Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 559

An Empty Windy City?

In case you missed it: Chicago’s city council recently tightened its fiscal belt by passing a budget with a huge property tax hike and other fees. These are stop-gap measures meant to keep its financial woes just this side of overwhelming. The AP:

Mayor Rahm Emanuel proposed an incremental $543 million property tax increase for police and fire pensions, along with a separate $45 million property tax hike for school construction, a $9.50 monthly household garbage pickup charge and other fees. The former White House chief of staff said the measures were necessary to restore the financial health. […]

Chicago has the worst-funded pension system of any major American city, along with a school system drowning in debt that credit rating agencies have rated at “junk” status. The problems have worsened over the years the city didn’t contribute enough to pension funds and continued questionable borrowing tactics, some of which continued into Emanuel’s tenure.

Rahm is looking for state approval for a measure that would soften the blow for the city’s poorer residents:

[Emmanuel] tried to make the property tax increase, which takes effect over four years, more palatable by pitching a relief plan targeted toward those whose homes are worth $250,000 or less. He said most of the burden of the increase would fall on the city’s downtown business core.

Emanuel has pushed to double a homeowners’ exemption from $7,000 to $14,000, or the amount cut from the home’s assessed value before taxes are calculated. The idea is to ease or erase the tax hike’s impact.

As we put it before about the financial sinkhole by the Great Lakes, “Fixing America’s cities so they can be sustainably prosperous is one of the biggest and most urgent jobs on our national to-do list.” The nation’s slow-moving pension crisis will require creative thinking and, most likely, Federal oversight, in some kind of “reform for relief” scheme. Chicago may be first in line for this fix-up. We need policymakers at the local and national levels to figure out how to do it right, and soon.

Venezuela: A Cautionary Tale

To make a case against the viability of a modern socialist state—particularly one that relies on exporting natural resources—one need only point to Venezuela. Since President Nicolás Maduro ascended to power following the death of Hugo Chavez, the country’s economy has spiraled into a meltdown replete with shortages of basic commodities, depletion of reserves, pawning of fixed assets, and hyperinflation north of 100 percent annually.

Inflation has become so rampant that the government stopped publishing its normal, falsified statistics in February. It wouldn’t matter what number the administration arbitrarily chose for its consumer price index; the fact is that the money Venezuelans have is not enough to buy even necessities. The beleaguered bolívar makes the price of importing too high—a huge problem for a country that imports 70 percent of its consumer goods—and takes away any incentive for businesses to produce.In one case, a man used a $2 bolivar bill as a napkin for his empanada. It may sound silly, but the fact is that that unit of currency is literally less valuable than the paper it is printed on to a man who cannot use it to buy napkins.NPR offers a look at what obtaining basic goods entails for a Venezuelan family:

In Venezuela, government supermarkets sell price-controlled food, making them far cheaper than private stores. But Valero explains that people are allowed in state-run supermarkets just two days per week, based on their ID card numbers. The system is designed to prevent shoppers from buying more than they need and then reselling goods on the black market at a huge markup. […]

We stop at a state-run store. There are no lines outside, but that often means there’s not much food left. Inside, the meat department is a barren landscape.“There’s just unplugged display cases, flies and a bad odor,” Valero says. She settles for three cans of sardines. She also finds diapers for Jeremy.But checkout is like clearing customs in a hostile foreign country. The checkout clerk scrutinizes Valero’s ID card and tells her to hold her index finger over a fingerprint scanner.

The condition of Venezuelans is two-tiered—a classic case of the haves and the have-nots. In this case, what you have or don’t have is foreign currency, which allows the elite class to continue purchasing foreign goods. The less fortunate are subjected to the rationing system detailed above. The apparent cronyism and mismanagement of the Maduro regime that have created this divide have led to anti-government protests, the emergence of prominent black markets, and, of course, political scapegoating.

