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Dystopian Nightmares: When Nature Isn’t Normative
Just over the last few days, the following stories have drifted through my news feed. The first is the one you undoubtedly know about: Bruce Jenner has had himself surgically mutilated, and has (to great fanfare!) donned obscene amounts of make-up, and unveiled his new, feminine persona to the world.
Second, our newest class of More Authentic Persons is apparently the “transabled”: people who feel “like imposters” in fully functional bodies, and who deliberately deform themselves in order to achieve the disabilities they feel they ought to have. In this piece we are introduced to “One Hand Jason” (his preferred name), who cut off his own arm with a power tool because he felt, in his heart, that he was truly a disabled person.
Third, in Britain, a mother was denied custody of her own biological child on the grounds that — through an informal, handshake arrangement — she had originally agreed to sell the baby to the gay couple, one of whom provided the needed sperm. After the child was born, she reneged on the agreement (once again, never formalized) and chose to raise the baby herself. A judge ordered her to hand her daughter over to the two gay men, demanded that any visits from the mother be supervised, and for good measure insisted that she not speak about the case until the child is 18.
The judge’s justification? He thinks it’s in the little girl’s interests, since the two men look to him like more fit parents than the actual mother. The mother has not been found to be either negligent or abusive, though one grimly hilarious write-up I found tried to indicate that she must be, on the grounds that she breastfeeds the child, carries her in a sling, and shares a bed. Oh yes! And she keeps the little girl with her at all times. At 15 months. Call a social worker, quick!
Now, admittedly, there are elements to the British case that seem decidedly “off.” If, as it appears, the woman just wanted to have a baby, why promise to hand him over to the gay couple? There are quite a number of ways to secure a sperm sample that wouldn’t involve such deception and complication. The biological father might also have a fair case that his paternal rights have been violated (which is another good reason why babies really should not be conceived under such irregular circumstances.) But hard cases, as we all know, make for bad law. The legal precedent here seems to suggest that it’s all right to tear a child away from her mother, even against the mother’s stringent objection and with no evidence of abuse or neglect, simply because a judge thinks this is in the little girls’ best long-term interests.
I know many people here are nervous (or even contemptuous?) about the sort of ethical reasoning that holds nature to be morally normative. I understand that drawing the correct lessons from nature can be rather complicated. But if we aren’t prepared to view natural attachments as having any normative content, where does the crazy end? And what stops Leviathan from seizing everything that is most precious to us and reordering the universe according to the whims of our progressive overlords?
Here’s the sort of speculation that occasionally keeps me awake at night. (You can call me paranoid if you like, but keep in mind that my most progressive friends told me ten years ago that I was wildly paranoid for thinking that Christian wedding vendors would ever be shut down for refusing to service same-sex weddings. And in a world in which Bruce Jenner’s voluntary mutilation is celebrated as courageous and inspiring, can we really trust to “common sense” anymore? When people will actually debate whether a person who chops off his own hand because it “feels right” is acting rationally?)
There are gay couples in the world who would like to have children. Adoption is complicated. Surrogacy is expensive. And modern progressives have a bad habit of asking government to make up for the injustices of nature (see: HHS mandate). Is it the gay person’s fault that his sexual orientation hasn’t put him in a position to procreate naturally with the person he loves? Of course not. This seems like exactly the sort of injustice progressives would seek to address through law.
So how long will it take before someone muses, “You know, insane Catholic women like Rachel Lu seem to be having a lot of babies. More than decent people consider reasonable or seemly. There’s no way they’re going to be able to provide all those kids with a decent upbringing (which is to say, a full slate of “enriching activities” from age three, and constant supervision practically through adulthood). Meanwhile, Joe and Bob over here desperately want a child, and is it their fault that two men can’t have a baby together? Of course not. So wouldn’t it be more fair, and also in the best interests of those excess Lu children, to give them a better, brighter future with Joe and Bob? We’ll pay the mother for her gestational trouble, naturally. Think of it as eminent domain laws for babies.”
Paranoid? I hope so. But already, through surrogacy and the promotion of gay parenting, progressives are working to undermine the idea that there is anything important about the connection between a mother and the child she bears. What would prevent this scenario from eventually becoming reality?
Published in General
These days? Nothing.
