Deathclaw_Puncher wrote:Spoiler: show
The article is defending parents who who give up babies for adoption getting paid. Currently, you can pay someone to donate eggs, and someone to carry the baby, but you can't legally pay someone to do both at once: if it's your sperm it's prostitution, if it's not then it's baby selling.
I'm tentatively in favor. My understanding is that there's a shortage of healthy babies in the US (special needs babies and older children are a different matter), which is why parents pay so much for international adoptions. International adoptions tend to be not super-well-regulated in the primary source countries, and sometimes involve baby stealing and often involve sundry other shadiness. I suspect actual child abduction cases are rare, but the assorted shadiness is enough of an issue that the top country for foreign adoptions changes every decade or so when the current country tightens regulations.
My feeling on most issues is "if it's between consenting adults and doesn't have externalities, it should be legal." I can't see any obvious externalities here, but I'm viscerally concerned because I know of one case of baby selling which involved the rape of a minor (as in, the husband of the couple buying the baby paid a teenage girl to let him knock her up and take the resulting babies). However that seems like something that would become less rare if you eliminate the black market. I mean, it seems like the reason this couple targeted a minor is that she was in a vulnerable situation with her parents and didn't know her rights; if it were legal to pay an adult for the same service you should prefer an adult since the pregnancy is less risky and the act less illegal.
So yeah, I see no compelling reason that this should be illegal and a couple of reasons why it should be legal. (Though my default is that things should be legal unless there's a compelling reason they should be illegal.) But I'm sure there's at least a few people on TCS who think it should remain illegal, so I'm curious what y'all have to say.