"The developing status of sexual surrogates for the disabled, as part of a right to health and well-being: So wrong?"

"Surrogacy involves paying a professional who engages in intimate contact (broadly defined, though certainly not always intercourse) with a patient."

In March, the French National Ethics Committee decided that sexual surrogacy was an "unethical use of the human body for commercial purposes."Anne-Marie Dickelé of the National Ethics Committee justified it to Rousselle: "The sexuality of the disabled cannot be considered a right."

But some French people like Laetitia Rebord, who is confined to a wheelchair due to spinal muscular atrophy, are campaigning passionately against the committee's decision. She's 31, a virgin, and wants to have sex -- "In her sexual fantasies, she is a fit and impetuous blonde who dominates her male partners." As she told Rousselle, "Eventually, one has to address the issue and understand why we are demanding this. I can't move. I can't masturbate."...

As the world increasingly sees health care to be a human right -- Kathleen Sebelius and Barack Obama understand health care to be "not some earned privilege, it is a right'' -- it might seem a leap to not only fail to address sexuality in caring for people with conditions like Rousselle's, but to go the additional step of precluding them from procuring it for themselves. Holland, Switzerland, Denmark, and Germany agree.

How can you have a right to something that would require another human being to do something with his/her body, when the other human being has a right over his/her body? I suppose you could frame it as a right against criminalizing the activities of sex service providers who restrict their business to the disabled. This reminds me of medical marijuana as a leading edge in the movement to legalize marijuana. It seems like a steppingstone to the legalization of prostitution for anyone who wants to buy it, because who will count as disabled enough for the authorization to buy what is criminalized for everyone else?

The public will be drawn in with empathy for people like the young virgin Laetitia Rebord, who will be like the emaciated, elderly cancer patients who were the face of the medical marijuana movement. Once you define a category of persons who may partake of the forbidden activity, others will cadge their way into the category. It will involve so much stretching and lying that pragmatic, flexible folk will cave in and say: It would be better to legalize it for everyone.

But as long as we stay in the medical framework, as we talk about legalization, we're also talking about health insurance coverage. Will we be paying for the select group of medical marijuana users and disabled consumers of sex services? The pragmatic, flexible folk may say: All the more reason to legalize it for everyone, so that it's not a health care service, just something people with the cash are able to buy. But that step is crazy — unless your agenda all along is to legalize marijuana and prostitution — because the most sympathetic consumers are least likely to have the money to buy the product/service. What's the point of using the Laetitia Rebords of this world to leverage policy change only to leave them unable to benefit from the new policy?

That's the practical problem, in my view. I don't want to pay for prostitutes for everyone with a medical condition — obesity?! depression?! — that impedes the pursuit of sexual activity.

Oh! But I'm saying "prostitutes." Was I supposed to say "surrogates"? But why, really? More from the link — which goes to a piece by The Atlantic's health editor James Hamblin:

Surrogacy does not replace a loving relationship, and it should't [sic] be expected to. We don't refuse the help of a physical therapist because it won't be as good as having never gotten hit by a bus to begin with. When real love is on the table, take it. When the table is missing, or someone's axed the legs, then there are surrogates.

Axed the legs... What a harsh metaphor! And right when you're trying to teach us to say "surrogate" and not "prostitution." And are prostitutes/surrogates really the alternative to "real love," deserving of the presumption that anyone who could get real love would surely go for the real love? People opt for prostitutes over real love all the time.

And why are we prompted to use the term "real love" to mean sex with someone you are in love with? I think it's because we're being lured into thinking that disabled people are denied something more than sex. They are denied love. Give them professional sex, because they are denied love and sex. They are denied a "right to health and well-being." That's supposed to make sense to you.

You're being softened up. Have you noticed... are are you so squishy for Laetitia you're too numb to tell?