I don’t think sexism is a very useful concept here. After all, you could equally well argue that it’s sexist to forbid surrogacy, since that’s removing autonomy.

Personally, I’m squishy enough that I’m willing to be convinced by empirical data. Like, if there was data that showed a huge percentage of surrogate mothers regret agreeing to it, then that would matter a lot to me, though I’d still probably lean towards education / screening / etc. before jumping all the way to making it illegal.

There’s a reason that voluntary slavery is illegal: Desperate people would do it (and have historically done it), and that didn’t make it right.

I think this is the point I was trying to make at the end of the post. If someone does surrogacy (or donates a kidney) out of desperation, that seems gross. Whereas if they are OK financially and decide to do it for some “extra money” (whatever that means) then that seems less gross.

My instinct is that $20 per A would not be enough to move the needle, and might be net-harmful when you consider intrinsic motivation. But how about $500 per A? (Or $1000 for straight As) Still might be cheaper than tutoring?

The response I find really amusing is that lots of people respond with, basically, “But if you don’t do this then it’s harder to make money on twitter.”

(OK… If doing plagiarism makes it easier to make money, then it’s not plagiarism?)

Being: “If you move these molecules around you can cure cancer and make a near-infinite amount of money”

Humans: “OK!”