Bizarre Misinformation About Bioethicist's Proposal
A case study in how misinformation spreads
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“‘Fetal containers’: Bioethicist proposes using brain dead women as surrogates,” is the title of an article by LiveAction’s Cassy Fiano-Chesser. Basically, a bioethicist proposed that if a person is braindead and consents in advance to having her body used, she’d be allowed to be a surrogate for couples who want a child but can’t have one the natural way.
The original article isn’t very good, but it isn’t terrible. It at least doesn’t mislead about the proposal. It just says bizarre things like the following.
Smajdor acknowledged the process is “straightforwardly the use of the body as a foetal container.” But like many apologists for surrogacy, she still argued it should be allowed if the donor agrees — despite the inherently exploitative nature of surrogacy.
It’s unclear why it’s exploitative. Sure, one is using another’s body, but this also happens whenever people have sex. Is sex inherently exploitative? It’s not clear. I’ll first reply to the points in the article, before describing the insane ways that this article has been used to mislead.
While many view surrogacy as an act of altruism, such a contract has a strong tendency to commodify women and children, and can put impoverished women at a disadvantage, with the temptation to sell their wombs to the wealthy to produce desired children.
This also applies to nannies. Nannies are disproportionately hired by rich people, and they’re disproportionately poor. Should we view being a nanny as inherently exploitative? No, for it to be objectionable and exploitative, it has to be bad for the parties involved, but if they all consent, it’s better for them in expectation, and third parties are generally bad judges of what will make one’s life go well.
In turn, the act of conception and childbearing become products, with couples choosing the kind of embryo they want, finding and hiring a woman (often low-income) to gestate the child for them, and then waiting for delivery.
And why is it bad when they become products? It’s not just the labor that one goes through pregnancy that is a product—so is wage labor. Is all wage labor bad? If so, that requires more substantive argument than is provided here.
Surrogates in such situations are often not treated as whole persons, but as gestating wombs that have been purchased for one sole purpose.
Aside from providing no evidence for the claim, the author doesn’t present a reason this is very troubling. When I buy a product from someone, I don’t really think about them much—I certainly don’t internalize that they are full persons in some important respect, depending on the circumstances. But purchasing things isn’t inherently immoral.
If things don’t progress according to the buyers’ stipulated plan — perhaps “unwanted” multiples are conceived, or the child is diagnosed with a disability or is found to be the “undesired” sex — then the surrogate may be pressured to have an abortion, regardless of her personal feelings about it. Some surrogates in similar situations have found themselves abandoned
This is true of having a child broadly. Is that immoral? All these things can have possible downsides, but the upsides outweigh, rather obviously.
In the Ancient Greek play Antigone by Sophocles, the title character risks her life to bury the body of her brother, arguing that it is immoral to treat a dead body with disrespect. The play is fictional, but the themes are timeless — and very real. If brain death is true death, it does not then grant someone license to use the body of that deceased human being as a tool to give them what they want. The body, even in death, still demands respect, and Smajdor’s proposal is not only disrespectful, but also dehumanizing and exploitative.
If they consent, then it should! You should be allowed to have your body used for any purpose after your death. Would the author object to giving your organs away after death based on it being exploitative? This is just an inconsistent demand for rigor—an argument that would be seen as ridiculous in any other context.
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Dr. Jessica Taylor posted a screenshot of the article—a screenshot which conveniently omitted the caveat about it being done with consent. It had the caption “I just, I hate the world.” This has about 3.3 million views. More people viewed this tweet than died in the Cambodian genocide.
And the replies show that people did not check to see that this was misinformation. Nothing said was directly false, but very relevant context was omitted.
(Strange, because the bioethicist who wrote the proposal was a woman).
THE WOMEN WOULD HAVE TO VOLUNTEER!
A woman is certainly not merely a fetal container. But she is, if pregnant, a fetal container, just as I’m a heart, liver, and kidney container.
THE AUTHOR WAS A WOMAN!
THE AUTHOR WAS A WOMAN!
Well, generally rape involves people who don’t consent. In this case, the person does consent.
But the proposal was about doing it with the explicit consent of the person.
This would only be done with braindead people. They can’t be abused—they are no longer welfare subjects.
There were about a quadrillion replies like this. Because when someone sees something outrageous on social media no one checks. Now the bioethicist who proposed this is no doubt getting tons of backlash, angry emails being written and so on. When millions of people see something, some of them end up writing angry letters.
Information can spread exceptionally quickly on social media. Because no one has an incentive to check.
"Responding" to literal bots on twitter is a waste of your time.