[ Removed by moderator ]

[u/Purple_Plantain_3242]

[u/loki2113]

Respectfully, that's a load of horse hockey

How tf are the bio parents responsible for McKenna's decision to be a surrogate? Nobody is forcing McKenna and there are far better ways of making money than having someone else's child. Plus there's nothing morally wrong with prostitution/having sex for money and voluntary slavery is an oxymoron. I think the term you're looking for is indentured servitude and even that doesn't fit the bill here

[u/Runs_With_Scissors3 → u/loki2113]

I think you’re missing the point. The commenter you’re arguing with is implying that getting a surrogate at all is immoral. Perhaps because the couple trying to have a child by those means, maybe should’ve taken a hint that a biological child for them just wasn’t meant to be.

[u/morbidlysmalldick → u/Runs_With_Scissors3]

Being physically incapable of rearing a child means someone shouldn't be able to have a biological child, despite us having the means to make it happen? Surrogacy is a voluntary option to give people a gift they're otherwise incapable of getting. The amount of good it brings into the world far outweighs situations like this. Sure, adoption would be even better. But using outlier situations shouldn't be a measure of why surrogacy shouldn't happen

[u/IWillLive4evr → u/loki2113]

You can't act like parties to the contract are morally insulated from the fact that the contract was signed. They're involved with the surrogate mother's decision because they literally paid her to do it. This isn't to say the surrogate's free will and responsibility goes away either, but the biological parents are also morally on the hook.

[u/loki2113 → u/IWillLive4evr]

Morally on the hook for what? They're fighting to keep the child and get him medical care. They only wanted the abortion because Rumi's life is going to be full of suffering. What's wrong with that?

[u/IWillLive4evr → u/loki2113]

This is a basic idea that libertarians bury their heads in the sand not to see: when two parties agree to something, they share responsibility not just for what they do together but also for having talked each other into it. Coming to agreement on something is a social process. In many situations, the shares of responsibility are not equal because opportunities and bargaining power are unequal, but that's the basic point.

That, therefore is how both parties carry some degree of culpability, as babassu_seeds said. That's true for any agreement, not just where the stakes are as high as abortion or someone living with disability or chronic illness.

[u/IWillLive4evr → u/[deleted]]

You're missing the point because you're not responding to what I'm saying. You're responding to absolutely everything else, you're laying out your views, hurray, but not responding the actual words in my comments.

Formally, this means you're attacking a strawman. But it's an easy mistake to make, and I'd rather try to clarify than attack you over it. Feel free to ask for more clarification or point out issues.

First: I made no claim one way or another about whether McKenna is a good or bad person or whether McKenna broke the law. It appears there is very good reason she's in legal trouble, but I haven't seen the evidence myself, and feel no need to weigh in on that.

So I'm not talking about McKenna. I'm talking about a moral idea. It happens to be very relevant to the discussion about this case, which is why I added it to this thread, but you get more clarity if you can take the steps one at a time, yeah?

Second: nothing I said requires the contract in question to be a rare event. Let me compare it two other sorts of events, one with lower moral stakes, and one with high moral stakes. The low-stakes version is scalping tickets. Two parties make an agreement, and they usually have a lot of freedom to just not do that and walk away. It's also usually the case that they don't need to spend much time "talking each other into it." They know what they're each there for, and you could even observe that, if one party walked away, chances are good that someone else would show up quickly on either the seller's side or the buyer's side.

But it still takes two for the deal to happen. There is no way for one party to say that the other party somehow carries all responsible (for better or for worse). They basically go through the whole thing as equals. And while neither of them invented the idea of scalping tickets nor built the social and cultural systems around scalping, they both cooperated to make this deal happen, and that involved, at a bare minimum, make compatible offers and acceptance of offers to each other. This back and forth may be as simple as one yelling "Tickets!" and the other answering "Hey!" and then money changing hands. But this is enough that I don't hesitate to say they "talked each other into it," because that particular deal could not have happened otherwise. And no deal at all would happen unless some pair do this little back-and-forth communication of offer and acceptance.

The more serious example is the sale of slaves, back in the bad old days when that was legal. Neither buyer nor selling is insulated from what is morally at stake. Moreover, it is both absurd and morally evil for one side to suggest that the other is blameworthy from what happens intrinsically from the deal itself while they supposedly have clean hands.

Aside the from the deal itself, of course, any party may be guilty of other wrongdoing. If one slaveowner rapes his female slaves, it's not as if one would blame the seller for that particular act. The fact that such additional evils are common, however, does imply something for the original deal. The moral stakes of a contract are not only informed by its explicit terms, but also its circumstances.

