California commodifies women and babies for gay men

It's true pregnancy does have a 100% complication rate. I don't know anyone who didn't have an issue before during or after birth.

I'd never thought about that.

Great informative post NotBadConsidering
Thank you* *

1. Exploitation. 99.9% of surrogacy around the world is rich westerners paying poor women a a relative pittance to carry a baby for them with the knowledge that if it goes wrong they’ll just walk away and try someone or somewhere else. Ukraine has traditionally been the most popular place. Covid and the war has left countless women with babies that were ordered and there are now Romanian style orphanages with hundreds of abandoned babies as a result. The BBC has covered this. You’ll never see a Kardashian offer infertile Olga from Kyiv to carry a baby for her, will you?

2. Women as a commodity. No one should be able to buy or hire the right to use a woman’s body for any reason.

3. babies as a commodity. No one should be able to buy a baby. We have banned the buying of children who are 15 years old, 10, 5 etc. Why can people buy a newborn?

4. Anyone who knows anything about babies and attachment knows that babies should be kept with their mothers whenever possible. Their mother is the woman who gave birth to them. That is why even if a mother is deemed unfit, a judge usually decides a baby is to be removed, because it’s a huge decision that cannot be taken lightly.

5. it is not possible for any legal, moral, or ethical framework to exist that protects all three parties equally. Someone has to give up rights. Should all the rights be with the mother? Then the intended parents get nothing. Should all the rights be with the intended parents? Then you get awful scenarios, like the example of where a woman was told that should she enter a vegetative state, the intended parents would have the final say on withdrawal of life support. How do you prevent this sort of thing? Whose rights do you prioritise? What about the baby’s rights?

6. It is impossible, within such speculative framework to cover all the possibilities of things that can go wrong. Ergo with enough surrogacy cases there will always be legal messes to clean up.

7. Even if it’s “altruistic”, how do you determine free choice? How do you know that a sister isn’t doing it out of immense guilt rather than love? Or someone is being coerced? Or that there isn’t money involved somewhere? When someone donates a kidney to a loved one or relative they have to undergo extensive assessment to make sure they understand the implications of what they’re doing. No such checks exist.

8. I have personally seen the emotional impact of a woman who thought she could give up the baby, but was left sobbing to herself in her own room suppressing her milk with midwives checking on her while the happy couple were all smiles and giggles bottle feeding the baby a few doors down. I saw midwives swear they’d never be involved again after that.

9. Even if you can be sure it’s a true altruistic arrangement, and even if everything during pregnancy goes through without issue (12 week scan normal, 20 week scan normal etc) and even if the mother comes through relatively unscathed (pregnancy has a 100% complication rate) and has no qualms about giving up the baby, and the intended parents go home, it’s still not a successful surrogacy. No one has any idea if the child will grow up wondering, yearning, for their mother and it could take decades for that to manifest. Ask anyone who’s never known a parent, and they’ll all tell you they wonder. There’s a child at my DC’s school who has two dads. She knows her mum is in India and she says she’s going to go and see her “one day”. It’s heartbreaking ❤️‍🩹.

These are just some reasons. It’s banned in many countries for reasons like this. Banning surrogacy for everyone - men, women, gay or straight - should happen worldwide.

On the contrary - there's considerable evidence from the children born via donor assisted conception that stepping outside the "norm" of conception and birth is not always as problem free for the child as we might assume. Some of it makes uncomfortable reading .
Adults buying babies via surrogacy is relatively new. People who dismiss concerns as "gender power games" are rarely women or those who have experience of pregnancy and birth - which presumably is why they're such a powerful lobby.

I think the core issue is the fallacy of deeming men INFERTILE when they are not having sex with women.

If a man decides he wants to have a baby he cannot himself become pregnant. He does not have a womb, for starters.
So he needs to rent a human with a womb - a woman.

She needs to have a lot done to her, over at least 9 months, to grow a baby for this man.
Growing babies can be a dangerous activity. And right at the end comes the really dangerous part when the woman needs to expel the baby she has grown - usually via the vaginal canal.
She may need an operation to take the baby out safely, which requires cutting through 7 layers of different tissue, pulling the baby and the placenta out and then stitching all the layers up again. It is quite the operation.

