elect and support trump.
How useful has Christianity's anxiety about sex been these last 70 generations?
Just a friendly reminder that under the catholic moral vision, women would be forced carry unwanted pregnancies to term against their will, without choice, or compensation or support. In fact, in recent history women who were morally unacceptable to the church were often punished by being locked in institutions, and having their children forcibly removed from them. Spare me your moral vision.
10
Women choose surrogacy? I can imagine someone choosing surrogacy in order to allow a loved friend or relative to have a child, but once it's in the realm of things you get paid for, it becomes the kind of "choice" that people have to make in the real world...to work for Uber because you can't find a job with benefits, to cross the picket line because you haven't worked in years, to work supposedly part-time for 30 hours a week without benefits because that's all that is offered. In the real world, most prostitutes are not sex workers. In the real world nobody with money sells one kidney. In the real world pornography is degrading to the people who watch it as well as to the people who make it.
And why, oh why, is a columnist castigated for writing about reproduction while being male, or for writing about one aspect of people's rights and responsibilities whenever some other aspect is the current hot topic?
Douthat the train of change has left the station and will not be coming back to pick you up. The issues that you continue to raise about abortion, gay rights, reproduction, secularization, feminism etc are issues of opinion not facts. And across the Western world opinions on these issues have changed. And all the ink you use to try to push these opinions back decades to where they were before are futile.
Did not the recent vote in catholic Ireland striking down a constitutional ban on abortion tell you anything?
The times they are a changing.
1
The origins of the feminist movement in the 1960's you had a strong socialist, anti-capitalist trend. And then the deep state moved in.
No, this isn't conspiracy theory. Key players from those days retrieved their FBI files and discovered that just as the feminist movement was under constant surveillance and manipulation.
The shift from a more radical view of society to the politics of inclusion did not occur naturally. Certain voices were promoted, others repressed. Mainstream publications championed some views, others were relegated to dusty academic journals.
But it's a mistake to label the winners in this struggle as "liberal feminists." Unless of course, you believe that we are living under a "liberal" form of capitalist exploitation.
The radical wing of the movement warned that women's liberation was inextricably bound to broader issues concerning race, class and gender.
Today, the issues that you describe, surrogacy on reality TV, sex robots, the oxymoron sex worker, are all the result of the breakdown of the American family into individualized economic units, each of which has now been captured by the fetish of the commodity.
Many of today's radical feminist see this and recognize that understanding the world is the first step to changing it.
That change is not going to come from glass ceiling movements or even #MeToo. It will come from class and racial solidarity and a vision of the world we can live in together, beyond capital's incessant exploitation.
2
Interesting that a person can’t sell a kidney but they can sell the use of their womb, which also carries significant health risks. We saw a morally repugnant outcome in the first case. But not the second.
1
The Feminist agenda considers capitalism only in the context of power, which is the force behind all its decisions. If feminism perceives victimization of women, it lobbies not so much for the oppressor to cease an abuse of power, but rather to usurp that power for their own abuse. The #metoo movement.
Feminists lament our cultures' view of women as sex objects. The objection involves the patriarchal perspective on sexual relations. Men are the aggressors. Yet feminists raved over the show Sex in the City, because it flipped the roles. The women used men for sex. They gained the power to degrade the men.
Feminists also lament the wage gap between men and women, which involves the unequal balance of power in the context of capitalism. To the extent that women can leverage the feminist agenda to gain power in capitalism, they will. But I argue its not about the money, its about the power. Surrogacy provides a great opportunity for women to leverage their biology to gain power in culture, but the money is just a by product of the desire for power.
You're an interesting thinker Mr. Douthat. I enjoy the openness you display. But it must be pretty lonely to be a contemporary American conservative with doubts about capitalism!
Back when Bush restricted the use of embryos for medical research what he didn't do was make any attempt to stop or even reduce the practice of creating extra embryos by the medical pregnancy industry. These embryos were routinely destroyed once a successful pregnancy was achieved.
Which meant that Bush's actions were total Kabuki, he wasn't saving any embryos, just ensuring that scientists couldn't learn anything from their destruction.
What was your stance, I wonder.
Since I don't believe that embryos are human beings their destruction is not a major issue for me. I just note that Bush's not touching the economic interests of the baby factories shows that he also didn't actually care about the fate of embryos.
Is it horribly churlish of me to believe that most anti-abortion folks are just like Bush?
2
Conclusion: "Something needs to pull our society back from its dehumanizing and commodifying drift." Societies have always dehumanized women in varying degrees. Its ultimate cause is not capitalism, it is human nature, i.e., ignorant power-driven males, which has an evolutionary basis. And it is not going away soon. Reason and science are our only hope. Shakespeare can help.