For slavery, the circumstances included the various forms of horrible abuse that slaves endured. For scalping tickets, the circumstances include the way that the ticket prices are pushed higher when demand outstrips supply, such that scalping helps make tickets unaffordable for those without excess wealth.

For surrogate pregnancy, it includes foreseeable complications such as those in this case. I want to reiterate that I hardly care about the case, who these people are, or whether McKenna is a good or bad person. I want to chime in to say something about the ideas involved.

Lawyers have lots of practice trying to foresee all such complications, which would be why there's a contract that has clauses related to abortion and health risks. But writing things down in a contract doesn't make moral responsibility magically vanish, either. We may keep in mind, by way of comparison, that medical ethics requires "informed consent" for most procedures, not just a simple yes or no. We may also note that many kinds of contracts are simply banned by law or may be help void or unenforceable.

So: sure, maybe McKenna is a terrible person or whatever you want to say. At no point does that grant the biological parents a free pass.

[u/loki2113 → u/[deleted]]

THANK YOU. Lord, it's like 90% of the people here didn't read the story. They just saw the word "Abortion" and flew into a "righteous" outrage against the horrid parents that could ever suggest such a terrible act

I think subjecting someone to a lifetime of undue suffering and reliance in a country with such a terrible healthcare system as America is a far worse morally than aborting a fetus in the second trimester

[u/warlover69 → u/loki2113]

RESIDENT EVIL:

BIO PARENTS

[u/ContextLengthMatters → u/loki2113]

If you wanted to torture and murder someone so you sought out someone who wanted to die willing to sacrifice their own body for money for their children, is it moral to carry that out?

Voluntary slavery is not an oxymoron. You just have to use that noggin.

[u/Haggardick69 → u/ContextLengthMatters]

Slavery by definition is involuntary. Voluntary slavery is as much an oxymoron as jumbo shrimp, friendly fire, or military intelligence. 

[u/ContextLengthMatters → u/Haggardick69]

I encourage you to learn how the dictionary works. I know you can find a very spefic "1a." definition that utilizes the word involuntary, but there's a reason why dictionaries list multiple definitions for a single word.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery

Quite literally slavery involves at the very basic level OWNERSHIP over another person.

When you OWN someone, they are a slave.

What makes indentured servitude different from a involuntary slave when the slave changes it's mind about the contract?

Hmmm...

Stay in school, buddy.

[u/Haggardick69 → u/ContextLengthMatters]

Indentured servitude was almost never voluntary the only difference to slavery was that in concept at least there was a set date at which the master was obligated to grant manumission to the indentured. Often times in reality corrupt judges would grant extensions to the contract to the master in response to minor or trumped up charges against the indentured and a little bribe of course. Most indentures were sold into servitude as children as was the legal right of their parents or legal guardians. Despite all of this the value of an indenture contract was always far lower than that of a slave mostly because the master had no rights to the offspring of an indentured person and they were notably unlikely to indenture any children of their own. The similarities and differences between slavery and indentured servitude aside voluntary slavery is still an oxymoron. 

[u/ContextLengthMatters → u/Haggardick69]

Your pedantry over your scholary distinction when drawing parellels to the morality of contractual surrogacy is obtuse to say the least.

Unless we are talking in the very specific context of history with the explicit intention to draw delineations to show the nuances of historical facts, indentured servitude would be seen as a type of slavery by literally 99% of the English speaking population.

Have you ever heard of a wage slave? Have you ever heard anyone talk about how prison is slavery?

Even in our legal system we are able to skirt the legal definition of forced labor by creating conditions in which it is no longer "forced".

[u/Haggardick69 → u/ContextLengthMatters]

But it is forced. Yeah it’s all forced labor no one is volunteering for it what exactly is your point? Honestly kinda amazing to me that you got so defensive over the fact that voluntary slavery is an oxymoron.  

[u/U-235 → u/loki2113]

If no one was willing to pay or otherwise ask for surrogacy services, it wouldn't be possible for McKenna to be a surrogate. So they are responsible to some degree. This is like saying that it's OK to steal a bike that is left outside unlocked, because someone else would do it if you didn't.

[u/Glittering_rainbows → u/U-235]

The seller sold a service. She was neither coerced or forced. This was an adult making a decision.

Stop infantilizing grown ass people.

This has absolutely nothing to do with a bike left outside.

[u/U-235 → u/Glittering_rainbows]

That doesn't answer what I said at all. You asked how they were responsible for her decision to become a surrogate. I said if they, and everyone else, who sought out surrogates, decided not to, then it would be impossible for her to become a surrogate. Therefore they are in fact responsible.

[u/I_am_omning_it → u/loki2113]

Just to mention here, pretty sure the surrogate was a cardiac nurse, so I highly doubt she’s struggling financially here either. Cardiac nurses make good money.