Last December, we eulogized the Venezuelan economy (the world’s 176th freest) and questioned how much longer Maduro could cling to power. Cuba’s trot in from the cold seemed to suggest that it was worried that the stream of financial support from its ideological mentee was about to run dry. This December, Venezuelans will answer this question when they head to the polls for parliamentary elections. If those elections are held in earnest, Maduro’s Socialist Party will likely take a deserved beating. But that’s a big if.It is not the case that the implementation of Venezuelan socialism has changed since Chavez died. The difference is wholly a function of oil prices. When the Bolivarian revolution brought Chavez to power in 1998, the price of crude oil per barrel was just under $30. This price rose more or less continuously for the next decade leading up to the global financial crisis and, even then, quickly rebounded back above $100 by 2010—but now crude oil sits at around $40 per barrel, and petroleum exporters worldwide are ailing. The boom powered Venezuela, but the bust has exposed the underlying fragility and inviability of the natural resource-funded socialist experiment. Put simply, the country can no longer afford to subsidize a paralyzingly inefficient and unproductive economy with petrodollars from its vast oil reserves.One wonders what the allure is of a socialism that impoverishes its citizens but enriches its leaders. But of course, this is the only kind that seems to have ever existed. At least now it is harder for Chavistas and their ilk to tout themselves as proponents of the everyman. When Venezuelans take to the polls next month, we hope they fully consider the options before them—and that their choice is honored.

WATCH: WRM Interviews Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

A couple of weeks ago, our own Walter Russell Mead interviewed Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks about his new book, Not in God’s Name, which explores the roots of religious extremism. Their fascinating and timely conversation was hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. Here’s the full conversation:

Corporate Costume Consultants

National Review reports on the latest fad in campus PC: “costume sensitivity consultants,” who students can contact to determine whether their Halloween costume is offensive. Apparently several colleges are creating posters and videos explaining to students what kinds of costumes they can and can’t wear, and instructing them to check with various campus officials with bureaucratic-sounding titles if they are unsure whether their outfit might offend somebody.

Conservative critics of campus political correctness are understandably lambasting the trend as another extension of extreme identity politics leftism. But there is also another angle to look at this from, which the Purdue lecturer Freddie DeBoer highlighted in an important New York Times essay last month: The way that university administration resembles a bloated corporate bureaucracy interested in managing students, rather than educating them. After all, what could be more corporate, and less related to the educational mission, than “costume consultants” and official costume instruction manuals? Here’s DeBoer:

As Benjamin Ginsberg details in his 2011 book, ‘‘The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters,’’ a constantly expanding layer of university administrative jobs now exists at an increasing remove from the actual academic enterprise. It’s not unheard-of for colleges now to employ more senior administrators than professors. There are, of course, essential functions that many university administrators perform, but such an imbalance is absurd — try imagining a high school with more vice principals than teachers. This legion of bureaucrats enables a world of pitiless surveillance; no segment of campus life, no matter how small, does not have some administrator who worries about it. Piece by piece, every corner of the average campus is being slowly made congruent with a single, totalizing vision. The rise of endless brushed-metal-and-glass buildings at Purdue represents the aesthetic dimension of this ideology. Bent into place by a small army of apparatchiks, the contemporary American college is slowly becoming as meticulously art-directed and branded as a J. Crew catalog. Like Niketown or Disneyworld, your average college campus now leaves the distinct impression of a one-party state.

As we said in a previous post on DeBoer’s thesis, “corporatization” doesn’t tell the full story when it comes to campus PC. In fact, if universities were more like corporations in some ways—for example, if they didn’t have an activist Department of Education breathing down their necks about Title IX, and if their ranks of make-work administrative positions weren’t being inflated by a constant stream of federal money—then the PC problem might not be as severe.

Still, DeBoer’s framing of enforced conformity on campus seems particularly apt here. Universities are creating “a corporate architecture of managing offense,” complete with professionally produced videos, information sheets, and administrator-consultants. The mix of politically correct ideology with out-of-control bureaucracy is particularly toxic.

