Dave Rubin on surrogacy

On no! I also think he is an important voice and I also don't agree with a lot of what he says!

How will a child will be born? He's skipping over a fairly important step there. The Petri dish is not going to give birth to the child is it?

I think sometimes even those making babies this way find the process grotesque and morally reprehensible so they can't quite bring themselves to use the right words.

The words you are missing here Dave are...
Women
Mother
Surrogate mother
Embryo
Foetus
Baby
Birth

I don't know anything about this writer but he may not subscribe to TWAW but he certainly doesn't see women as human.

way more expensive than a bottle of tequila and a viagra pill

What the hell.. even the charitable interpretation that it's for his husband completely neglects the fact that the woman's going to have to have sex with him. The less charitable interpretation, that the tequila is for her, is just rape!

Fucking hell. Those thoughts are in print, for anyone to read. How on earth can he think that's something he's OK with people knowing he thinks.

Sorry - to be clear - I know that he's trying to be amusing, that they'd never do it 'the old fashioned way' compared to in-vitro fertilization. I'm just saying that it's not a funny joke or amusing comparison in any interpretation and I'm genuinely shocked he thought it was an OK thing to put in a book.

I'd also add, the word he's missing, is Vagina.....the baby will come out of the woman's vagina. Which won't be painless or risk free.

Before I bought a woman's body for my own use, I'd always been solidly pro-choice.

I'd love to know the next paragraph, but I can't see it ending well. It has to boil down to something like : But all that changed when I realised she might be able to back out of the agreement without my consent and take control of her own body back!

Compare: Before I started seeing prostitutes, I was solidly anti-rape.

It's the clinical language and passive tense, isn't it?
"Nine months later a child will be born."
No, a woman will grow that baby for you, experiencing all sorts of effects of that pregnancy, and then she will give birth. And it's unlikely to be in exactly nine months.

For those interested, he goes on to say he now describes himself as "begrudgingly pro-choice" after learning in the past two years(!) more about gestation and "seeing the left fetishise it" (referring to "Shout Your Abortion" amongst other things).

He goes on to conclude two main things:

(1) that abortion up to 12 weeks is the optimal compromise between the rights of the individual (mother, the baby) and public policy/ "duty to protect the life of the unborn" (but he'd allow later than that where mother or foetus life was in jeopardy or for severe abnormality); and

(2) that if, early in the surrogate pregnancy, he and his husband found out that their baby was going to be severely disabled and unable to live an independent life, he and his husband decided that, "we would terminate the pregnancy".

Which rather begs the question - Would you, indeed?

For those wondering, apparently he and his husband have spent hours discussing how severe disability would affect them, the child themselves, and their extended families. Apparently the decision to terminate would be an impossibly difficult one he would wrestle with the consequences of for years afterwards.

No such thought appears to have been extended to the surrogate, what would happen if their surrogate declines to terminate, whether she has the right to do so (or generally where that falls in his views on women's reproductive rights), how they would enforce their decision if she doesn't, or how any part of either a normal or abnormal pregnancy might affect her.

I'm not sure I'd have read it through that lens if you hadn't brought it up here, so thank you. Now I've seen it, the incredible sleight of hand in erasing the mother and the underpinning sense of self-regarding entitlement is hard to un-see.