No man can become pregnant, grow one or more foetuses, and then give birth. They need women to do so.

When heterosexual couples use surrogates I find it equally reprehensible, if that helps.

In countries where giving birth is less medicalised, the rates of mortality are rather a lot higher.

Probably because there aren’t all the issues you scare monger around to support your ideological stance on this issue. It’s not bugger all to do with the well-being of children and everything to do with gender power games.

The mother baby bond is one of the strongest in nature.

Surrogacy purposefully breaks that bond.

Not self evident it’s bad to everyone

You haven’t answered the questions. Surrogacy exists, it’s not self inflicted vide my to everyone is it bad, me included. I’d be happy to considered your argument as to why it’s bad, and for whom, however.

Why, was I not vehement enough.

What a bizarre response.

Also secondly, looking at examples throughout history, any movement where babies are removed at birth from their mothers never ends well.

What’s wrong with trading human beings to order? Really? Can I order a baby via surrogacy but not pick it up till it’s 10 years old?

No not all surrogacy is equally bad, but it’s all bad.

We never hear from the grown up surrogacy babies. We'll probably have to wait a few more years. I'd be very interested to know their thoughts.

A baby absolutely knows who it's mother is at birth.

If the core of the issue for you is “men’s sense of entitlement”, this sounds like a pretty nebulous foundation, to me, for judging policy. What is this sense? How does it manifest itself? How can you prove your answers? It sound like you just don’t like it, “cos men” vs you have any meaty argument.

But is wrong with that, and I’d every single scenario in which surrogacy occurs equally bad?

There are copious threads on surrogacy, including straight celebrities, all the time.

They can all be found through the search function.

This thread is about California’s new law proposed this week.

Do you think criticism of surrogacy should only focus on surrogacy done by straight couples?

I'm not wasting my time arguing with the mental gymnastics you're doing to claim you're not homophobic by just focusing on gay men and not on straight couples. There are countless articles out there focusing on female celebrities etc. who have had babies via surrogacy, but you're not commenting on these.

I don't even really care if you have something against gay men - I'm just commenting here to show that some people will call you out on it, both online and in real life, and also to show any gay parents who do happen to be reading this that lots of people support them.

But you failing to recognise the relevant bit is that they are men not that they are gay. The legislation also considers single men as ‘infertile’ and should have rent a woman to grow a baby to order services covered by their medical insurance too.

Lesbians or single women are far less likely to want to rent a woman for baby-growing services because they can (barring actual infertility) grow the baby themselves. They need to acquire some sperm, but that’s a different issue to surrogacy.

The main beneficiaries of this California legislation are men. Gay men are likely to be over represented in the group because most single heterosexual men would probably just choose finding a woman to have a baby with without paying as the best way to solve their problem.

But the problem is men’s sense of entitlement to pay for women’s bodies. The homosexuality is a red herring.

It isn’t homophobic to observe that a couple which does not have the type of sexual intercourse which leads to pregnancy is not suffering from infertility. They are not infertile. They do not need “fertility” treatment.

The article is about the financial coats of surrogacy arrangements being paid for from medical insurance, based on a completely false argument that a couple not having the form of sexual intercourse which leads to pregnancy is equivalent to being infertile.

The article in the OP focuses on the recent news that California is aiming to pass a bill specifically to provide gay couples with a surrogate to achieve “fertility equality”.

So no, it’s not homophobic at all. Surrogacy is abhorrent in all contexts, it just happens to be that this week, that abhorrent thing is Gilead-style provision of women to men.

@IncomingTraffic It is completely homophobic to take an issue that both gay and straight people are doing, and focus just on gay people when criticising it.

I'm not in favour of surrogacy, but I am going to call out the rising trend of so many media sites to find ways to twist narrative against gay and lesbian couples.

Infants are people. Actual human people. Hugely vulnerable people.

They are not commodities to be bought.

Nor should women’s bodies be used as incubators to rent.

For SO many reasons. Whereas the other arguments are mostly ‘I want a baby; I think having a baby grown to order is something I’m entitled to’.

Because it is the trade in human infants grown to order.

@LoobiJee I agree with you that surrogacy and sex work seem to attract the same kind of astroturfing that we saw with Schofield. Several of the same tactics are even employed.

Why is surrogacy “abhorrent” exactly?