America’s Forgotten Missionaries

Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal ran a fascinating piece, worth reading in full, about how American missionary organizations are scaling back their global footprint in the face of budgetary pressures and increased competition from missionaries hailing from the non-Western world:

Peter and Jennie Stillman felt a divine calling to preach the gospel abroad. So the Southern Baptist couple left Texas with their three young daughters 25 years ago and became missionaries in Southeast Asia.

Now, the Stillmans are responding to a new call: early retirement. They are among hundreds of Southern Baptist missionaries working abroad who are being summoned home in a move to slash costs, after years of spending to support missionary work around the world led to budget problems. […]The cuts to the program, considered America’s flagship evangelical missionary organization, underscore a fundamental change in mission work as the church becomes more global and the tradition of lifetime assignments for Christian missionaries sent “from the West to the rest” declines.

The most important news here is that the spread of Christianity around the globe is changing the nature of world missions—there are relatively fewer (expensive) Americans, and relatively more Brazilians, Koreans, and even Indians. As of 2010, according to the Journal, these countries had more than 60,000 Christian missionaries spreading the word abroad.

More broadly, however, the story should remind us of the overlooked importance of American missionaries in shaping the history of this country and the world. Evangelical missionaries aren’t fashionable topics today, and missionary history is almost totally neglected by the educational establishment, but the almost 200 years of American foreign missions has been one of the most consequential long-term movements in American history.American missionaries played a crucial role in the rise of Christianity in East and South Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, the Pacific Islands and of Protestantism in Central and South America—an epic tale of courage, sacrifice (and occasional follies and missteps) that, for most Americans under 50, is completely unknown and untold. In the 19th and 20th centuries, missionaries opened professional doors to women both here and abroad, helped lead lead the the attack on segregation in the United States upon their return (to say nothing of the anti-slavery movement), and spread ideas about democracy, development, and medical education around the world. Missionaries and their children have also been closely involved with American foreign policy and diplomatic service.You can spend a lifetime in elite American schools and colleges without knowing that any of this ever happened—or that more than 100,000 Americans are serving abroad in this capacity today. This is one of many ways that Americans are losing touch with some of the important values and movements that shaped and continue to shape this country and the world.Changes in communication technology, faster travel in an age of jets, and above all the rise of vibrant Christian communities across the global South, are changing the mission of Americans seeking to share their faith overseas, and this change has driven and will drive more changes in the ways missionary agencies work.But if Americans are going to understand their own history and society, much less the nature of America’s role in world affairs, our colleges and schools are going to have to recover one of the most dramatic and consequential elements of the American story.

Ignore the Prosecutor, Ignore the Problem

Prison reformers are making a hash of things again. A measure designed to reduce the unfair use of mandatory minimums in Drug Laws may be ignoring, or possibly worsening, one of the biggest problems in the criminal justice system today—the coercion of plea bargains. Antonio Ginatta, of Human Rights Watch, writes in The Hill:

97 percent of federal drug defendants ultimately plead guilty. That surprisingly high rate — it was 78 percent 30 years ago — stems in part from the increased drug enforcement and harsh sentencing laws that began in the ’80s.

Under these laws, federal prosecutors can and do threaten defendants with mandatory minimums of five to 10 years if they don’t plead guilty instead of going to trial. Prosecutors can also threaten to double those sentences, or even require mandatory life in prison, depending on whether the defendant has prior drug convictions. […]Under the proposed bill, a new “safety valve” for the 10-year drug mandatory minimum would allow judges to hand down lighter sentences under certain conditions. But prosecutors can keep judges from sentencing under the minimum if they maintain that defendants haven’t fully cooperated. So even with this new safety valve, the prosecutor holds almost all the cards, and can continue to threaten the 10-year mandatory to push people into guilty pleas.[..]Under the Senate bill, prosecutors could seek a 15-year mandatory minimum for one prior drug felony and 25 years for two. In a positive change, the person would actually have had to serve a year in prison for that earlier charge, not just have been convicted of a crime that was punishable with a year or more.But the bill actually expands the types of crimes that could trigger these enhanced penalties — not just drug crimes. A state-level firearm charge or robbery could trigger the enhancement.So threatening big mandatory sentences for a broader range of prior crimes will continue to help prosecutors drive drug defendants to plead guilty.