Thank you! I'm a lifer feminist. A woman has no equality as long a man has the-god-given-right to tell her what to do with her body. When I left the USA, 2002, I was still telling women, you have the Freed-Slave complex. You think you're freedom means free to do as your choose. Yet you still work for less money than a man, you see no problem in that there are great many women who are selling their bodies because their economies necessitate that; everything from voyeurism to childbearing is a financial bargain. Once the contract is sign the female is often on the losing side simply because money was exchanged for a future service that she now wants to renegotiate on. Women are not free yet.
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So, during a week of wailing children, Douthat professes himself distressed because commercial surrogacy compromises his ideal of feminism. And he worries that humans may get too much unholy pleasure from sex robots.
I suppose there's no point asking about the *other* "handmaid of Capitalism"? You know, our perpetual state of war, and those who suffers its effects? And the political parties which promote it?
I think I'll just go home and re-read Puddin'-head Wilson, by Mark Twain.
The problem, it seems to me, is that in a world of some seven billion points-of-view, you're bound to have conflict regarding human management. We need laws, and we have cultural mores, but not everyone is going to accommodate themselves to the dictates of others.
Ross here is pretty confident that he sees, knows, and speaks the truth -- if only reasonable people would admit it! One big thing is that women need to get their act together: How dare they disagree among themselves! Who do they think they are? Men?
If Douthat were king, there would be lots of civic order and conformity -- or else! Following his rules is the only way to human happiness, and he has -- sigh! -- the burden of imposing it, but it's god's will. Q.E.D.
"But the most serious form of cultural conservatism has always offered at most two cheers for capitalism, recognizing that its great material beneficence..." For some, Mr. Douthat. The current crop of robber barons in Washington and on Wall St. have been giving capitalism a standing 'O' for their entire length of stay. As it seems that sex is always a topic of yours may I point out the 'O' stands for 'Ovation' just to clear up any confusion.
1
I like the column, but have a hard time taking Mr. Douthat’s positions on women and feminism seriously.
The subheading should probably be “Women, don’t let the market dictate your beliefs. Let me.”
Capitalism defeated Communism in the late 20th century. Before that it defeated Catholicism and undermined the hegemony of the Church in the Western World.
The Catholic Church has a history of oppressing and suppressing women. That propensity was not abandoned as capitalism and the rise of the merchants took an increasing role in the affairs of emerging nations. Things are the way they are because the got to be that way.
Today, there are a lot of people who believe that the "wisdom" of the market means that humans don't have to use their wisdom to make choices. In aggregate, people will make good economic choices and, in aggregate, those choices will drive good public policy.
We can argue that there's some overarching immorality in commodifying women's bodies. If those arguments are used to make women lesser beings, I oppose them. It looks to me that's all too often the case.
I disagree with many of Ross's conclusions. But this time he's on to something. And I'm glad for the clarification on his robot column.
I also think he'd be an interesting guy with whom to have a beer and talk about his ideas. I think the one way nature of column writing sometimes impedes interesting thinking.
2
"Preserving the moral and spiritual integrity of society in the face of natural processes of decay. We stimulate thought and conversation on the existing values and philosophies that drive pop culture, because of the negative outcomes that these false values lead to. We challenge the status quo on issues of justice, mercy and inequity. Can't be so caught up in religion that we forget about the other responsibilities in our society. Ritualistic moves don't remove responsibility in and for our society - light for the world not JUST the kingdom."
"We live in the tension between the ideal and reality. God represents the ideal. It gives us something to reach for. It represents the standards by which to judge. We aspire to greater things because we can see something better."
- AR BERNARD (he's on IG & Twitter)
My church notes
3
Mr. Douthat, I always appreciate your often reasonable and thoughtful consideration of the ethical side of cultural values. You are one of the few conservative writers I trust to be genuine versus dogmatic.
This column is thought provoking and also raises other considerations, just for one example hiring domestic help. Overwhelmly female, lowerer income and people of color, domestic workers (housecleaning and childcare) these women make their money by sacrificing their bodies performing physically repetitive and challenging work. Cleaners are exposed to chemicals too. After a decade or so, many of these women begin to work in frequent or constant states of physical pain. Decades later, the pain can be debilitating with few healthcare resource.
Like paid surrogates, domesric workwrs work for the wealthier side of America and sacrifice their bodies because they have to make a living. Domestic workers may not be involved in the miracle of birth for pay, but they too are paid to provide services to the wealthier classes, sacrificing their bodies to support themselves and their children.
The physical sacrifice made by working class women for the wealthier people deserves just as much or more ethical consideration than is given to paid surrogates. Please write your next column about how feminism has been a transformative movement and the benefits feminism has brought to both women and men.
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Domestic work is easier on the body than factory work, waitressing or being a hotel housekeeper. And the worker has a better working environment and more control over their schedule.
