A Tyranny That Smiles
January 6, 2011
AS DISCUSSED in a previous post, Melanie Thernstrom, the daughter of neoconservative authors Abigail and Stephan Thernstrom, has written of her experience hiring an egg donor and two different surrogates to provide her and her husband with an instant family of two children. This real-life version of Margaret Atwood’s reproductive dystopia in The Handmaid’s Tale is told with a confusing blend of self-awareness and self-deceit. The absence of any blatant coercion in the many contractual arrangements Thernstrom and her husband, Michael Callahan, made with others, including with the woman who supplied breast milk, is chillingly representative of technocratic liberalism.
Liberal society blandly draws people in with a system of material rewards and the appearance of mutual necessity. Thernstrom met with the donor and surrogates in coffee shops, where they held friendly chats and cheerily deliberated. Everyone had something to gain but all self-interest could be couched in altruistic terms. The donors only wanted to help. They weren’t looking for money. Thernstrom only wanted to do something utterly natural – have a family – and do the best for her marriage. She wasn’t shopping for children in the way one might shop for a car.
Again, it appeared, because there was no coercion involved, because all was conducted on friendly terms and substantial sums of money were given in exchange for biological services, that Thernstrom and her husband had not in any way mistreated the other parties. But this appearance is false. The offer of substantial money for “gestational services” of any kind is a form of coercion. It’s soft coercion, holding out temptation to the stupid, selfish and weak. And, these business transactions have forced a life of confused identity on the most important parties involved: the children who were conceived, and who will be raised, under brutally impersonal arrangements. No amount of smiles and friendship between the parties involved can hide the deliberate refusal of love to these children. For one cannot love a person whom one regards as a non-person, as an abstraction or as an end for one’s desires.
A society that allows women and men, even a small minority, to sell their sperm or their eggs or their wombs is barbaric. A society that allows people to sell the flesh-and-blood bonds of kinship is a dark, heathen hellhole that makes one long for the days when barbarians plundered and pillaged instead of subverting their hostility toward life into non-violent forms of destruction. “Liberalism makes every man his own Nietzche – only with health insurance, a retirement plan, and protection against discrimination,” wrote James Kalb in The Tyranny of Liberalism. The order, efficiency and technical sophistication of modern life all provide cover for the coercive processes of deathlike de-civilization. We live under a tyranny of the most heartless kind.
— Comments —
Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:
Regarding your latest post on the Abigail Thernstrom story, you wrote: “The offer of substantial money for ‘gestational services’ of any kind is a form of coercion… soft coercion, holding out temptation to the stupid, selfish and weak.”
Like you, I find the entire Thernstrom arrangement bizarre and repulsive, and I would condemn it, but I’m not sure I would condemn it as “coercive.” It might be suborning, the equivalent of offering a bribe, and here your ascription of moral feebleness to the “surrogates” is entirely appropriate. I suggest that a closer equivalent to what the Thernstrom and her husband have done is prostitution. Just as a man on his own offers money to acquire the services of a prostitute for sexual gratification, the married couple offers money to acquire the services of the surrogates – in this case for satisfying what elsewhere you have aptly characterized as the “maternal lust” of the so-called professional or career-oriented “I want to have it all” woman. Lust is the primary sin in both cases. Apparently the Thernstrom couple has also bought the services of a sperm donor or plural sperm donors, in which I again see the equivalent of trafficking in the fleshpots.
It makes a fascinating if slightly morbid thought-experiment to imagine the cold, calculating, self-alienated attitude that the surrogates especially must bring to this transaction. They are literally selling themselves, hence my comparison with prostitution. In my opinion all the participants in this moral imbroglio must be deranged in one degree or another. Our elites are as perverse in their morality and as sordid in their willfulness as the homicidal, wench-mongering Byzantine elites of the Sixth Century about whom the court-historian Procopius wrote in his Secret History.
Laura writes:
“Coercive” alone is probably too strong of a word, which is why I called it “soft coercion,” but your suggestion is better. It is bribery, though distinct from all other forms because of possibly complicated motives on the part of the surrogates, who in this case seemed to take some genuine pleasure in pregnancy and childbirth. For them, this too seemed a form of vicarious motherhood.
The comparison with prostitution is tempting but it falls short because third parties are involved. The costs for everyone are nothing compared to the costs for those conceived.
One of the most disturbing aspects of the story is the passivity of the husbands of the surrogates, or “gestational carriers,” who were impregnated with the fertilized eggs of a donor. These women said they wanted to have children again, but did not want to have more of their own even though they were married. Their husbands, middle-class men, already the fathers of children, agreed. What does one say to one’s wife when she is carrying another man’s child? How does one act? Presumably money was a motivating factor. But even Thernstrom was surprised by the mens’ acceptance of their role. She writes:
When we met their husbands, we felt relieved by their self-confidence and self-possession. The role of a gestational carrier’s husband is, in some ways, more difficult than that of the carrier herself. The husband is, as Fie puts it, “a bystander to a miracle,” who partakes in the inconvenience of his wife’s pregnancy but has fewer emotional rewards (as well as the occasional negative reaction from a stranger whose congratulations for a new chip off the old block can turn to disapproval).
This soulless, technocratic reproduction would have been futuristic just a few years ago, but it fits in nicely with the Times’ campaign to normalize homosexual parenthood. If surrogacy is honorable for heterosexuals then it is fine for homosexuals too. I would not at all be surprised if this motif was in the forefront of the editors’ minds.
Thernstrom writes:
[I]t sounded weird and somehow hubristic, as if having children were a vanity project or a movie we were producing or a manufacturing job to be outsourced.
Who would deny that life is complicated and messy? After going through this lengthy process, Thernstrom is joyful, but hires yet another person – a nanny – to care for the babies.
Bertonneau writes:
I take your points. I would add this, that liberals always describe conservatives as soulless people interested only in financial calculation and personal gain. (“Evil capitalists.”) Yet in the Thernstrom arrangement – which exemplifies the bold liberal world “beyond good and evil” – everything is reduced precisely to soulless financial calculation. I failed to glean that the surrogates were married women whose husbands, as you say, are entirely agreeable. What kind of man is that? To use an old term, a blackguard who deserves mockery and jeers. I am reminded of the first quatrain of Wordsworth’s sonnet:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
Reverse the phrase “getting and spending” and one has the first part, at least, the sperm-donor part, of the Thernstrom procedure, every element of which is profoundly unnatural and “sordid.” Indeed, by dedicating herself to what Wordsworth calls “the world” – that is, to career, public status, and material chattels – Melanie Thernstrom has wasted her powers and given her heart away. So have all the other participants given their hearts away.
When Marxian or any other form of atheistic materialism becomes the bedrock of assumption of a people, what considerations might give pause before such a heartless scheme? Precisely none. As you say, this is a liberal phenomenon in every way, shape and form.
Caryl Johnston writes:
Thank you for your excellent blog. I agree with you and Tom Bertonneau about this Thernstrom business. Other than coercion or prostitution, I’d say it is an example of the “Might Makes Right” philosophy that has penetrated every corner of our national life. Because we have the (technological) power to do something, we do it. It is a destructive and anti-social philosophy which has now entered the realm of biology.
It took mankind thousands of years to raise the biological into the social. The casualness with which we destroy social customs of civilized life is nothing short of astonishing.
Of course the end result of this is the further atomization of society – and more power to the State. “Divide and Conquer” seems to be the sequel to “Might Makes Right.”
