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

Birth is natural process so a very poor comparison.

Babies are separated from their mothers at birth, generally because the mother is judged to be not fit to keep the baby from harm. The trauma caused by separation is weighted up against the risk of death from neglect or abuse.

What evidence do you have to back your rather bold claim Those babies don't all then go up to spend their lives suffering as a result.?

How do you know? Have you not read accounts from people removed from their birth mother for adoption etc and the impact it’s had on their lives and mental health? It sounds like you have no idea what you are talking about and have just assumed.

And yes, we know that puppies suffer long term issues if separated from the mother too early, just like we know that human babies do. It’s a perfectly good comparison.

Firstly, it’s not “regularly” it is in a small minority of cases for medical reasons.

Why can’t we compare humans with dogs or any other mammal when it comes to giving birth, feeding milk and aftercare? Many instincts are the same. Puppies and human babies both root around instinctively for milk. We’re not that different except humans are born at an earlier stage of development than dogs because of our brain size.

Anyone who has given birth and held the baby shortly after knows this.

You’re the one making the leap, that everything we know about separation of babies from their mothers doesn’t matter because you were ok and others can be ok.

Generalisation in this sense is based on all that evidence and data we know.

their father, or their loving grandparents, an adoptive family or surrogate parents

The first three are done out of necessity when the mother isn’t available for whatever reason. It’s not the primary choice and is inevitably done under stressful circumstances. Invariably it is not an option that is chosen, is it?

But surrogacy is the only one where keeping a baby from its mother is the primary goal.

Don't you see a difference?

Of course children can be loved and grow up fine, but that doesn’t make it ok.

Several decades of research into old style adoption says otherwise. The impact of not growing up in your birth family can be significant and life long, no matter how loved, cared for and wanted you are. Some do indeed 'spend their lives damaged and struggling because someone other than the woman who birthed them fed and changed their nappies'. Not all, but why risk it, unless there's no alternative way for that child to be raised?

In the UK, the bar for a legal adoption to take place is that nothing else will do to safeguard the child. That's a high bar. It has to be agreed by a judge, assessing evidence, that that is the case. Because adoption is about the child, not the wants of adults who don't have a child but want one. Finding the best solution for a child who exists,not creating a child then risking traumatising it, to suit adults wants.

Adopters have to be assessed over several months, complete group training and evidence that they've researched adoption and understand trauma, have to be DBS checked, provide references from family, friends, their employer, have family members interviewed, all of their previous partners contacted, then a report written about their home, their parenting ability, what kind of child the social workers believe they could parent, then have a report written about them and appear in front of a panel to be approved as adopters. Then once a match is identified between adopters and a child waiting for adoption that match has to be approved too, then introductions planned with social workers and foster carers, then once the child is placed the family are visited weekly by social workers and the child is still legally in care and the adopters have no parental rights and aren't allowed to apply to adopt legally for at least 12 weeks after the placement begins, then they gave to apply to the court to actually legally adopt.

Those buying a child through surrogacy just have to have the money. There are no checks or assessments on them whatsoever, all we know about them is they have enough money and so few morals that they're willing to buy a baby.

It's like The Handmaid's Tale.

Dystopian.

What an absolute leap to make - don't be ridiculous.

I'm saying a child brought up by their father, or their loving grandparents, an adoptive family or surrogate parents are not being fundamentally harmed.

Children growing up knowing that their mother purposefully conceived them to give them away is awful. Couples really wanting a baby is not a good enough reason to allow this to happen. It does seem taboo to point this out, and even more so when the couple involved is gay.

A woman local to me gifted some embryos to a gay couple and once the men were satisfied with the size of their family they removed the right for the woman to use her own remaining embryos and it’s ended up in a bitter fall out.

They used her and discarded her once they had what they wanted in my opinion. It’s been splashed all over TikTok as the men see themselves as influencers.

I am again - and these are not rhetorical questions:

Why is it illegal to purchase a newborn baby?

Why can it be legal to purchase a newborn baby if the contract was signed before the mother became pregnant?

TempestTost replied, Part of it is because often the baby is in fact related to the commisioning parent, so it's not quite like selling the baby to a stranger. It's more like paying the mother, or mothers if a donor egg is used, to give up their parental rights.

Would it be acceptable to pay a mother to give up her parental rights over her newborn?

If a child has rights to have biological parents, doesn't selling those rights to another adult strip the child of something that belongs to them, not to the commissioners?

And I go back to my original point. All these things are unacceptable both morally and legally when done to a child - except when a contract to do these things has been signed before the child is 'begun'.

What is the difference?

Yes - I understand that statistically my one example won't speak for everyone and doesn't make my comment an unequivocal fact. But nor do the blanket statements and generalisations I was replying to 🤷🏻‍♀️

Ok, so by this logic, do you think requiring a family court judge to decide if it’s ok to remove a baby from its mother is unnecessary? People can just…take babies away because no harm is done to the baby?

How do people this has happened to cope with it all? You think they’re all fine?

It's also woeful ignorance to not recognise that babies are regularly separated from their mothers at birth for a myriad of reasons, not always within the mother's control. Those babies don't all then go up to spend their lives suffering as a result.