1
Chelmian is right. Being a commercial employee is much rougher than the average domestic situation. The quotas placed on hotel housekeepers are overwhelming. Exposure to toxic substances in factories dwarf handling containers of Babbo in someone's McMansion.
Having rescued my wife from a Cinderella existence as a domestic, I've heard a plethora of individual stories from that realm.
Abuse can occur in a household, but is far more likely in a commercial setting.
1
Good social systems balance humanity against excesses and fatal flaws.
Organized religion, of course, with its rich history of patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia, sciencephobia, cultured superstition and ignorance, is an utter disgrace to human dignity and intelligence, and has done everything to usher in a demographic and environmental catastrophe that decent public policy and modern science are entirely capable of solving with free modern contraception, LARCs, vasectomies and public sex education for all.
Of course, organized religion and Father Douthat prefer to keeps their heads in its medieval sand about that.
Capitalism works well, too, when balanced by regulation of sociopathic greed.
That's why civilized countries like Canada, Japan and Europeans have affordable healthcare and America has the greatest healthcare rip-off in the world...Greed Over People runs amoral America.
But capitalism does raise living standards, even in its mutant, inhumane American form, and rising (and expensive) living standards are also a powerful contraceptive, as people choose less children and more individual comfort.
On the other rapacious hand, the three richest Americans own as much wealth as the bottom 160 million, and the world's five richest own as much wealth as the bottom 3.4 billion...that capitalist math is insane and sociopathic.
Religion and capitalism have both done a nice job trashing society and Mother earth.
Now let's try some decent regulation and public policy.
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Your comments are marvelous, but off topic. Whenever the discussion turns to the fact that a woman’s basic human dignity is so often diminished, men such as yourself attempt to change the subject?
2
Socrates, excellent, as usual. Thank you.
1
I taught philosophy for 8 years at a local university and I can't pull out a clear argument from this piece. If it were to be one of my students I would tell them to rewrite it with less ideological references and some attempt at describing just what commodification is and why it is to be discouraged in certain realms.
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Greg....logorrhea is a common communication disorder of mostly conservative writers that causes excessive wordiness and repetitiveness, which can sometimes lead to incoherency.
We all hope that Father Douthat seeks available treatment in the marketplace....let us pray.
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Funny. I didn't have any trouble understanding the argument. Feminists who equate surrogacy and/or pornography and/or prostitution with the "woman's right to chose" trope should think more in terms of the moral stature and dignity of women. And he gives reasons, if they have deep roots and thus may be unintelligible to some.
2
I wouldn't blame the writer. With everybody thinking of Trump's inability to come out with a coherent sentence, commentators probably feel it necessary to prove that they can express themselves clearly.
Many thoughtful points too subtle for many readers. There is an alternative strategy to de-monetize all human value, and values - outlaw capitalism, freeze all technological implementation, and non-coercively reduce world population by 4 billion over time. Then we would start to see the emergence of people who would not be imperfect robots, people who value of caring for one another.
Why, because their lives would resemble the evolutionary conditions in which our affective, emotional, social brains evolved, hopefully with less brutality. Conditions in which we need to love one another.
4
I am most certainly a feminist, but I do not believe that participating in surrogacy is a human right any more than I think that owning an assault rifle is a human right. There are limits to individual freedom – it’s all about where the lines are drawn. I find no cognitive dissonance in believing that some things should be limited and others not, and therefore that abortion should be a right, but human trafficking and commodified reproduction should not.
Surrogacy is rooted in the egotistical and biologically deterministic notion that propagating your own genetic lineage is essential to your personal fulfillment. That imperative is not sufficient, in my mind, to justify the risks of exploitation of surrogate mothers inherent in a surrogacy relationship. On a finite planet with an exponentially growing human population we are hurling toward disaster. Eight billion miracles is enough. If you truly want to love a child, adopt one that needs a home.
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If you don't support a woman's right to do as she wishes with her own body you are not a feminist.
The only limits to individual freedom are those that prevent one from harming others.
There is no victim in surrogacy, and hence there is no crime.
Your argument is completely muddled. Are you worried about exploitation of surrogates or overpopulation? You can protect surrogates from exploitation well short of making it illegal, and preventing infertile couples and them alone from engaging in biological fulfillment while counseling them to adopt the unwanted offspring of others won't do a thing to lessen overpopulation. Giving women greater access to contraception and better education will, over time, reduce the number of unwanted children and is more than likely to reduce the number of women willing to see surrogacy as an economic boon.
The "handmaids" of capitalism in the United States are:
1. The Roberts majority whose Citizens United decision turned our government over to right wing corporatists who seek greater personal wealth at the cost of all social programs and progress.
2. The Republican Congress that has been bought with corporate dark money in order to serve the wealthiest capitalists in America.
