Surrogacy article in the guardian

[HermioneKipper]

amp.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/oct/01/how-gay-parenthood-through-surrogacy-became-a-battleground

this has made me furious! The entitlement of these men is just unbelievable. How dare they demand the use of a woman’s body.

Oh no darling.... they have "situational infertility". Find the right words and everything makes sense.

Yes I'm obviously being sarcastic. I am fed up with the erasure of biology and women. And the other couple further up being so blatant about how their family will be motherless but they don't care

@TheKeatingFive

Poole-Dayan sees the “situational infertility” gay men face as equivalent to medical infertility. “We define infertility as not just a condition or a disease but also a status that defines our inability to procreate with our partner.” It doesn’t matter if you have healthy sperm, eggs and wombs; if you can’t make a baby with your chosen partner, you are infertile, by this definition. “Situationally, we are the most infertile, by measure of the level of intervention that is required to achieve a pregnancy. We’re also expected to be OK with not having children. This is the kind of discrimination we’re trying to fight the most.”

Poole-Dayan sees the “situational infertility” gay men face as equivalent to medical infertility.

That may be. It doesn't mean that medical insurers/law makers do, when the principles of the insurance policy are based on replace/repair as explained by a PP.

@NightmareSlashDelightful in that case, yep I would say they probably do have a case. Thanks for clarifying

The only way it would be discriminatory in the basis of (male) homosexuality is if surrogacy is covered for straight single men who have no access to a uterus but not covered for gay men. I doubt this is the case.

Surely the most situationally infertile individual is an asexual (identity/ sexuality) single man (so no sexual feelings/ urges/ attractions to anyone), not a gay man who could theoretically ejaculate into a cup whilst thinking of his partner, and use the turkey baster method to create a pregnancy, and resulting biologically related child, with a lesbian or any female friend who'd like to co-parent...

If its a competition now...

Agree that 'situationally infertile' is a bullshit concept. I get what they mean by it but I think they need to find a different phrase to describe it.

Porridge I guess the big downside to the willing friend/turkey baster/casual agreement route is that it offers absolutely zero protection to the woman carrying the child. At least when it's done through an agency and with the appropriate health cover, the woman's healthcare needs are covered and legal situation is clarified (I think that's the case, anyway).

Why is it a bullshit concept though?

Two gay men or two women can’t biologically have a child together without some medical help, unless one of them is willing to leave their partner and force themselves to try to be straight and have sex with someone they aren’t attracted to.

A straight couple where the woman has no fertility issues but the man has a low sperm count or blocked tubes, would be unable to have biological children together without some medical help, but they would be considered eligible for IVF, IUI and donor sperm on the NHS, even though the woman could technically leave her husband and go have a child with some other man.

I don’t agree with surrogacy in general, but unless you think that women or men who are themselves healthy and capable of having children, should be denied medical help because they’ve refused to leave their partner who has a fertility issue, then you can’t also say that the concept of situational infertility is bullshit.

Call it by another name by all means, but don’t pretend that gay people have no issues because they are “technically” biologically able to contribute to the process of creating a child

Hm. This is a good point and you've made me think about this in more detail. (I'm a gay man myself, for context.)

Right. Let me try to explain what I mean. This might be a load of muddled nonsense but what the hell.

I think where I'm coming from is that in my head there is a distinction between infertility as cause (as in a medical condition, a diagnosis) and infertility as effect (as in the resulting situation).

Is 'infertile' a medical diagnosis, or is it the result of external circumstances? Is it both? I suppose the thrust of this particular argument will be about how the medical insurance company wants to define it vs. how the couple(s) attempt to define it.

Connected to that, I think what the article — and some of the people involved in this scenario — are doing is attempting to wrap surrogacy up as a 'treatment' for infertility. Is it? Isn't it? I don't know. Maybe in the US, where medical treatment is (largely) privatised and profit-driven, there's a different usage case than here in the UK.

Perhaps I've too quickly jumped to assuming the semantic usage of 'infertility' as primarily medical, and therefore the concept of situational infertility doesn't sit quite right if, technically, neither party is biologically infertile. In that context it feels a little clunky. (To be fair, we don't know if either of the guys in this case are biologically infertile, because the article doesn't say.)

However, I also understand what you're saying here and I hadn't considered that especially in legal and activism terms, there might be a broader usage of the term. Or at least, a strong argument for having one.

