In our age of self-preoccupation, children’s rights usually take a backseat. With one of the worst offenders, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, in political prominence with the GOP, this problem is not going to be solved anytime soon.
Part of that is because, as a concept, Musk’s family plan itself is never really “solved.” He has fathered (a minimum of) 13 children with four women, to none of whom he relates as a real father and most of whom he stores under nondisclosure agreements. It’s an inherently unstable model, and will always be so. And Musk doesn’t want to stop — because, well, not stopping is the point.
The point, for the now-right-wing tech executives who hail repopulation, is to correct a falling fertility rate with their preferred genetics. Musk’s general technique is to find women either unsociable enough or impressionable enough to agree to the request to have his children, often by in vitro fertilization or surrogacy, and receive significant payments as a result. The process is deeply disconcerting for the women who engage with Musk and then find him a total absentee. A recent Wall Street Journal article on his tactics tells as much, focusing on 26-year-old Ashley St. Clair, right-wing influencer and Musk’s most recent, after she went against the grain and filed a paternity lawsuit. St. Clair claims their child was conceived naturally — a believable romantic entry into Musk world. Still, the driving idea, as the Journal reports, is his idea that, “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse […] we will need to use surrogates.”
For Musk’s children, too, the endeavor is inherently harmful. And no wonder: At its most basic level, surrogacy inflicts serious evils on the children it sells. Unnatural, and intentional, separation from the child’s mother is one, along with identity struggles and the overall dehumanization fundamental to both IVF and surrogacy. Beyond these, the web of pedophiles who purchase children by surrogacy is large, sinister, and mostly untracked.
Pedophile abuse is the sort of thing we sanction implicitly through surrogacy, along with all the aforementioned child-offending characteristics of which we now approve explicitly. Despite early efforts to discredit a link, Obergefell v. Hodges certainly helped bring us to our current level of societal acceptance of these dangers, if not for the definite acts themselves. Now, technologies loom to push us over the edge, already having succeeded in broad dehumanization that redefines the social landscape.
GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE AUDITING MUSK-LED DOGE
Musk’s approval of these more grave effects on children is also implicit. But with his money, knowledge, and influence, blame falls harder. He is willing to do a simple utilitarian analysis of the situation: Proven child abuse cases of surrogacy and IVF make up only a portion of the number of babies who can be produced into dysfunctional but non-pedophile homes, like Musk’s. It is a sacrifice in favor of “saving the world.”
A gross equation, and yet the rest of us do similarly when we verify that Musk’s political benefits are worth overlooking the defects of his not-so-personal life. Compliance grows more woven into society by the day, partly because of our open moral borders. And Musk certainly has no need to slow down: He persuades normal-seeming people to run the legal side, and there are always misguided women willing to date him.