It would be interesting to calculate the change in net income of the 0.1% after the Trump/GOP tax slashes combined with the growth in profits after the unleashing of fossil fuel industries. That income should then be compared to the net income based on the sale ova and/or surrogate motherhood.
Yes, the true handmaidens of capitalism are those serving the political wishes of the corporatists who own them. Everything else is mere child's play.
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Mr. Douthat makes the (very accurate) point that while most people claim to be motivated by reasons other than money, their actions tend to belie that. (How many NYT readers think their own taxes should be increased to provide more benefits to the poor?) As someone once said: "If they say it's about the principle and not about the money, you can be sure it's about the money."
6
@J.Waddell, fellow Buckeye: I'd gladly pay 25% more taxes to help the poor via affordable healthcare, housing, and education. I object to more of my taxes supporting ICE's separation of asylum-seeking families, an obscene military budget -- and, soon, the Space Force -- as well as corporate subsidies, and tax cuts for the wealthy who dont need another yacht.
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That's the point of (income) taxation: you're going to pay for things you believe in, as well as things you don't.
I'm an affluent liberal Democrat. I've said many times in these comments that I don't pay enough taxes. I live in a society where many have not been as fortunate as me. I believe in strong government that is well funded and looks after the welfare of our all our citizens. I don't mind spreading my good fortune around. Most of my fellow Democrats feel exactly the same way. If we didn't, we'd all vote for the zero government, zero taxes Republicans.
6
Yes, a superb analysis . Modern extremists would do well to consider that, born in a different era, they may have shouted in support of the opposition. Right and wrong are cultural issues , not absolutes We are in desperate need of moderate thinking, of careful pondering of all sides of arguments, no matter how much the latest trending thought excites our blood in outrage or sympathy.
9
Mr. Douthat, can’t you write a column about dehumanization of sex without bashing feminists and liberals? Our society winks at the commercialization of sex, prostitution, and our President embraces it. Where do you think that leads?
And, really, writing such a silly column when the government is separating innocent young children from their parents and warehousing them is morally tone deaf. Embrace the cause of pro-life and join your voice and pen in protest of this morally repugnant pogrom.
223
Really?! You criticize Mr. Douthat for writing to encourage thought and discussion about an additional topic rather than jumping on the bandwagon to write would be the fifth opinion piece today alone to appear in the NYT on the topic of separating children from their parents who are detained following illegal border crossings!?
I wholeheartedly agree that the separation issue is heartbreaking and complicated, clearly worthy of significant coverage and discussion. But I also believe that most people are capable of reading about and thinking about more than one single issue over the course of a day. So I for one appreciate that Mr. Douthat had the independence to raise a different yet also thought provoking topic, rather than walking in lockstep with your insistence on limiting himself to your preferred topic of the day.
6
I think he wrote this column so he wouldn't have to take a position on the issue that is tearing the country apart. Not a profile in courage.
1
Pointing out a basic flaw in contemporary liberal and feminist thought is not “bashing feminists and liberals” - it is pointing out this blind spot essentially undermines the feminist and liberal beliefs. Does commercial surrogacy do this? The broadcast remarks of one of the men who actually employed a surrrogate points in that direction. You can google the actual comment. Ross brings up a major issue. I am amazed that so few women addressed this.
2
Sometimes I want to write a response to a column, but I know I don't have the time to craft my thoughts carefully, and 1500 characters won't do.
If Ross had resisted that reflexive, predictable attack on reproductive rights and gay marriage, which causes me and surely many others to become distracted and recoil, he would've made a stronger case. He is absolutely right about commodification and consumerism and how capitalism has coopted feminism, but now I just want to argue about the difference between abortion (retaining autonomy) and surrogacy (selling your body as a commodity).
Instead, I'm just going to agree that selling yourself doesn't make you free. Because in this country slavery was a race-based institution and is inextricable from white supremacy, we don't see clearly enough how a nostalgia for slavery apart from the disease of racism informs the problem of inequality—the huge distortions of power and wealth that are anti-democratic and anti-republican. Historically, prostitution has been closely linked with slavery, and surrogacy does raise questions of human trafficking. To cloak this under feminism is deluded, a madness induced by the religion of capitalism, which dictates that all choices made in the name of moneymaking are hallowed, inviolable, and inarguable, and all other choices worthy only of derision.
Did Ross Douthat utter the phrase "slaves of capital" with some degree of seriousness? Liberals and true conservatives should have that conversation.
47
Agreed, yet no one should be able to judge another’s actions relative to their body. Not surrogacy. Not prostitution. Not coal mining. Not motorcyclists. Not skydiving.
2
C Wolfe:
I would LOVE to see "that conversation" between liberals and conservatives. But I don't think that either the media or the political parties would find it a profitable.
