Gay men and surrogacy - the new “be kind”?

I do think babies and children should have mothers unless there is an absolute catastrophe.

Adoption is one, where the child can't stay with the birth mother. I support gay adoption because it is a response to a difficult situation.

I don't agree with creating babies who are deliberately going to be motherless.

I put single men into the same category as the gay couples on this one.

I know we are both adopters but we seem to view the importance of birth mothers differently. That's just how it is - i think it matters more than you do.

sorry couldn’t follow this incoherent response. “Scientifically confused” lol.

No there is no evidence that suggests that gay surrogate parents are an increased risk to their children compared heterosexual dads who share their kids’ DNA.

You are trying to generalise/ extrapolate from evidence in ways that are not valid because the sample of people included in that evidence cannot be shown to reflect the population to which you are trying to generalise.

HTH.

That doesn’t address my point though, which is that you say that surrogacy by a gay couple is worse than surrogacy by a straight couple, because the former leaves a child ‘motherless’ (it was your word).

But of course anyone having a child through surrogacy - straight or gay - is raising that child without their birth mother. I’m not sure why you think that is worse if it’s a gay couple than if it were a straight couple?

Unless by ‘motherless’ you mean that children of gay male couples are lacking in any type of mother - whether birth mother, genetic mother or adoptive mother?

I think we all have a mother, whether we like her or not. The idea of not even knowing her name seems bizarre to me. In adoption in the old days, children were denied this info, and we changed that because of the harm it was doing. Yet here we are, allowing men to do the very same thing just because they want to.

Gay and single men are having babies by exploiting 2 women. At least straight couples are usually only exploiting one.

And I am just as against a single man using surrogacy as a gay couple. Imo it is dystopian, heralding a world where women are of no value. It used to be that men married women partly becausecthis was how they could be fathers, risking their assets in the case of divorce. Now they don't need to. Just send off a sperm sample, pay your money, hire a nanny. All interactions with women purely transactional. They don't need women in any meaningful way and gay men and rich men like Musk are leading the way.

I think by other woman exploited the PP referred to the woman who gave her gametes. Most of the time it's not the mother (by which I mean the woman who carries the baby) so as to have the "right ethnicity" and minimize the mother's attachment and claim to the child's.
In a hetero surrogacy the gametes usually come from the adoptive parents, not a third person.

You've lost me there how are gay and single men exploiting two women whereas straight couples are just exploiting one? Either way there is a surrogate who is being exploited which is the other woman you are talking about?

I think we all have a mother, whether we like her or not. The idea of not even knowing her name seems bizarre to me. In adoption in the old days, children were denied this info, and we changed that because of the harm it was doing. Yet here we are, allowing men to do the very same thing just because they want to.

Gay and single men are having babies by exploiting 2 women. At least straight couples are usually only exploiting one.

And I am just as against a single man using surrogacy as a gay couple. Imo it is dystopian, heralding a world where women are of no value. It used to be that men married women partly becausecthis was how they could be fathers, risking their assets in the case of divorce. Now they don't need to. Just send off a sperm sample, pay your money, hire a nanny. All interactions with women purely transactional. They don't need women in any meaningful way and gay men and rich men like Musk are leading the way.

Yes, I completely agree with you that all surrogacy is bad. But this thread was specifically about gay men. If we normalise gay men using surrogacy then it makes it more normalised across the board. They are the ones posting about it, not straight couples, who want to keep it a secret if possible so that they blend in further down the line. And they are creating babies with no known mother, which I think is a sorrow. And like I said, I'm not against gay adopters (I know several).

So the premise of this answer is that surrogacy involving gay couples is worse than surrogacy involving straight couples.

Now most of your post is about the trauma for the baby of being removed from their birth mother. Which is fair enough as a concern but is not worse for gay couples than straight couples.

You then slightly switch to using the term ‘motherless’ suggesting that what you think makes gay surrogacy worse is the lack of any mother in the child’s life rather than specifically just the lack of a birth mother.