That transabled phenomena is not new. I’ve seen that before, though I wasn’t given a name. There are people who believe that they should have been born without a particular limb. And I’ve seen (and that article mentioned a case or two) that they have gotten surgeons to perform the amputation. It’s sick. It’s a mental illness. Such amputations should be prohibited through law. And the same goes for sex change surgery, which I think is along the lines of the same mental illness. It should be against the law for any doctor to perform any amputation not due to a physical ailment in the limb. Or penis.
Why Rachel are you only picking on Progressives. Libertarians, at least in theory, support this insanity. They just don’t want the government to pay for it. It’s an individual freedom issue.
It’s difficult to imagine what specifically this might lead to. But I think you’re intuition is correct that there will be similar cases in the near future.
Test tube babies are a complication. Especially now that jurisdictions like California are insisting on sexually-neutral terms for parents (no more “mother” and “father”), parental rights will become a more complex issue. It will increasingly fall to judges to determine who the “real” parents are without preference for the traditional model.
Incidentally, this is another possible trend that concerns me. It seems there are ever more stories involving judges ordering citizens not to talk about their cases even when trials are not in progress.
Go almost anywhere on the web where is a strong Dem presence where the subject of the Duggars come up and you will eventually have someone suggest the very situation you fear. Because they obviously cannot be taking care of those children in their best interests. This is philosophically the same group of people that wrote in a journal that abortion should extend to after the child is born. No, there is no end to what these people might do to our families because of what they think is our childrens best interests.
FYI Brucie has indicated he plans to continue to date women.
It was only a few years ago that “I’m a Lesbian trapped in a man’s body” was a joke.
Now it’s a headline.
There is no rational stopping point. NAMBLA has to be giddy every time some other crazy idea receives social science recognition.
I wholly agree that looking to nature in this way is very useful and informative; as from tradition, we can learn an incredible amount by looking at nature to see what’s worked and what’s failed over millennia.
Where I demur is in concluding that because something has been useful or successful in bringing about good ends that we can conclude that it’s morally normative.
I used to joke that abortion ought to be legal up to age eighteen, but I was only joking. Some of these folks actually believe it.
There have been days I thought I was the only one who remembered that these monsters exist.
I think we are going to soon need an underground system for parents so that they will be allowed to keep their own children. I know that rather than hand my baby over I’d be disappearing to a place where I would never be found.
How do you think we determine what is morally normative, Tom? And what is your response to the other questions in the paragraph? Do you think the mother should be required to hand over the child she carried in her womb and has cared for and loved since birth?
If it is both successful and good is it not moral? If it is both successful and good should not a society and/or culture decide to make it the standard, at least until a better example of behavior is found?
Okay, a couple of things:
As Rachel said, it’s a very messy case, largely due to the poor decisions of the people involved. I haven’t fully made up my mind on it, but if we assume that both the biological father and biological mother have equal parental rights, and that the two of them have mutually exclusive ideas about how to exercise those rights, then it seems that having a family court adjudicate them is the only viable alternative. How he adjudicates the particulars is a separate matter, and it seems to me that he made some bad decisions here.
Also, I’m not sure how different the case would be if you remove the gay angle (i.e., if the child’s biological father were a single, heterosexual dude who had arranged an informal surrogacy agreement that she subsequently reneged on).
“Natural attachments”? Those are the bits you have before some crazy surgeon lops them off, right?
I think this is where Rachel’s appeal to nature is helpful in setting some moral parameters. No child should be brought into the world under these circumstances and that should be obvious to everyone. Third party reproduction is immoral. It is wrong to deliberately deny a child his or her mother and father. Since the child exists, as a mother, I think her much bigger investment in the child through bringing her into the world and caring for her should rule the day–also an argument from nature. I think in matters of human reproduction, nature should be a very powerful guide.
By the way, I doubt this is a modern problem. Surrogate mothers existed thousands of years ago. Back then, surrogates were typically slaves; but there might be some aspect of those histories that could inform modern decisions.
There is some less than clear reporting about that British case. I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions based upon what I’ve read.
I’d like to read the actual ruling if there is a link.
Good point, Aaron, but it is a modern problem in that technology has made many things possible that weren’t possible then. I think the slave analogy is very apt, however. What is ironic is that about 20 years ago the book A Handmaid’s Tale came out–fiction, I know, but aimed at the patriarchy and conservative Christians, who, it was implied, use women as “breeders”–and now those who loved that silly work are the ones who think it is hunky dory to use women as breeders. The ironies that the left daily produces would be funny if they weren’t so tragic.