1
One thing to remember about prostitution laws is that the women were much more likely to be the ones charged than the men. If only the men were prosecuted, we might see different attitudes.
65
I've always thought the same thing as you about prostitution and have similar thoughts on illegal immigration. If the employers of illegal immigrants were prosecuted instead of the workers, perhaps we might see different attitudes and we would've come up with a comprehensive immigration policy years ago.
58
And who is shamed by the sex act engaged in by Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels, for money? Prostitution, on both sides.
1
Perhaps.
But it's also possible under the circumstances you describe that such women might be persecuted by society at large as temptresses and family breakers.
The greater underlying questions are how society treats women and how women treat themselves.
I dont know for certain, but i doubt prosecuting men would change that.
The underlying third rail of commodification is choice,
The question is always, if you choose to "sell your soul", was that choice made freely, with complete autonomy--and whether complete autonomy is itself morally enough for that sale to be ethically allowable.
I am well open to the argument that, given the psychological and sociological imperatives and constraints that all of us develop living in an interactive society, complete free choice is generally more of an ideal than an actuality. But the real deep down argument is whether ultimately autonomy is the "zero-order requirement" for ethical choices, or whether there are competing zero-order requirements.
There are cultural as well as personal variations in the opinion here--not to mention philosophers and other scholars have been debating this for centuries. The observation that where you stand on this depends on where you sit also led to whole philosophical offshoot schools, such as deconstructionism. But I don't think we're any closer to consensus on this than Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were.
13
Theoretically this is true. The actuality is quite different. Women have been systematically denied access to money. They are paid less and are usually disadvantaged when they try to borrow. Choice isn’t the issue for most - making the mortgage payment or the rent is the priority.
2
"But the real deep down argument is whether ultimately autonomy is the "zero-order requirement" for ethical choices . . . "
And what does "autonomy" mean? Certainly, it doesn't exist in observable nature. It's a subjective experience. But the idea of autonomy made sense in a world where identity had multiple sources--culture, religion, education, family--which were transmitted by different means, and which were predicated on the individual's uniqueness as well her inclusion. When all of life is mediated by the marketplace, choices (and therefore identity) are defined by others according to their economic self-interest. Individuals are exchangeable, and the idea of autonomy is just another useless thing they sell you.
Good column, Mr. Douthat, on the connection between feminism and consumerism--a kind of consumerist protection movement. As you say, what about the higher values?
4
Funny how there is a connection between feminism and consumerism, and not one between masculinism and consumerism. Why is that? Because masculinsim is the default and at fault for the current consummerist society we are in. Most politicians, corporate heads are men. They have brought us to where we are today. Stop blaming women for the greed is good culture we have today.
2
Here's a note: Adam Smith, who we might say is one of the patron saints of free-market economies (cf. The Wealth of Nations), wrote another book called A Theory of Moral Sentiments. It could well have been intended as a companion piece to balance the amorality of unfettered pursuit of self-interest. Moral Sentiments is not overtly religious, more like a description of how human beings in social arrangements "peer group pressure" themselves toward better behavior.
Mr. Douthat, thanks for pointing out what should be obvious: that feminism should be about the best interests of women, not just their commercial interests.
31
Feminism, in fact, does care about the best interests of women, their families and children.
More than I can say for anyone who thinks incarcerating innocent children is ok.
61
Feminism has been used to compete with men and make women look anything but feminine!
And Robert, who determines “the best interests of the women” — they or their peer group or someone else’s religion?
3
The now clear and undeniable alliance of social progressives and the largest corporations in the US will not cause the American left to reconsider and lament the loss of its soul or rebel credibility. The commitment of Democrats on the side of the Tortilla Curtain who have civil rights to social justice that might interfere with the commodification of everything including our selves was never real. The outcomes of the feminist debates about surrogacy, prostitution and pornography seem hardly worth pointing out because how could Andrea Dworkin's outrage at selling female degradation contend with the one freedom that matters to sell our selves (at least once)? Let liberals explain what they believe in that should prevent a woman from agreeing to sexual slavery, I cannot. What Ross Douthat might also consider in hindsight is the longstanding allegiance of the Christian vote to the same corporate interest that abrogated the outcome of the vote on same sex marriage in Indiana. That allegiance made the Republican Party on the balance dominant in the US during my lifetime, so I wonder what exactly was the argument that unfettered capitalism and Christianity were natural allies?
10
Will
I can't imagine the blindness that would lead a supposedly capable human being to criticize Liberals for selling out to corporate America and then choose Republicans as some kind of alternative.
Do you not read the news?
Are you ignorant of history?
Have you never driven driven through urban decay or rural decrepitude?
You created that mess. Liberals (or, as you sneeringly put in au courant snarkitude, "progressives") largely devote themselves to finding a cure.