Both the new proposed law and the one it replaces create a situation in which defendants are punished much more severely if they exercise their right to trial. They do so in part by leaving to prosecutors, not judges, discretion in when to pull the trigger on minimums. As Ginatta wrote, “Our research found that sentences for federal drug defendants who exercise their right to go to trial are three times as long as those who forgo that right.” This strikes us as contrary to the spirit of the Constitution, if not necessarily the case law on what it allows the government to do (we are not lawyers).

As we noted the other day, prosecutorial culture plays an enormous and under-appreciated role in the criminal justice and prison crises.Some of the smartest solutions to these problems come from Glenn Harlan Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit), in his capacity not as a blogger but as a law professor. In “Ham Sandwich Nation“, one of the (it’s safe to say) few law journal articles to break through to the mainstream, Reynolds argued that:

The “nuclear option” of prosecutorial accountability would involve banning plea bargains. An understanding that every criminal charge filed would have to be either backed up in open court or ignominiously dropped would significantly reduce the incentive to overcharge. It would also drastically reduce the number of criminal convictions achieved by our justice system. But given that America is a world leader in incarceration, it is fair to suggest that this might be not a bug, but a feature.18 Our criminal justice system, as presently practiced, is basically a plea bargain system with actual trials of guilt or innocence a bit of showy froth floating on top.19

A less dramatic option might be to require that the prosecution’s plea offers be presented to a jury or judge after a conviction, before sentencing. Judges or jurors might then wonder why they are being asked to sentence a defendant to twenty years without parole when the prosecution was willing to settle for five. Fifteen years in jail seems a rather stiff punishment for making the state undergo the bother of a trial.

When you look at plea coercion, it can seem pretty bleak: a world in which only single digit percentages of defendants get a full and fair trial doesn’t seem much like the America you learn about in civics class. The good news is, there are a lot of smart people out there, including Reynolds, pushing good solutions. Our legislators need to start listening to them.

Tango Nuevo: Will Argentina’s Leftist Establishment Lose the Presidency?

Che Guevara t-shirts may be selling as fast as ever in campus bookstores, but Latin Leftists aren’t doing so well in the real world. Between the Brazilian crisis and the Venezuelan implosion, left-wing regimes of different shades have some economic ‘splainin’ to do. So it shouldn’t be so surprising that anti-Leftist winds have blown into recession-mired Argentina and upended the Presidential election there.

Argentina has been a mess for most of the past fifteen years and presently suffers 25% inflation. The global commodities price collapse hasn’t helped (nor has the country taxing its own critical exports). Yet an election to succeed the hard-nosed Leftist President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner was still expected to smoothly usher in Kirchner’s designated heir and successor, Daniel Scioli. That didn’t happen, and there’s now a run-off after Scioli managed to receive only 2% more of the vote than his centrist opponent, Buenos Aires Mayor Mauricio Macri.Scioli might have won outright if former political ally Sergio Massa hadn’t left Scioli’s party and garnered 21.4% of the vote as a third-party candidate. With questions swirling about whether Massa will make an endorsement, Macri and Scioli will face off next month and most analysts suggest it’s anyone’s game.Given the depth of Argentina’s recession, it may or may not be surprising that left-wing star economist Paul Krugman holds the country up as an example for the rest of us:

After it defaulted at the end of 2001, [Argentina] went through a brief severe downturn, but soon began a rapid recovery that continued for a long time. Surely the Argentine example suggests that default is a great idea…

After the 1998–2001 depression that saw a loss of over a quarter of GDP, Néstor Kirchner, Cristina’s late husband and political predecessor, steered the economy to an apparent 9% growth for five years. Yet as things came apart during the 2008 global recession, it became clear that Argentina had been habitually fudging its numbers and over-inflating its currency. Some economists began to doubt that the economy ever saw anything close to 9% growth (Krugman has dismissed all criticism and doubled down on his analysis).

