FROM a 2011 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.

Some interesting comments follow the post and I corrected the suggestion of “coercion.”

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