Another commenter here snidely asked if the airhead liberal readers of NYT would voluntarily go for a tax increase assuming they could be sure the money would go for the poor and not some conservative slush fund or private social service conglomerate. The answer is an obvious yes because, given the opportunity, it has happened before.
Conservatives crushed our legislative system, they perverted the courts to extend the privilege of the corporate and the wealthy, they consciously created a society in which the only measure of worth is riches, the only endorsement needed for action is that it will increase profits, the only function of government is to prepare the field for private enterprise and personal financial aggrandizement.
Our system makes people richer simply because they started out rich, regardless of ambition or ability; the poor have no chance. Taxes favor wealth. The law makes exceptions for those rich enough to hide their money and avoid taxes.
And that is your ideal?
8
We should continue to err on the side of individual freedom. Slippery slope arguments are unsound, but we do need to pay attention as mores shift lest we be caught unawares holding outdated assumptions.
12
Commoditization of women/women's bodies - Do you mean maybe like before a woman marries her Father owns her, and when a woman does marry she loses not only her name but her independent right to own property and other legal rights like it was in most of Europe/America in the 1800's AND much of the 1900's? The inability to get a credit card in her own name in the 1970's even when she made more money than the other member of her marriage? Life is messy, people make correct and incorrect decisions all the time. Making decisions for oneself is one thing, claiming the right to make decisions for someone else is another. I see less of a move towards commodification today and more of a move to autonomy - which is very messy. Good.
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Just for the record, I had credit cards in my own name beginning shortly after I graduated from college in the late 1960s.
I did have to get a co-signer for a loan, but it didn't have to be a man, and as my mother, a banker, pointed out, a young man in the same financial situation as I was, would also have needed to get a co-signer.
I'm not trying to claim that there weren't any problems and that sexism didn't have a negative effect in various ways on many women's lives, but I'm also tired of all the exaggeration about things were.
The great Karl Marx has described this phenomenon best. We are in Late Capitalism, the phase where everything is a commodity and thus a monetary price. Using Marx's hierarchy, virtually everything can be explained as a reflection of this point in history. People such as this Opinion writer do us much value by elevating the thinking on a detailed circumstance to one of theme. This highlights the greatest weakness of The Media; its incessant river of very specific details on all matters permits no reflection for the powerful threads that are the energies of the forces at hand.
35
Reflections on the powerful threads that are the energies of the forces at hand are the stuff of books, not The Media.
Remember--Karl Marx was an economist who died in poverty, and his greatest legacy--the Soviet Union--collapsed, while "Late Capitalism" is doing well 150 years later.
Capitalism continually adapts to changes in markets and labor. So, to paraphrase Mark Twain, the reports of capitalism's death are greatly exaggerated.
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Marx would not have considered Stalinism to be his legacy.
Capitalism "adapts" by starting wars in which millions of people die.
Its "adaptation" can be seen today in Yemen and other benighted nations.
A fasciating column. I recently had an argument with a friend about my idea that #MeToo is about celebrity as much as about sexual harassment, since the only tool it offers women to prosecute their tormentors depends on his fame & the willingness of the media to publicize their accusations (but not the accusations of the waitress next door). We also disagreed about a hypothetical instance of an actress who slept with a producer in order to get a role, in a situation where there was no physical coercion, only an above-board exchange, and the actress was not under economic hardship. Assuming the agreement was not violated & she got the role, would she have a right to complain afterward? My friend thought "yes," which I suspect is how most feminists would think--suggesting that feminism isn't completely subsumed under capitalist values.
The story Mr. Douthat tells about feminism is essentially the story that I often tell about religion: that Protestantism, for example, is evolving from commuities advancing spirituality & the self-critique of the fallen, to commercial mega-churches & media outlets pursuing & amassing economic & political power by selling moralism and tailoring their morality to fit the amorality of militaristic "free-market" Republicans. For left OR right it's hard these days to just advance the idea that capitalism is something we should be harnassing to our own purposes, rather than something that defines what our purposes are.
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The actress in your example above would not have a right to complain (about the exchange, not her acting role or the movie etc). Two adults used what they had to offer in order to get something from each other. Like the song says, "I used her, she used me, neither one cared. We were getting our share."
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If you are so concerned about women delaying having children, or renting out their bodies for others to have children, perhaps you should advocate for equal pay and opportunity for women in the workplace. Perhaps you should advocate for men and women who want more time at home with their children. Our country's obsession with capitalism is destroying families. What would help? Universal healthcare, so that people don't have to work full time at jobs they hate just for benefits. Then men and women could work part time and balance home life. Then young people may be more interested in having children. Since I know you and your party aren't really interested in helping families, I'll assume you just want to, once again, blame women for the ills of our society.
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This is precisely the antidote to the social ills Douthat recounts, yet he skirts by them in favor of Sunday Mass.