It's also woeful ignorance to compare a human baby to a dog.

Plus you weren’t separated from your mother irrevocably, forever.

Surrogacy does this on purpose.

I'm not the one who made this about gay couples. I simply used that example because it's what the OP made the thread about. Feel free to substitute for "straight couples" "single women" etc.

Birth is traumatic for babies - should we not do that either? Should they stay in there?

My point is, people do not spend their lives damaged and struggling because someone other than the woman who birthed them fed and changed their nappies. Children who are truly loved and well cared for will typically grow up happy and healthy, regardless of who provides that care.

This is anecdata, a sample size of one.

Not a properly conducted research study.

You understand this difference, right?

I was separated from my mother for the first 3-4 weeks of life (I was in NICU and she was seriously unwell and unable to visit me). I am, and always have been perfectly healthy and reasonably well adjusted. There's no lasting trauma there.

It may be different circumstances being discussed here, doesn't make it a poor comparison. If we're making blanket statements that it's harmful for children to be separated from their mothers at birth, then the reason behind that separation doesn't make a difference to the outcome.

Evidence shows removing a baby from the mother especially so soon after birth effects cortisol levels on baby and mother and has a detrimental effect on the baby. The baby bonding with the mother is so important, it's why the baby is put straight on the mother's chest. To say it has no impact on the baby is woeful ignorance.

In a previous job I had quite a lot to do with heterosexual parents who had used a surrogate from Ukraine. None of the families I met (particularly the women) had any regard for the woman who had given birth to their child whatsoever.

It wasn’t unusual to “fake a pregnancy” by wearing a bump, or for the woman in the couple to have to have “bed rest” for much of the pregnancy so that she wasn’t seen.

Every couple had staged photos in the hospital, with the woman on the bed in a hospital gown, and the father next to her - the woman who had actually given birth was nowhere to be seen.

One particularly tragic cats had resulted in the woman giving birth having to have a C section and a hysterectomy. The couple were - understandably - not allowed in for the birth due to the complications. The woman was screaming and banging on the door while this was going on, and demanding to see her baby “as I am the biological mother.”

In all cases, the woman was packed off to the war zone they came from without a second thought from the parents, once they had got the baby. I asked one couple if they were going to keep in touch with the mother - the person who had given them this amazing gift - and there was genuine bafflement and “No, why would we?”

All surrogacy should be made illegal.

It is not about bringing up a child in a single sex couple. No-one has said that, you are looking for a simple “homophobia” box to slot this into.

The problem lies in being removed from the gestating mother at birth.

That is utterly traumatic for a newborn. A baby knows it’s mother’s sounds and voice and the early weeks of life are (or should be) a continuation of this safe and secure relationship, just outside the body rather than inside.

Look up the concept of the “mother-baby dyad”.

Instinctively I feel it is wrong to plan to remove a newborn from its mother. Nobody is entitled to having a child, sad as that may be in many cases.

If a child has to be removed from its mother for other reasons- say safety risk to the baby or mum sadly dies - the baby’s placement elsewhere becomes unavoidable and in that infant human’s best interest.

And that’s not even considering the ethics of commoditisation of trading babies.

It’s nothing to do with homophobia but I agree gay men are most affected, but again as no one is entitled to “own flesh and blood child” then biology is biology and you can’t change that.

Surrogacy upsets me. I used to follow a surrogacy watch group on Twitter when I had it but it was so troubling. There were single men in their 60s getting children. Even in a best case scenario that he’s a kind loving father with good health. That child will not have any parents in their 20s and possibly before. It’s just sad. No one wants that start in life.

I guess some here would ask, what are older people supposed to do if they want children? I’d say they just need to get over it. Go volunteer or work with children.

I know there are terrible mothers but I don’t like the implication in some of these pro-surrogacy comments here that a mother is just irrelevant.

There’s also a disconnect. People recognise that children in care and adoption even if they are placed in good families at a young age can have issues in not being with their biological parents. But then the children who are purposefully created to be parted are somehow fine.

We don't actually know what the effects are on the child because it hasn't been evaluated properly.

In ICU the babies still have access to their mothers. Also it is necessary to keep the baby alive, which makes it a very poor comparison to this situation.

Meanwhile, nothing fundamentally detrimental is happening to a newborn human child if someone other than the birth mother is feeding, changing and caring for them. If that were the case, the millions of preterm babies who spend time in NICU, or babies cared for by father's or grandparents where mothers are absent in their early lives as a result of illness or death, would all be in serious trouble.

Every effort is made in every single maternity/NICU unit around the world to keep the baby with its mother. Where it’s not possible, it has been repeatedly demonstrated that kangaroo care improves outcomes. Where kangaroo care isn’t possible, it’s recognised that there is unavoidable separation trauma occurring, and new mother are (should be) supported with that difficulty.

Why do you think this is?

Equally if a baby is to be removed from its mother for child protection concerns, a family court judge is required to make the decision because of the gravity of removing a baby from its mother.

Why do you think this is?

Oh come on? So the traditional nuclear family is not as good as two men or two women? That is nonsensical and actually pretty offensive.

Well maybe they adopt or else accept it’s not going to happen for them?

I am 💯 with you OP. Surrogacy is abhorrent.