What do you have against the North American Marlon Brando Lookalike Association?
…nearly every case.
I remember the first article I was directed to on the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman incident. I saw many red flags there. British reporting seems to be even more sensationalist than that done here, if that is possible.
My first thought was “This is kind of paranoid, Rachel,” followed almost immediately by “But of course everything that was dismissed as paranoid 10 years ago is now in full bloom.”
It’s certainly more moral than many alternatives, but — as your second question implies — not necessarily superior to all alternatives. As I’ve written before, I think tradition is an incredible source of knowledge and wisdom, that those who do not account for it are fools, and that its dangerous to have fools in power. None of that, however, means tradition should have the final word on things.
Conservatives make a very valid point about how we often (ignorantly and unfairly) judge people of the past based on modern standards and ideas that were not available to them.
Sometimes, however, the same people who make this excellent point write as if there are no further ethical developments on the horizon for which we — all of us — will be unfairly judged.
Agreed. That’s why I’d like to read it.
In the old days, before DNA tests, before it became possible to prove paternity, men had no rights whatsoever when it came to children born outside of marriage-and women had no right to demand anything from the fathers of children born outside of marriage. If I remember correctly, Charles Murray once suggested that we should return to that ethos. I don’t know if he still believes that, but I might.
Those who support abortion often point out correctly that women who have been raped often do not report it. What happens if a woman has been raped, gets pregnant, and decides not to abort? The biological father-her rapist-can come back on the scene at any point and start demanding rights. Feminists seem blithely unconcerned about this.
One of my friends in college was an unwed mother: the biological father made it brutally clear to her that he wanted no part of the child, and she respected that. She never took him to court, or demanded anything from him. I respect her for that. I also knew a man who got a woman pregnant: she told him that she was going to have the baby, but did not want him in her or the baby’s life: he respected that, and I respect him for that. Decent people will work these things out on their own, but the law does not exist to guide decent people who can work it out on their own.
Re: the British case, it seems that normal adoption law would cover cases like this very well. I can use myself as an example: I was conceived by unwed parents, who decided that I should be put up for adoption. My adoptive parents were matched with my biological parents by an adoption agency before I was born, and I was turned over to them very shortly after I was born (my parents have the pictures to prove it). Presumably there was a post-natal window in which my biological mother could have changed her mind. Presumably this has already happened in some adoption case or other, and presumably there is a corpus of either statutory law or traditional caselaw which governs such cases. Other than the strengthening of the adoptive parent’s claim if the surrogacy agreement involves an actual contract, I don’t see the substantive difference.
Had the judge ruled the other way — i.e., in letting the mother retain custody of the baby — wouldn’t the father’s rights to his biological child have been denied?
If so, it seems that the problem isn’t in the denial of rights itself (again, if the parents’ understanding of how best to exercise them is in conflict, that seems to be the only possible conclusion ) but in the specifics of how they were denied.
But also on the grounds that she’s “duplicitous and manipulative”, “lied to the court”, has a “vendetta”, and threatens to breastfeed the child “for several years to come” so no one else can have her. As a friend of mine working child-custody cases grimly describes it, “You’d be surprised how often breast-feeding is used as a weapon.”
My friend, who attends a highly conservative church, recently got to see one of her fellow congregants use them as such:
That poor woman, abusive and manipulative toward both her husband and her children, eventually found her husband divorcing her and requesting custody of the children for their own safety. That woman used all the appeals to conservative nature she had at her disposal – that she was the religious one, that she was still breast-feeding, that her husband divorced her, making her the loyal one – to wrest custody from her ex. She even prayed aloud in church for her ex-husband to be struck down. That woman, too, could be a traditionalist’s poster-child – if you were willing to overlook certain pertinent facts.
Maybe the grimly hilarious writeup reflects this woman’s grimly hilarious nature.
If by morally normative one means; based upon the instructions from a transcendent Creator, who laid down His will through the Scriptures, then it is a finality.
Otherwise, morality, as defined above, is merely preferential.
This scenario (the state taking kids and giving to gays) does not seem to me as a likely widespread future. I actually foresee the government expanding the school program to boarding schools and requiring people to turn their children in to be educated / cared for correctly (by their standards). Parents will most likely have some visitation rights, at least at first.