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Just to add my two cents, I'm no fan of Mr. Douthat but I think his very point is that women may be able to succeed where no one else can.
I don't think he's blaming women. I think he's suggesting they could be saviors on this.
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Capitalism and families, while not mutually exclusive, are solidly at odds in the workplace. That is as it should be since any activity outside the workplace has a detrimental effect (to some degree) on the operation of that workplace. It’s not just women who bring baggage to the office, shop or factory floor and I’d wager that if the topic were studied, men would be the far greater villains. PTA meetings, kids sports and activities, that weekend trip, major life events and social relationships all cast a negative pall on ones performance.
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I'm all for putting constraints on capitalism. Those include declaring that organizations of any kind do not have rights conferred by the constitution. Corporations are not people, my friend, they are written contracts. There should also be restraints in the form of environmental and fiscal regulations, and all organizations should pay taxes. After all, capitalism should not be the ends, but the means to a better society. Suggesting that regulating women's reproduction choices is some form of reigning in capitalism's excesses is preposterous. But, nice try.
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So, am I to understand that you don't think unions should have any rights?
After all, unions are non-profit corporations.
For a change, in this essay I didn't get the moralizing sanctimony I've come to expect from Ross, or at least not the full dose. In fact this is his second in a row that didn't thoroughly rankle me. Here I found he has an interesting, if somewhat flawed take on the situation, but nowhere did I think he equated controlling women's choices with fixing greed and avarice. I don't buy into the notion that feminists are reactionaries sans deliberative and purposeful self direction, and I generally cringe when any man thinks himself qualified to speak with authority on this topic. He's dead wrong in thinking choice and dignity are mutually exclusive. In fact as in most of his columns, he demonstrates a lack of the signature characteristic of being a christian, which he claims not just to be but to represent, which is humility. These criticisms aside, I do find food for thought in this column, as opposed to it simply raising my blood pressure and ire. Ross has an eccentric point of view, and given that one could learn a few things from digesting rather than rejecting what he says. His cautions about capitalism are salient points, and for now at least he's abandoned the disparagement of the "unchurched". Let's recognize if not applaud him for neither tipping at windmills nor overindulging in gobbledegook logic. It is, as you say, a nice try.
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Unions do not have rights. They defend the rights of their members who have the right to organize into a union.
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The excesses of capitalism are all across the political spectrum. Why just a week or so ago I read about an evangelical minister demanding that his followers pony up to buy him a new private jet, the older two just weren't good enough.
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That's not captialism, that's begging or rather govt. which has the power of the jackboot. With capitalism, if you don't have the money, you can't have it.
Okay, I wasn't going to reply to Gregory, but, really, I can't stop trying to figure out how an evangelical minister demanding his followers buy him a new jet is caused by "govt. which has the power of the jackboot."
When I was a teenager in the 1960s, homes for unwed mothers were common and popular; indeed, there were often waiting lists for girls (and they were only girls not women) who got pregnant and were not prepared for parenthood. Unavailability of birth control (this was before the pill, but even when the pill was available to women, it was unavailable to girls for fear it might encourage them to have sex) and abortion being a crime no doubt contributed to many pregnant girls. But homes for unwed mothers were common because that's the only place pregnant girls could go since public schools prohibited pregnant girls from attending. Homes for unwed mothers were baby factories, as it was always contemplated the girls would give up their babies for adoption. Much has changed since, but not the natural instincts of a parent: even then, many girls often changed their minds after the baby was born and did not give them up for adoption. I suppose homes for unwed mothers have all but disappeared. Instead, we have surrogacy. Is that progress?
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Yes that is progress. Women CHOOSE surrogacy. Girls didn’t choose to be in homes for unwed mothers. There is no equivalency between the two.
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Those homes were often run by nuns and the girls were regularly shamed and often mistreated.
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And in what ways are these two things analogous? Apples and oranges, or more likely apples and string beans.
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As a young women back in the late 70s, I remember listening to a classmate explain that I should not be contemplating marriage and children (something that was still almost 15-20 years in the future) because I owed it to women to use my education and brains to become part of a work force of liberated women.
And here I thought women's lib was about be able to make choices; instead I was told by another woman that it was about being required to live a different set of ironclad rules.
Feminism is not about setting up restrictions for women - it is about giving women a full share in their own decision making and personal agency and the same types of choice that men have about how they go about their lives. So a feminist would let another women make the choice of abortion, or of surrogacy, even if she did not personally support those choices. A feminist supports the ability to choose.
Ross, a whole lot of evil comes from capitalism: drug prices that hold sick kids hostage; healthcare that is only affordable for the healthy; jobs which don't pay living wages being the source of full employment bragging; 21% of households with children in "food insecurity;" tax packages that rip wealth from the future to send to a few people's Cayman accounts today; a government that defines the term "kleptocracy." Surrogacy is not one of those evils. It is just a personal choice; if a woman chooses to be exploited by a reality TV show, that is her own dumb choice, because she is free to make it.