Is that correct? Because that seems to go beyond just concerns about surrogacy into a general value judgement based on whether a child is raised by a straight couple or a gay one.

It’s controversial but I actually completely agree. In the context of the commercialisation of pregnancy and birth, it is really starting to feel a bit Hand Maids Tale. The only acceptable surrogacy imo is completely altruistic, and even then there are real ethical issues with creating innate separation trauma in an infant who can’t consent. I hate that more and more surrogacy seems to be viewed as a right, that anyone is able to pay for if they don’t fancy pregnancy or can’t have kids naturally. It’s so reductive to the entire thing and to women. Often couples are going to the US or countries with fewer protections to reduce the rights of the surrogate and “guarantee” they can take the baby, but we’re supposed to think it’s only positive and fantastic. It’s awful, and particularly irks me when it’s men who don’t seem to understand the huge physical and emotional cost of pregnancy and birth, or celebs who seem to want to avoid the work and bodily changes.

(I think gay couples can be fantastic parents, just as straight or single parents can. The issue here is surrogacy)

I just think focusing specifically on gay men rather than issues with surrogacy in general makes it much harder to advocate against surrogacy effectively as it comes across as homophobic rather than focusing on the child. I see what you're saying but even in heterosexual surrogacy the child is deliberately being created to be taken away from their birth mother.

I disagree with all surrogacy. But we are talking here quite specifically about gay men using it and I do believe that there are particular reasons for concern.

In a child centered world, the babies would come first.

This is not the case with surrogacy at all.

These babies have no rights. None of the agencies or adults involved are thinking about their needs

But gay and single men are not who surrogacy was introduced for. We were told it was an altruistic act from one woman for another. It has gone far from that, partly driven by this huge new market of gay and single men, who are deliberately creating motherless children. I don't see that as progress.

Like I said, I'm against all surrogacy - is have two adopted children and I have seen at close hand how much sorrow is involved when a child loses its birth mother. In adoption the child couldn't remain with her. In surrogacy the adults are choosing that for their own purposes.

But gay men are a completely new and growing market and normalising/ celebrating/ encouraging it isn't good. Can you imagine not knowing your mother,?!

I disagree with all surrogacy. But we are talking here quite specifically about gay men using it and I do believe that there are particular reasons for concern.

In a child centered world, the babies would come first.

This is not the case with surrogacy at all.

These babies have no rights. None of the agencies or adults involved are thinking about their needs

But gay and single men are not who surrogacy was introduced for. We were told it was an altruistic act from one woman for another. It has gone far from that, partly driven by this huge new market of gay and single men, who are deliberately creating motherless children. I don't see that as progress.

Like I said, I'm against all surrogacy - is have two adopted children and I have seen at close hand how much sorrow is involved when a child loses its birth mother. In adoption the child couldn't remain with her. In surrogacy the adults are choosing that for their own purposes.

But gay men are a completely new and growing market and normalising/ celebrating/ encouraging it isn't good. Can you imagine not knowing your mother,?!

Have you read the article I linked? That woman certainly wasn't keeping a low profile or having any sense of 'sisterhood' with the two women she exploited! Neither were the many other cases I have read about. From what I have seen the women and the gay men who use commercial surrogacy generally behave with often the exact same disregard for the womens welfare. It sounds like you are letting your biases get in the way. And I've made it very clear that I do have a problem with that, I don't agree with surrogacy for anyone male/female gay/straight, and I do agree with adoption for any gender/sexuality.

Gay men are not using surrogacy as a solution to infertility- when surrogacy was first introduced, it was as a sisterhood thing, a way for one woman to help another woman who could not carry her own baby.

Now it is a complete free for all. Men can obtain babies without as much as speaking to a woman. Yes straight couples do it too, but usually after years of infertility treatments.

Gay and single men are exploiting two women - the person they buy the eggs from and the surrogate. Straight couples often use their own eggs.