Kirchnerists are still running on their track record in 2002 and 2003, saying that at least things aren’t as bad as they were in the Great Argentinian Depression. For many Argentinians, that’s a stale message.Argentina is a great example of what we like to call Recurring Failed Populist Syndrome. RFPS takes hold when a corrupt oligarchy doesn’t bother to secure economic gains for the poor and middle class. Think Greece or, in a starker example, Venezuela. In such a political climate, the isolated majority grows restless and rises up to kick out the regime. The problem is that the populists often end up replacing the old system with an equally corrupt, but far less competent one. No amount of socialist lipstick can hide the failure of this new oligarchy and the saga often ends in a return of the old, and still unreformed, establishment. That sad cycle is the curse of modern Latin American history, and Argentina’s seventy year fixation with a deeply corrupt, anti-liberal Peronist movement has been one of the costliest political infatuations on record.Unsurprisingly, Macri is accused of being a friend of big money and the banks. Populist Argentinian wisdom is that neoliberal (a favorite Latin American slur) policies led to the 1998 collapse, so Macri is trying to avoid looking too much like the status quo ante. Indeed, he has been so successful that many Argentinian pundits believed he wasn’t differing himself enough from Kirchner. Yet his careful strategy seems to have worked well thus far, and many outside observers now think he will win.Whether Macri makes it to the Casa Rosada (in Argentina, even the White House is pink), his surprising success indicates a clear anti-Leftist trend: we aren’t hearing viva la revolución shouted from many Latin American rooftops these days. We aren’t really surprised, either: socialism generally falls out of favor when it moves from t-shirt slogan to actual policy.

UN Pessimistic About Climate Future

A total of 146 nations have submitted national plans to curb climate change ahead of this December’s summit in France, but the message out of the UN is something of a buzzkill. As the FT reports, the UN doesn’t think those national commitments—called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs for short—go far enough:

[T]he pledges will not be enough alone to keep global temperature rises to less than 2C, an internationally-agreed goal scientists say should be met to avoid risky changes in the climate.

“The INDCs have the capability of limiting the forecast temperature rise to around 2.7C by 2100, by no means enough but a lot lower than the estimated 4C, 5C or more degrees of warming projected by many before the INDCs,” [UN climate chief Christiana Figueres] said.

Delegates seem to have left themselves quite a lot of work in Paris, then. The draft text for the conference, initially some 80 pages of hedging, was pared down to a shorter but heavily bracketed 20-page document earlier this month. That draft didn’t sit well with the developing world, however, and after meetings in Bonn earlier this week and last the document bloated anew to its final pre-Paris form, checking in at 34 pages. Carbon Pulse described this development as a “step backwards” for the Global Climate Treaty process, and it’s hard to read it any other way.

They say the hallmark of a good compromise is a result that leaves nobody happy, and if that’s the metric by which we judge the Paris summit, then perhaps greens might be able to claim some kind of victory this December. In reality though, all signs point towards an impending trainwreck. The developed and developing worlds are still miles apart, the only meaningful policy mechanism meant to bridge that divide—a climate fund paid into by rich countries to help poorer countries mitigate and adapt to climate change—remains woefully underfunded.It’s too early to call, but there are a couple of certainties. First, whatever watered-down agreement negotiators finally agree upon will be derided by the environmental movement (ever incapable of assessing outcomes realistically) as too soft. Second, in order to get everyone to agree to the deal, it will not be binding or enforceable, making it little more than the eco-version of the Kellogg-Briand pact.

