Voices we don't hear from - a child of surrogacy

Goosefoot, it is fair to point out that the consequence of your position is that lesbians should never have biological children.

Um, no, lesbians can't have biological children. There is no should about it.

If you say that the rights of children are violated by being born to a lesbian couple, this would be more convincing if you could produce some evidence of that harm. Particularly given the number of studies which have looked for this harm and failed to find it.

The whole of the thread is discussing this. Rights of the child include the right to have a relationship with the biological parents, not to be concieved with the intent to be given away or treated as a non-child by the biological parents.

"Evidence of harm" - how would you even show that? Do people generally have to show harm to justify having their rights considered in policy and law?

Chatty Lion - I'd have said considering the views of the people they represent should be part of making a conscience vote. Though not the only part. That's always a difficult point to navigate though I think.

I tend to see the alternate as whipped votes which usually means the central party leadership makes the call.

Goosefoot, it is fair to point out that the consequence of your position is that lesbians should never have biological children.

If you say that the rights of children are violated by being born to a lesbian couple, this would be more convincing if you could produce some evidence of that harm. Particularly given the number of studies which have looked for this harm and failed to find it.

Trauma to children and adverse childhood events have well evidenced consequences in the future lives of those children - their health, relationships, stability. You would expect to see evidence of these adverse effects in the lives of children of lesbians if their family situations were damaging them. Except there is no such evidence of that harm

Goosefoot the conscience vote point is that MPs should want to weigh their constituents’ views as well as their own personal prejudices when they vote - and if we don’t tell them what those views are, then because women’s issues aren’t something they’ll ever tend to research I fear the MPs will just vote with personal conviction or with which lobby groups seems most valuable to them on that thing. worst case scenario is the MP gets the emails from women explaining how these proposals would affect them and just ignores them because ‘conscience vote’. (Like a lot of the MPs opposed to abortion do.)

Some ‘conscience vote’ issues affect women more than men, or affect women entirely and not men at all in a relevant way. I would rather those weren’t seen as personal moral decisions to be made in a vacuum by MPs, many of whom will never be personally affected by the laws they want to vote in.

I don’t know what the alternative should be but what we have doesn’t feel sufficient to safeguard women and children because it’s ‘conscience‘ vote not ‘vote with the evidence of harm/benefit’.

Goosefoot, you're setting a moral boundary. Nature isn't setting a boundary - human biology allows lesbians easily to get pregnant from donated sperm and have children together. You're saying that's immoral. But the evidence shows that children do as well with lesbian parents as straight parents.

Yes, it's a moral boundary, but you are missing that I was criticising the form of the argument.

The natural boundary is that a woman cannot impregnate another woman, so they cannot in fact have a child together biologically. There must still be a father. That is all nature.

The argument was that it is homophobic to not allow sperm donation because there is no other way for a lesbian couple to have a child. So the form of that is that because "something" is what allows lesbians to have a baby, it must therefore be moral - to say it is a problem is homophobic

Try the same argument for surrogacy - if someone has doubts about the ethics of surrogacy, is that homophobic for gay men? What if surrogacy wasn't technically possible and the only option for gay men was to buy a baby, would that therefore make it ok?

Means justify ends arguments very rarely work. You have to show the thing is ok in itself. If a practice or scientific procedure or technology is immoral, it does not become ok because it allows lesbians or gay men to have babies. Saying that it is immoral doesn't make someone a homophobe.

These are all issues that relate to the rights of children. You don't get to over-ride the rights of children because it benefits lesbians. The question of whether such kids "turn out fine" isn't the only issue (and in a lot of ways its a crude measure anyway.

Goosefoot, you're setting a moral boundary. Nature isn't setting a boundary - human biology allows lesbians easily to get pregnant from donated sperm and have children together. You're saying that's immoral. But the evidence shows that children do as well with lesbian parents as straight parents.

It is saying that only women in straight relationships can have biological children and lesbians should not have biological children. Deeply conservative and hardly liberating for women.

This is just ends justifying means. "Lesbians can only have children via X and so saying X is wrong is homophobic." Substitute anything you like for X and you can see the problem.

Lesbians can't have kids together because it requires a father and mother. That's not anyone's fault, it's just what happens when you are a sexed species. Nature isn't homophobic. We all face boundaries set by nature at one point or another, it doesn't mean we can do whatever we feel would be required to overcome them.

Plus oftentimes when it comes to voting in Parliament on ‘beginning of life’ issues, like with ‘end of life’ issues, MPs are usually offered free votes as these are seen as ‘conscience issues’.

Honestly I think this is better. These issues don't belong to any particular political philosophy. When they are whipped all too often everyone is obligated to vote for what the party leadership thinks will be most popular.

