A Modest Proposal to Anti-Choice Folks

Update: What timing! Pro-life Senator Dan Patrick said, er ... much the same thing. He's just really, really off about the price. Here's my original post:

If anti-abortion types really just want to save fetuses, why not the most obvious solution: make it legal to sell babies?

Okay, I didn't really mean that -- what I meant was, it's legal to pay an egg donor for her "pain and suffering" in the egg donation process, without actually paying her for the eggs themselves (uh-huh). So why not make it legal to pay women for their gestational services in "donating" a full-on baby?

I love when anti-abortion people ask abortion-seeking women, "Why not just have the baby and then give it up for adoption?" Are you kidding? You can sometimes get a guilt-riddled Christian teenager to do that. But, obviously, very few employed adult women are interested in carrying a baby, enduring childbirth, getting stretch marks and getting fat and possibly incurring other, more serious, physical consequences (urinary incontinence is way more common than most people want to discuss, and I'll never forget the diagram I saw in a medical textbook of a "clitoral fissure"), taking time off work (those employed outside large corporations do not get maternity leave), and explaining the whole thing to people who ask questions about your obvious pregnancy. If you don't have a religious belief in the all-out personhood of fetuses, there is simply no reason you would do this. Well, no reason you would do it for free. (I wouldn't have donated eggs for free, and that doesn't even cause stretch marks).

As you undoubtedly have noticed, we live in an increasingly commoditized world, one in which we have already put a price on this service: surrogate mothers receive about $20,000, plus medical expenses and sometimes payment for lost income, for carrying and giving birth to a child.

As per current law, surrogate mothers are always carrying babies made with someone else's eggs, that way they cannot be said to be "selling their babies."

But if you're really against abortion, and perhaps you'd like a baby for less than the $50,000-$100,000 you might spend on a combo of egg donor fees, surrogate fees, IVF, legal and medical expenses, why not legalize one-stop baby production and delivery?

Or, more specifically, why not make it legal to pay women for gestational services they provide in offering babies for adoption? Someone could found a matching agency. Pro-lifers: if you believe abortion is murder, certainly this is better, no? Pro-choicers: if you believe abortion is a human right, then perhaps you might also get behind the idea that women deserve to be compensated in a market economy for tasks traditionally considered "women's work," just as various feminist thinkers (mostly in Europe's socialist nations) have proposed compensating women for domestic labor, and just as women are sometimes compensated for domestic labor (after the fact) in U.S. divorce cases.

Now everyone's offended! By a comedy blog! Discuss.