Churchgoers Less Likely to Believe in Ghosts

In honor of Halloween, the Pew Research Center has published an interesting post highlighting its 2009 findings about Americans’ belief in ghosts. Not surprisingly, regular churchgoers are less likely to say they they have seen or been in the presence of the apparition of a dead person:

Does going to church help keep ghosts away? It’s impossible to say, but people who often go to worship services appear to be less likely to say they see ghosts. Just 11% of those who attend religious services at least weekly say they’ve been in the presence of a ghost, while 23% of those who attend services less frequently say they have seen a ghost, the Pew Research Center survey found.

The survey also found that the share of Americans who said they had seen ghosts had doubled between 1996 and 2009—a period during which religious affiliation declined sharply.

These figures support a view we’ve expressed before—that humans inherently feel connected to something beyond their visible day-to-day reality, and that, in the absence of organized religion, that feeling tends to be expressed through superstition. A world without God is unlikely to be a more “rational” world in the sense that Richard Dawkins and Co. would like.

Same-Sex Marriage and the Baby Business

Gay Americans scored a huge victory in June when the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, declared same-sex marriage a Constitutional right.

But will this historic win for homosexuals inadvertently translate into a setback for American women? Anyone who studies third-party assisted reproduction trends, more specifically surrogacy, will tell you it’s inevitable, unless something is done about it. Payments from wealthy prospective parents to poor women for surrogacy services were surging before Obergefell v. Hodges. Now they’re set to explode.The gay rights movement has realized astonishing success in the past two decades, not just in advancing legislation but in normalizing homosexual relationships in American culture. According to Gallup, just 38 percent of Americans believed that gay and lesbian relationships were “morally acceptable” in 2002. A decade later that number stood at 63 percent. Sixty percent of Americans support gay marriage today, almost twice the 35 percent that supported it in 1999.In other words, gay and lesbian households are going mainstream, and with that change comes a demand for traditional features of the married household, including, foremost, children. The growing number of adoptions by same sex couples speaks to that nesting trend: In 2000, the Census reported 8,310 adopted children living with same sex couples in the U.S. In 2009—five years before the Supreme Court decision—it was 32,571.Consider another fact: The Census Bureau estimated that there were 252,000 gay and lesbian married couples in America in 2013, when just 14 states allowed same sex marriage. Now that all fifty states allow it by the Supreme Court’s decree, the number of married same sex couples is poised to shoot up in short order. It’s not a stretch to say that the baby market going forward could reach into the low millions, as gay couples turn to Third Party Assisted Reproduction rather than adoption to build families.Paid surrogate pregnancies are one of those things that sound like a win-win upon first hearing but become more and more problematic, for all parties involved, the closer one looks. There’s a reason countries like France, Germany, and Spain prohibit all surrogacy, and that Canada has banned paid surrogacy. They understand what the surrogacy market can do to women and to the children they bear.In the United States, though, the laws are still a patchwork quilt that has effectively allowed a lightly regulated, multibillion-dollar business to take hold. A quick Internet search reveals baby brokers who aggressively market surrogates especially, in the wake of Obergefell, to same sex