Gay men are the ones posting about it on social media. Straight couples tend to keep a low profile. So when people complain in response to social media posts, it is overwhelmingly about gay men, whose posts are ads for other people, especially, to dovthe same.

Thing is, gay men have huge purchasing power and are well placed to fund a purchase. They, and single men, are leading the way in a Handmaid's Tale dystopian future where the only women giving birth are the poor, as everyone else uses a surrogate.

And they are deliberating motherless children. You may not have a problem with that - plenty of people think that's a sorrow. I support gay men adopting, as adoption is the solution to a difficult situation, but to deliberately create a child and to remove it from its mothers, both of whom are probably fit and well and out there during that child's childhood, is bizarre. Imo children need their mothers unless there is a catastrophe. That's not being homophobic - it's being child centered, something the surrogacy industry certainly is not.

There are significant ethical issues with surrogacy, but I'm not sure why OP is having a go at gay men specifically, it does come across as needlessly homophobic. Lots of heterosexual couples also use surrogacy, either due to infertility or often because the woman doesn't want to go through pregnancy and childbirth (seems to be becoming more and more common with celebs and the wealthy). Personally I don't think commercial surrogacy should be legal in any circumstances, the sexuality or gender of the prospective parents is irrelevant. I'm not even sure altruistic surrogacy should be legal either. This was a dreadful (commercial) surrogacy case I read about recently in America. This woman and her partner hired 2 surrogates simultaneously, didn't disclose a genetic issue which made the pregnancies high risk, one surrogate nearly died during childbirth and had to have a hysterectomy, and the other had a stillbirth and has been horrifically harassed by the woman who hired her ever since, and left with the medical bills.
https://www.wired.com/story/the-baby-died-whose-fault-is-it-surrogate-pregnancy/

You cannot see the need to assess risks for the baby then?
It's fine for any men to purchase a baby to please them with no checks. Why not allow any age child to be purchased by males then?
Nothing to see here...

What we shouldn't do is impute causation to studies where none is proven.

Why do you assume that bonding moments will have any impact?

The fact is that there is very little research in this area. So all we can do is extrapolate from other studies.

And back to the original post, which is about gay men using surrogacy, in a gay couple, only one of those men is the biological father.

We can say "oh it's more like adoption" or "he has known the child since birth" but fact it, we don't know the risk level, and given the other studies about non related father figures, imo we should be vigilant.

I'm an adopter. I know a family where the man pushed for his wife to agree to adopt and all the time he was part of a paedophile ring and, long story, but the children he was planning to adopt had a lucky escape.

That doesn't mean we stop men adopting but it definitely shows why there are lots of checks - and remember, these just don't exist in surrogacy.

I think it is you not quite understanding to be honest.

Tandora is saying, as I understand it, that the research proves that genetically unrelated men in a step-parent role (I’m using that term to describe any partner of a parent who has come into the child’s life without the primary objective of being their parent) pose a higher risk.

What Tandora is disputing is your claim that this research proves that the higher risk is because of the lack of biological connection.

And she is right I think. The research proves a correlative relationship but not a causative relationship between biological relationship and risk.

To actually make the claim that is being made stand up, you’d need to control for things like the age at which the individual entered the child’s life and whether they were always an intended parent of the child or not.

It’s not hard to see why - a step dad who meets a mum of a 12 year old is very different to a parent who adopts a 2 year old or who becomes a genetically unrelated parent through surrogacy. The latter two were the child’s parents or intended parents from the start of the relationship between them and the child. They have never known the child except in the context of a parental relationship. They will have all of the usual parent child bonding moments that biological parents have (obviously in the case of adoption this may depend slightly on age of the child at adoption).

So the claim being made requires evidence that the reason that males in step-parent roles pose a higher risk is because of the lack of DNA, rather than the lack of intention to be a parent to that child or the lack of bonding moments in a parent child context.