There are lots of potentially dangerous jobs in the world, take mining for instance. Miners trade their physical capability for wages, and often are forceid into that dangerous and difficult work by extreme need. How is this different?

I can only think of good differences - the employer has a vested interest in the health of the employee, and that womb-renting actually pays well.

Most of the rest of us ain't so lucky.

To put the lowest grade food on the table, I went to school for 20 years, and work all the time in fear of losing my job. The fear of being tossed into the street (I haven't paid my rent this month) keeps me in an occupation I do not like, because it would be difficult to find another occupation that pays "as well."

I risk quite a bit by not having a job at any time. In addition to hunger, and the lack of a roof, I could quite literally be placed in jail if I am laid off, since TCF, CL, KM, et. al., would all too eagerly call me a deadbeat dad.

If I want to change jobs to find a more satisfying job, my ex-wife will be asked if that change is okay with her. And if a new job pays less, I will have to pay the same amount of child support as I previously paid, EVEN if by any sensible measure, the amount I would be paying would still be quite sufficient to bring up a child.

In return for this, I do not get to see my kids unless my ex-wife agrees, I cannot take them out of town so they can see their grandparents and cousins unless my ex-wife agrees, and I only get to see them perhaps 4 days a month.

If I were in Iraq, there is a very good chance that my ex-wife could file to eliminate me from their lives entirely.

Being able to lie on a bed, given good medical care, given good food, watching TV -- well that sounds almost like a vacation to me.

It's good to think globally, but if you open your eyes Tracy, you'll find a lot of people selling their bodies and forced to sell their bodies very close to home. And some of them are due to your privilege that you refuse to acknowledge.

Where people are allowed to sell a kidney for money. They get about 10 years of income and someone here gets to live.

BTW 'extreme' is a rhetorical device. By local standards 'extreme' means they're so far off the grid you'd never find them to even ask them if they're interested. 'Extreme' means in this context, lower class even lower middle class, locally speaking.

Otherwise if you hate this and object then you figure out some way other than blogging and giant puppet protests to help those people.

I'm no anthropologist but I suspect that reproductive transactions hugely predate the monetized, globalist form that Judith Warner is feeling so icky-poo about. The Biblical Old Testament is full of Israelites making deals over who gets whom pregnant, child-swapping, and any number of other soap-operatic developments.

Call me crazy but isn't this a case of a woman's right to make her own reproductive choices? One of the things about free choices is that they're free, you know? Some women pay money to not get pregnant. Others pay to end pregnancies.

So if some women accept money to get pregnant, and they do so of their own volition, on what basis do we say that what they're doing is wrong?

The thing is, from a biological point of view, women are baby-making machines, just as men are sperm-donating machines. Do we worry about the dehumanization of men making money from contributing to sperm banks? Or of women who are egg donors?

Granted, those purer forms of paid gamete donation aren't in the same league as being pregnant. But that's a choice for each woman to make, isn't it?

Privileged, well-paid white women making a careful attempt not to judge the choices of women not like themselves (the vast majority of the women in this world). Not that the attempt succeeds, of course. (They can't quite keep the wiser-than-thou out of their tone, despite all their efforts.)

Whatever next? Giving those women the benefit of the doubt, being as they are adults? Acknowledging that they're capable of making choices that might actually be good for them? Perhaps even - *gasp* - deciding that judging the experiences of people in other cultures might not be their job?

Who knows where this could lead?

the only problem seems to be confusion/conflicted emotion on the part of the two mothers and maybe the kid, since normally birth motherhood and genetic motherhood aren't separated, but is there any reason to believe that the requirement in this instance that people deal with things that people can invent but that nature didn't "intend" is any worse in this situation than in any other.

How can we blame men for this? After all, brown skinned adult women who make choices must make the choices we educated white women approve of.

Is the Patriarchy to blame? Penises? Indian female oppression?

Oh well, at least they aren't indentured servants like the disenfranchised father who posted above.

We should blame men for his plight, too.

Men, evil men. I read about them on "I Blame the Patriarchy".

Men = bad

It would seem that in a world where we can do what we want with our bodies as long as it does not hurt anyone else that this would be celebrated. Instead most femminists seem threatened by the fact that the monopoly on the honey pot might get broken. Tough beans.

This is one reason I take a dim view of property theft. It is not just the usefulness of the object that gets stolen that is the problem. It is also the time I put in to aquire that object that has been stolen. Time that I can never get back.

You can also make the same agrument about dirty, difficult and dangerous work (something which men do more than women). If I am going to take the physical risk I should get the reward.