couples. They sell the idea of the American family by renting out the wombs of struggling American and foreign women. Agency websites are rife with dehumanizing terms, with patients referred to as “clients,” surrogate mothers as mere “carriers,” and pregnancies referred to as “sales.”Brokers also provide prospective customers with a veritable menu of features to bequeath children. Eye color, athleticism, Ivy League genes? It’ll cost you more, but they have it all. Tall, short, blonde, brunette, Asian, European—whatever you’re looking for can be arranged, for the right price. Unregulated, the business of egg and sperm “donation” run the risk of eugenic commodification. Ads commonly specify racial, physical, and intellectual characteristics—giving parents the opportunity to create custom-tailored children and pressuring surrogates to terminate pregnancies if the “product” doesn’t fit the customer’s desired outcome.For £1,800, couples can now get a blood test in England that will reveal in thirty days if their genetic combination could—could—result in one of more than 600 heredity diseases. A single potential flag will no doubt send some to the egg and surrogacy markets.Because surrogacy frequently depends on the exploitation of poorer women, the lack of regulation on these unequal transactions often results in “uninformed” consent, low payments, coercion, poor health care, and severe risks to short- and long-term health. As the European Parliament stated in a resolution, surrogacy and egg sale constitute an “extreme form of exploitation of women.” The New York State Task Force on Life and the Law under former New York Governor Mario Cuomo stated that commercial surrogacy “could not be distinguished from the sale of children and that it placed children at significant risk of harm.”Still, the practice is being regularized, glamorized even, by the American media. Time listed pregnancy as one of the “Top Ten Chores to Outsource” a couple of years back. Glamour glowingly noted this May a group of A-List celebrities, including Nicole Kidman, Sarah Jessica Parker, Elton John, and Neil Patrick Harris, who have hired surrogates to produce children for them. Wealthy, figure-conscious Americans are in on the game as well. Why endure the pains and risks of pregnancy when you can pay help to do it for you?But what about that help? Who are they? What are these surrogate pregnancies doing to them, psychically, spiritually, and psychologically? And what does it do to the children?These are the questions not being asked because the surrogacy industry doesn’t want to know the answers, and there are almost no government studies on paid surrogacy. The National Institute of Health spent $666,905 to study the benefits of watching television reruns but doesn’t seem to care that scenes from Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, are playing out in delivery rooms every day.What we do know from limited private research is that the health and psychological risks to women serving as egg vendors or surrogates often go untold. Those risks include Ovarian Hyperstimulation syndrome (OHSS) due to superovulation, loss of fertility, ovarian torsion, blood clots, kidney disease, premature menopause, ovarian cysts, chronic pelvic pain, stroke, reproductive cancers, and in some cases, death.In October, a paid surrogate mother from Idaho died from placental abruption while carrying twins, reportedly for a Spanish couple. The twins died, too, just days before they were scheduled to be delivered by cesarean section. The mother had been a paid surrogate multiple times.Military wives are being heavily targeted to act as paid surrogates. And “targeted” is not too strong a word: These woman, mostly young and mostly poor, may not be able to hold down full-time jobs while balancing responsibilities to children and household—not to mention the stress of having a spouse in harm’s way overseas.Here’s what one recruiting website writes:

