THE PSYCHOLOGIST : Pope Francis Is Right. The World Should Ban Surrogacy (?)

Pope Francis Is Right. The World Should Ban Surrogacy (?)

Oh boy! Another diffcult issue to navigate. AUBREY GULICK (below) is a young conservative but she is also a devout Catholic and that has clearly influenced her views.

I think she is wrong. As I see it, surrogacy brings human beings into the world who otherwise would not exist so it is to be praised.

Her big objection is that not all fertilized eggs during a surrogacy process will result in a pregnancy. Fertilized eggs are real human beings and their death is akin to murder.

I do agree that all fertilized eggs are full human beings but it is myopic to say that their loss is akin to murder. Fertilized eggs are routinely lost during menstruation. That only some fertilized eggs survive is nature's way and surrogacy in fact REDUCES those losses. And the products of surrogacy are clearly very much wanted so should normally be treated well

Catholicism can be very dogmatic but I hope it releases its grip on Aubrey in this matter

Blue eyes. Blond hair. Somewhere between 5’9 and 6’3. Does that sound like the ideal baby boy? Or maybe you wanted a girl with brown hair and green eyes who would grow to be 5’3. Until very recently, that wasn’t a choice anyone got to make. Now, with surrogacy, almost anyone can.

Of course, that doesn’t mean surrogacy is moral, and the Catholic Church has been consistent in its opposition to the practice because it amounts to trafficking unborn children. On Monday, Pope Francis called for a global ban on surrogacy during an address to diplomats gathered in Vatican City in which he discussed a wide range of global issues, including the wars in Ukraine and Israel and the persecution of Christians in Nigeria. (READ MORE: Kellyanne Conway’s Contraception Gambit)

“The path to peace calls for respect for life, for every human life, starting with the life of the unborn child in the mother’s womb, which cannot be suppressed or turned into an object of trafficking,” Francis said. “In this regard, I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs. A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract.”

Surrogacy Grows in Popularity

But Francis didn’t just speak out against surrogacy, which he has done before; he called on the world to ban the practice altogether — and he did so in the face of an industry that is growing exponentially. Global Market Insights estimates that by 2032, the surrogate market will have grown ninefold compared to 2022 data, becoming an industry worth $129 billion. Surrogacy isn’t exactly new (“Baby M,” the subject of a contentious case that went to the New Jersey Supreme Court, was born in the 1980s), but its popularity has skyrocketed over the last few years.

There are several reasons for that. As homosexuality becomes more widely acceptable, those practicing the lifestyle want to have biological children, and that requires using a surrogate. Celebrities who want children often turn to surrogacy for health reasons or convenience. Couples who were married late in life or who struggle with fertility will sometimes do the same. Of course, surrogacy doesn’t work as an industry unless women are willing to carry someone else’s child for nine months — and those living in war-torn countries like Ukraine, countries with third-world economies (some of which have wisely banned the practice), or situations with low incomes and few career opportunities, usually are.

As the practice has become more popular, stories like that of Shane Dawson and Ryland Adams have received a lot of attention in the media. Despite Dawson’s demonstrable pedophilic tendencies, the popular YouTubers were recently able to take home twin boys conceived via an egg donor and birthed by another woman. An estimated 10 children were discarded in the process after Dawson and Adams decided which babies they wanted. (RELATED: Shane Dawson and Ryland Adams’ Use of Surrogacy Showcases the Practice’s Grotesqueness)

Product of the Culture of Death

While Dawson and Adams’ case is particularly horrific, the problem with surrogacy and in-vitro fertilization isn’t only that the gay couple deprives a child of his or her mother but that the process itself is immoral. Millions of tiny, unborn babies are frozen or killed, and the miraculous process of bringing life into the world is reduced to a contractual relationship in which thousands of dollars pass hands.

The same is true when a heterosexual couple struggling with infertility or sexual trauma turns to surrogacy to build a family. The ends don’t justify the means, and the process should be illegal. Fortunately, in some places like Italy, Spain, and India, it is. Unfortunately, in the United States, surrogacy is governed by a patchwork of laws across the states, and only three ban it outright.

As Francis pointed out in Monday’s address, surrogacy and its popularity are a product of the culture of death in which we live. “At every moment of its existence, human life must be preserved and defended; yet I note with regret, especially in the West, the continued spread of a culture of death, which in the name of a false compassion discards children, the elderly, and the sick,” the pope said.

The pontiff is, of course, quite right. Children ought to be the natural product of the love between a man and a woman — a wonderful, miraculous outflowing of their relationship. They should never be a commodity, ordered out of a catalog in a desire to satisfy the egos of the people who claim to be their parents.

https://spectator.org/pope-francis-is-right-the-world-should-ban-surrogacy/

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

Pope Francis Is Right. The World Should Ban Surrogacy (?)

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