How surrogacy is transforming medicine
by Mary Harrington, UnHerd:
Normality is being treated as a problem that needs solving.
In 1954, Russian scientists successfully grafted the still-living head of a puppy onto an existing adult dog. I recently stumbled on a photo of the resulting horror which I think will haunt me forever. But why is it upsetting?
Those untroubled by bourgeois moral shibboleths would probably explain their instinctive revulsion to a two-headed dog by simply saying “yuck, that’s unnatural”. This is, of course, true, but those who try to stick to elite moral orthodoxy will struggle to make the same point. For today, the idea of “natural” is highly politicised.
This leaves us on the back foot, in responding to the accelerated advance of biomedical technology. Many of the advances it brings take less obviously grotesque forms than a two-headed dog; but even (or especially) where they come dressed as wins for civil rights, the unease is as deep as it is difficult to articulate.
One such uneasy debate erupted over the weekend, when the Guardian carried a long article about Corey Briskin and Nicholas Maggipinto, two New York men who have filed a class action complaint with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) against the City of New York. They argue that, unlike female colleagues, their health insurance doesn’t cover IVF or surrogacy in the case of infertility, and that this constitutes discrimination. In their view, the fact that both parties are male amounts to “situational infertility”, and as such their healthcare should fund the cost of gestational surrogacy.
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