If you do some reading about this, you find that the evidence is that having lesbian parents does not harm children.

whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-wellbeing-of-children-with-gay-or-lesbian-parents/

She would have found something to be bitter about even if the woman who raised her was biologically related to her.

Many people dismiss the feelings of adopted children and adopted adult children like this. I understand it's more pleasant to write it off as a bit of teenaged angst or a personality fault rather than unpack it, but I'd suggest doing some reading about this A pinch of salt is a convenient escape from facing the real issues here, albeit inconvenient ones for adults who long to be parents.

The fact that woman is calling her mother her ‘social mother’ suggests background problems between mother and daughter. She would have found something to be bitter about even if the woman who raised her was biologically related to her. Take all of this with a pinch of salt. In the US many extreme Christian groups are trying to ban everything to do with assisted conception from IVF to gamete conception to surrogacy.

I am not sure what disapproval of conception by donor sperm has to do with women's rights or feminism. It is saying that only women in straight relationships can have biological children and lesbians should not have biological children. Deeply conservative and hardly liberating for women. Lesbians have been having kids by donor sperm for decades, in informal non-commercial arrangements more often than through the fertility industry. There have been multiple studies on kids born to lesbian couples and there is no evidence that kids are psychologically damaged by it - rather they do as well as kids born to straight couples.
Lesbian couples are no more motivated by selfishness or treating kids as commodities than straight couples.

Really interesting thread. I have recently had a child, she is a few weeks old (my biogical child, conceived the "normal way"). What with coronavirus, I have been contemplating recently that I don't know what world she is being born into or whether she will have a good life, whether she will be happy etc. She has not asked to be here but there is no going back now. It was not her choice, it was mine. I appreciate that she won't have to contend with questions about her heritage. However I know plenty of biological children who have difficult relationships with parents and feel like they were created for a parents need or have to live up to an expectation. I also know people with complex relationships with step parents, not knowing who their father is etc. I have not experienced surrogacy so I cannot say whether this is innately different or not to these other experiences.

I think donor conception and gamete donation are also wrong. I do not believe everyone has a right to be a parent and to go about it in ways that will be detrimental to the child's future emotional health and sense of self.

I find this attitude really homophobic. Lesbians are unable to have biological children without using sperm donors and it's insulting to suggest the children of lesbians are disadvantaged and will have problems with their emotional health.

There is absolutely no evidence that children who are donor conceived are less happy or fulfilled than other children as a general trend. Plenty of studies have been done on it.

whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-wellbeing-of-children-with-gay-or-lesbian-parents/

Brilliant thread. Michelle you are so insightful and eloquent in your posts. The individualism is so pervasive it’s hard to see it a lot of the time. People also often feel very uncomfortable with it being pointed out as it shows something so deep and entrenched in society. so it can be hard to talk about and develop views on.

The primary law on this is made in Westminster and many women on here will be able to say, based on their experience of campaigning on other ‘women’s issues’ that the vast majority of MPs (male or female) will not have thought about this issue in any depth nor have sought to find out what their constituents’ views on it are.

Plus oftentimes when it comes to voting in Parliament on ‘beginning of life’ issues, like with ‘end of life’ issues, MPs are usually offered free votes as these are seen as ‘conscience issues’.

As the two Law commissions covering GB (not sure about NI) will be advising government about changing the law on surrogacy in the next year or so we need to keep on with letting MPs know what we think. All the questions are not already settled and it’s really important for them to listen to the voices of all women who have been surrogates and to the voices of children born from surrogacy.

The planet is overpopulated-there are hundreds of thousands of children in care homes desperately in need of adoption. Surrogacy is obscenely selfish when so many children already exist that need love and protection. Having yr own biological child is not a right-I can't see any reason its allowed to happen (other than that its a business.)

It's not child centred. Having a child is not a right. Being a parent is not a right.

This, exactly.

@Michelleoftheresistance just wrote possibly the best post I've seen on MN, and I've been here under various guises since 2006.

Among so many brilliant posts.

I did once read a description of people who use surrogates which fitted perfectly - apex capitalists.
It is not poor single women or poor gay couples who are using surrogates but people with a huge amount of money.
Kim Kardashian is a perfect example of this - she gave birth to two beautiful children. At this stage a lot of women think “Christ that was hard work, I’ll stop at two” but Kim is insanely rich and treated herself to the size of family she wanted. There’s 7 billion people on the planet but she needed more babies so she paid someone to have them for her.
This type of capitalism is then bizarrely cheered on by the left wing (the Guardian etc) as being empowering and the needs of self have to be celebrated at all cost. The left have all but forgotten completely about class analysis.
But inevitably this type of capitalism has its down sides. The women who are giving up their babies to someone far richer in exchange for money and the babies themselves will find their voice as humans shouldn’t be seen as a product to buy off the shelf just because “you’re worth it”.