Embraced by independent ways, military wives are a good match for couples looking to build a family through surrogacy.

They truly understand the commitment and the self-sacrifice—which comes full circle in their own lives.Today, military wives are helping intended parents, as well as gay singles and couples, both in the US and abroad. It is a suitable fit, with their solid supporting cast, more and more of these courageous and loving women are taking action. They see it as a way to help unlucky couples build a family, not an exclusive montage of money.

Once they sign a contract, these and other women are injected with risky hormones to produce as many eggs as possible for cultivation. Egg providers are enticed through ads in online classifieds, social media, and college newspapers offering anywhere from $5,000 to $100,000 per extraction. The better the school these young women attend, the more money they are offered. Ads directly appeal to college-age women’s financial need without any mention of the potential health risks involved—essential information to enable informed decision-making and consent. Universities do nothing to block these advertisements, even though their students are being recruited to accept medical risks for money.

Lupron, a drug commonly used on egg donors to medically induce menopause, for example, is not approved by the FDA for use in fertility treatment; thus it used off-label in surrogacy. This drug has a Category X rating, which means if a woman gets pregnant while taking it there will be harm to the developing fetus. This is extremely concerning in egg donors who are very fertile and may not be compliant with instructions not to be sexually active during ovarian stimulation. The use of Lupron in preparing a gestational surrogate to receive transferred embryos has been documented to put a woman at risk for increased intracranial pressure.Most concerning is that there is little to no peer-reviewed medical research on the long-term safety effects of egg procurement on the health of the young women who provide their eggs. This makes it impossible for fertility clinics to provide the information about health risks necessary for informed consent. Students are praised, paid, and left in the dark about what might happen to their bodies.Due to the high costs involved in surrogacy and the strong desire to boost success rates, multiple embryos are often implanted in a surrogate mother. In addition to the increased risk of caesarian sections and longer hospital stays, the British Journal of Medicine warns, “multiple pregnancies are associated with maternal and perinatal complications such as gestational diabetes, fetal growth restriction, and preeclampsia as well as premature birth.”Surrogate mothers who carry multiple embryos can be pressured to abort one or more. Couples can separate or divorce during a surrogate pregnancy, complicating the process. Serious moral dilemmas can arise over disagreements about unborn babies found to have deformities or other medical difficulties. One party might insist on terminating while the other wants full-term delivery. Our laws are chaotic and unsettled when it comes to determining what is in the best interests of the child when surrogacy arrangements go wrong.In addition, egg and sperm donors often regret their decision later in life. A 2014 study in Human Reproduction found that many donors later in life seek to gain information about their child and sometimes seek to establish relationships with these donor-conceived persons. The biological link between parent and child is undeniably intimate and, when severed, has lasting repercussions on both parties. A 2013 study in Reproductive BioMedicine surveyed 108 parents of children conceived via oocyte donation and found that 50 percent regretted using anonymous donation for these very reasons.There are also clear health and psychological risks to the children born via third party reproductive arrangements. Children born through assisted reproduction are much more likely to suffer from low and very low birth weights, according to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. Children conceived via IVF (as are all children in gestational surrogacy) also suffer from significant increases in preterm births, stillbirths, low birth weights, fetal anomalies, higher blood pressure, Beckwith-Wiedemann and Angelman Syndromes, and cesarean sections according to studies published in the American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology, the Journal of Perinatology, the American Journal of Human Genetics, and Fertility and Sterility.Equally concerning is the fact that surrogate pregnancies intentionally sever the natural maternal bonding that takes place during pregnancy. A June 2013 study released in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry found that “surrogacy children showed higher levels of adjustment difficulties at age 7,” and that “the absence of a gestational connection to the mother may be more problematic.” The study also reported that the child’s difficulties “may have been under-reported by reproductive donation mothers who may have wished to present their children in a positive light.”Young adult children born via anonymous gamete donation also suffer serious genealogical bewilderment according to both empirical studies and first-person testimonies. A 2001 study in the journal Human Reproduction concluded, “Disclosure to children conceived with donor gametes should not be optional.”The more one looks, the more ones sees serious moral, ethical, and medical problems associated with the commercialization of conception. Teresa Erickson, a reproductive attorney convicted of baby selling, has stated that she was just “the tip of the iceberg.” Rudy Rupak, founder of Planet Hospital, a global IVF industry provider of services, stated in the New York Times: “Here’s a little secret for all of you. There is a lot of treachery and deception in I.V.F./fertility/surrogacy because there is gobs of money to be made.”The problem of the exploitation of poor women—the renting of them for childbearing duties—was coming to a head long before June’s Supreme Court ruling. But now it threatens to pit women’s rights advocates against LGBTQ advocates in profound ways.The pressure on state governments from the paid surrogacy industry to widely legalize the practice is growing. In New York State, for example, Governor Andrew Cuomo is using the same task force his father convened to outlaw paid surrogacy, the Task Force on Life and the Law, to reverse course and allow it once again. It raises the question: When in the intervening years between father and son did the commodification of children become morally acceptable?Some perspicacious gay leaders are joining with feminists of all political persuasions to demand a stop to the growing paid surrogacy industry in this country. It is a brave and lonely fight at present, but it’s one that has to be waged.