Wow, you really went off your meds today. Feel better soon!

You're being awfully hard on elves.

I used the terms "incubator", etc, to illustrate a potential mindset on the part of a client. I can *certainly* see many clients thinking in those terms, even though I don't, personally.

My argument, at bottom, is about a woman's control over her own body.

Does a poor woman or a woman in a poor country, in a non-regulated market, have control over her body once she has entered into a surrogate pregnancy? Or is her body: the food she eats, the exercise and activities she performs, the work she can and can't do, her daily life, etc, etc, under the control of the adoptive parents? To what extent does her life and her body, by enveloping the uterus that holds the client's baby, become subservient to the clients' desires?

I think that, even with the best of intentions on all sides, the potential for assuming control is great.

No one has shown actual cases of blatant exploitation, but no one has put forth evidence that she is protected, either.

I think you might need a cold compress, as you seem to be a bit overheated. You make some interesting and valid points, but they're rather clouded by the vehemence with which you expressed them.

I'm sorry, but if this gay Israeli couple wasn't intending to exploit 2 poor women from a third-world country, then they would have taken their quest to someplace like liberal California, where surrogacy is legal. OH, but that would have cost A LOT MORE MONEY. Huh, it's amazing how often you can follow the money to find out what's really going on.

You merely assumed that the couple intended to exploit a poor woman in the developing world (BTW, you must not have received the memo, but "Third World" is considered rather passe, if not obsolete, as a term of reference.) That's quite a stretch, and betrays your own biases on this issue. How do you know their life circumstances? Israelis are, on average, poorer per capita than Western Europeans or North Americans. Maybe they investigated surrogacy in America or Europe but it was more difficult and out of their price range? Undoubtedly it would be much more expensive, and as you admitted yourself it would be more difficult to find a willing surrogate, especially for foreigners from thousands of miles away. Perhaps their options were to go without a child, or to contract with a surrogate in the developing world? They're still forking over a very large sum of money, but there's no evidence that the surrogate mother is being abused or exploited. You merely assume that she is due to her geographic location and her socioeconomic background. I call that jumping to conclusions--or perhaps confirmation bias is more accurate.

To find a willing population of surrogates, you need DESPERATION and you require EXTREME POVERTY.

Again, you're arguing an extreme position. There are shades of gray on this issue, as on most issues. Are all surrogates, no matter where they're found, desperate and living in extreme poverty? NO--but again, you're forced to argue a black-and-white position to bolster your contention that surrogacy is prima facie exploitation. You started with a conclusion, and then proceeded to structure your arguments around it.

And that my friends, is why it is exploitation. And not just some cool fertility alternative.

My friends? You're starting to sound like John McCain. Anyway, again, in some cases surrogacy can be, and is, a "cool fertility alternative" and in others it truly is abusive and exploitative. One must look at each case individually. As I argued earlier, context is everything.

Having children, let alone biologically related children, is NOT an entitlement and it never has been.

Most people consider reproduction to be a human right, not a privilege. Only authoritarian or totalitarian regimes think otherwise. That is why the US government or those of its constituent states cannot prevent poor people, or people with criminal records, or mentally ill people, or people with inheritable genetic diseases, or alcoholics, or people who've been known to use drugs, from reproducing. That's why eugenics is illegal and abhorred, why the castration of the criminal and the mentally ill and other forms of involuntary sterilization are illegal and things of the past. That is why China's one-child policy and the compulsory vasectomies enforced for a time in India have been criticized as heavy-handed statist interventions in private life, if not outright human rights violations. You're in a minority on this issue--most people consider it their right to have a child if they so desire.

A consistent percentage of human couples has always been infertile -- about 15%. The alternative has always been adoption of ALREADY EXISTING needy children.

Sounds great, but this story provides a case in point as to why that's not always an option. And let's not exaggerate things here--adoption is ENORMOUSLY more common than is surrogacy, whether domestic or international, as it will almost certainly always be.

It should not be a Frankenstein-like intervention into the natural process of conception and birth -- simply the fact that this Israeli couple required THREE particpants to create their baby is a serious sign something is morally wrong.

Do you consider sperm or egg donation, in-vitro fertilization, home insemination with needleless syringes or turkey basters, and fertility clinic treatments to be "Frankenstein-like intervention[s] into the natural process of conception and birth"? If you don't, why not? If you do, should they be banned? Are they forms of exploitation? Are cash-strapped college boys who are enticed to donate sperm for $50 a pop being exploited into fathering children of whom they won't know and with whom they won't have any contact, out of sheer financial "desperation"? Should we only accept children who are conceived in the old-fashioned, missionary style way?

Your discussion of organ donation and the black market for organs is fascinating, but not particularly relevant. There are serious differences between the two issues that you gloss over. Actually, your arguments about organ donation, theft and murder for organs, black markets, and bidding wars is far more relevant to a discussion of the problems with the global ADOPTION industry than they are to surrogacy. Many children who are up for adoption around the world find themselves in such a status for highly dubious reasons, to put it mildly. There are children stolen to feed the adoption industry, there is a black market for kids, there is much fraud and deception and abuse and forged documents and many other serious problems. Just look at the recent news out of Guatemala for an example. And many children who are waiting to be adopted never find homes with loving parents. Why don't you focus your rants on the exploitative abuses and tragedies of THAT system, rather than on a comparatively very rare phenomenon? At the very least, in surrogacy the adoptive parents know (or should know) that the child is being borne by a willing volunteer with whom they have contact and to whom they're providing major financial support. If done right, with the proper safeguards, it precludes the sort of shady dealing and uncomfortable questions that accompany the global adoption industry.

...but HEALTHY poor and middle class people (as you lunkheads are suggesting be done with surrogacy) would be compelled to sell kidneys just to survive economically in the coming recession (or depression)

Huh? Show me one person (er, excuse me--"lunkhead") on this thread who has argued that poor and middle class people should be compelled to be surrogates. Your argument became seriously unhinged at this point.

This kind of human trafficking starts out with all the right intentions (oh, the poor gay Israeli's who can't have a baby of their own because it's biologically impossible!) and end up with a world where the poorest people are little more than Soylent Green baby-and-kidney factories for the rich.

First, this isn't human trafficking. Let's get our terminology correct, shall we? Second, what a snide dismissal of the gay couple who want to have a child! I'd expect such a comment from a right-wing blowhard. And the Soylent Green allusion was rather over the top--but hey, no sense arguing logically when you can wield an emotional bludgeon, huh?