Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of Unchanging

Truth, the Colson Center on John Stone Street.

Last month in the journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, a philosophy professor on a

smaidor from Norway proposed that the global medical community should consider what she

called, quote, whole body, gestational, donation, women, and a permanent vegetative state, or

who are declared brain dead could be used, she suggested, as unconscious surrogate mothers

for people who, as the paper says, either, quote, wish to have children but cannot, or

prefer not to, gestate.

According to smaidor, though what she is proposing may sound shocking, it's really

no different, at least not in any qualitative ethical way, from organ donation, and other

assisted reproductive technologies.

Now to be clear, it's not primarily the incredible advances in medical technology that lie

at the heart of such a proposal.

Also at work here is a widespread embrace of expressive individualism, which cultivates

an expectation from people that whatever we desire should determine reality.

If we want children, we deserve them, and any barrier to obtaining them, moral, biological,

circumstantial, is an injustice that needs to be overcome.

The same line of reasoning is what's behind the calls for so-called reproductive justice

in the increasing use of artificial reproductive technologies by gay couples, including,

surrogacy.

Having chosen an intimate relationship that's inherently sterile, the couple now demands

a child, along with the legal paperwork to declare the unrelated, related, and the photographs

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