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Just fabulous Cathy. Just fabulous.
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I could kiss your feet for this column, Ross Douthat. Renting wombs and selling babies is a travesty. I know, I know, gay folks and celebrities are big on this practice of preventing children from relationship with their bioparents. It's become trendy, the child as an accessory, a pet. Nature designed procreation to involve a male and a female, not a male and a male nor a female and a female. Bringing new life into the world is the most important function of human beings; we women should value our procreative gift as the highest calling.
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I add to my post that I have friends, a lesbian couple, 1 a minister and the other a physician, who co-parent a beautiful, talented, now-adolescent daughter, conceived by the minister with a gay male professor friend. This seems to work well for all of them, because the daughter has always known her male parent, who is an active part of her life though he lives with his gay male partner in a lovely historic home. My point is this child relates to both her bio-parents with love.
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Anne:
Treating children "as accessories" is certainly a phenomenon seen in heterosexual parents as well as LGBT parents. "Nature" gives us gay people who have an instinct for child rearing, and it gives us orphans, so it would seem perverted to keep them separate. The question is whether it is nature, or greedy capitalists, who give us technology.....
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"...Bringing new life into the world is the most important function of human beings..."
I have no difficulty understanding how this proposition may "in the fullness of time" and without significant qualification, be proven true and accepted in the same way that heliocentricity has and is.
The "but" is, in my own experience and education - which includes 19 years in (Roman) Catholic schools (tho now I am "lapsed") - there is higher degree of difficulty for this proposition's being accepted than heliocentricity, in which regard recall that despite Galileo's having been close to Urban VIII the Inquisition required him to recant and spend the rest of his life in exile.
Surrogacy Law in Canada.
Contrary to popular belief, surrogacy is legal in Canada. The Assisted Human Reproduction Act prohibits the provision or acceptance of consideration to a woman for acting as a surrogate; it is illegal to pay a surrogate mother for her services.
Commercialized surrogacy is banned in most of Europe and Canada for exactly the reasons expressed by feminist voices decades ago.
It has only been “normalized” in the USA - the same country that resoundingly defeated its attempt at including an Equal Rights Amendment in its constitution.
“American Exceptionalism”?
Exceptionally misogynistic!
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I agree that something needs to temper the ravages of unrestrained capitalism, though I'm not sure Christian moralism should get the credit for "gentl[ing] the ruthless capitalism of the robber barons". Rather, government regulation should get the credit, though I realize admitting that is anathema for a conservative.
I also agree that capitalism has a corrupting influence on pretty much anything and everything it touches, unless there are strong social (and yes, regulatory) safeguards in place. You single out the current trajectory of feminism here, but it is far from the only thing influenced by capitalism. I think even of Christianity, with Prosperity Theology and the Gospel of Wealth. Time did a survey in which 17% of American Christians identified with Prosperity Theology, and that was in 2006. The movement has only grown. I have also read several articles talking about how Prosperity Theology helped propel Donald Trump to the White House. I would be interested if you did a similar column on the evolution of Christianity, particularly evangelical Christianity, and its confluence with economic libertarianism.
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But many, if not most, of the groups who got the ball rolling in the government against the robber barons were based on Christian moralism.
As a general rule, I - a hard-core, multi-generational lefty - have little to no luck finding common ground with self-described conservatives or moralistic religious types, but I always read Douthat and I most often come away from doing so feeling glad that I did. If only there were a way for people to reject Fox News and read guys like this, putting rigid ideological differences aside long enough to examine a well-considered opinion. I might feel a little more hopeful in a scenario like that one.
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Good grief. Safe conception, pregnancy, birth, and who does -- and does not, have access to those things, has always been commodified. It's wrong. But singling out 'feminists' and surrogacy, while families are dealing with far larger consequences at our border, is a waste of print space and personal navel-gazing on your part.
Step up and use your pulpit to further our collective discussion on what 'family' means, universally.
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So much in our society today seems monetized and dehumanized. The Bravo TV couple who hired the surrogate mother should not have incorporated this into their dumb reality show, then ridiculed the woman on air. The core problem is that people have no decency, no manners, no scruples, no notion of the value of human dignity. They should have treated their surrogate with respect. They see her as a set of organs for rent. I assume that, in the near future, surrogate mothers won't be necessary. It will all be done in a lab. The woman made money, I guess, but what a way to have to do that.
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"The Bravo TV couple who hired the surrogate mother should not have incorporated this into their dumb reality show, then ridiculed the woman on air." This really happened? It is absurd that in a society that ridicules religion, the media - especially television - offer grossness and stupidity to the masses.
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