Nightmare I was trying to describe a situation in which the mother also wants to be a parent and shares custody 50/50 with the biological father via turkey baster once the child is old enough for this to be appropriate - not an unpaid goodwill based surrogacy where the newborn is given as some kind of gift to the father. Where the mother is and remains the mother the maternal health issues are as in most more standard pregnancies.

I think "altruistic" surrogacy is actually almost as fraught with ethical problems as commercial and don't think any surrogacy (where the baby is a commodity specifically created to be given as a gift or sold at or before birth) is justifiable - women are emotionally coerced into being unpaid surrogates and there are lots of healthcare issues (a pregnancy with a doner egg is higher risk medically than with the woman's own egg, and egg donation is also risky) but central to the situation even when the women concerned are genuinely freely volunteering in full possession of the facts on risks, is the baby.

The baby is highly likely to have various issues if they are, essentially, created to be removed from their mother at birth and given away or sold.

I find it abhorrent how the couple in the article seem to get their knickers in a twist about why there shouldn't be a problem with them wanting a biological child... and that it would seem offensive to ask the question. It is irrelevant why people don't ask straight couples why they don't want to adopt instead of having a biological child.

I'm all for freedom of choice but not when there are some very important, feasible and viable alternatives. If my parents had been asked why they hadn't had biological children instead of adopting me, they wouldn't have been offended. They love me unconditionally regardless. It's not so black and white, so why he is putting such gravitas on the issue is ridiculous.

I actually find it offensive to think people have a right to use a woman as a "womb to rent". Children aren't rights or commodities. I was equally offended when an ex-boss of mine said that having an adopted child wasn't going to ever be the same as a biological one, which was better (apparently)🙄😳😠

Honestly, I could've slapped him. Had he any experience of adoption? No. I wished I'd said something to shut him up.

Complete straw man argument in many of the responses in this thread. The point raised by the couple isn't about whether surrogacy should exist or not, it’s about their access to it through insurance. I get it; lots of people disagree with surrogacy esp commercial surrogacy. But that’s not what their case is about.

How is it prejudice to not give them fertility treatment paid for by the state when they don't have a womb to have the treatment done to? Like that's the point... you don't have the bits to do it.

Adoption is available. Yes it's sad they can't have a bio baby but that's kind of part of being a single sex relationship. Lesbians have to pay for sperm donation but they have the easier lot because they have the biology to do the hard bit!

It's not a woman's job to give gay men a child! Therefore they must volunteer or be paid like any other thing you can't do for yourself.

Calandor I don't think its paid by the state in the linked story as it's about New York based people and a specific health insurance dispute.

ChilliPB this is a chat forum and a lot of the discussion is always going to be around the issue - that doesn't mean that all discussion of the ethics of surrogacy are straw man arguments, they're just not directly addressing the very specific legal case in the story. Nothing wrong with discussing issues raised by the story, as nobody here gets to make any decision on the case.

Are we actually heading towards a handmaid’s tale scenario where any wealthy couple or trio or single person can pay a woman to undergo a pregnancy and birth and surrender her baby?

So we’ll need a breeding class? Will imprisoned women have time knocked off their sentences for this? In prison their diet, exercise etc could be closely monitored to the commissioning party’s specifications. Since they are in prison I suppose they might get even more time off sentences for expressing their milk? Maybe privatised prisons would take the fees to cover “costs”. Corrupt judges could be offered bribes to swing cases involving young fertile defendants… corrupt police could be bribed to arrest vulnerable young women on trumped up charges. As a sideline in the states they could increase the number of babies available to the US adoption industry by putting penis people in women’s prisons…

We need to end all surrogacy now! And in the US the adoption industry needs some serious looking at too, not to mention prisons on both sides of the Atlantic.

PomegranateOfPersephone there was this story a few years ago about the single 28 year old man with 16 babies borne by Thai surrogate mothers:

www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43123658

That is horrifying Porridge!

The son of an IT billionaire.

“In 2014, he was investigated by Interpol for human trafficking after it emerged he had fathered 16 surrogate children in Thailand.
His Bangkok apartment was raided and police found nine surrogate babies, nannies and a pregnant surrogate mother there.
He left Thailand soon after, but later sued the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security for custody of the children.”

Possibly also fathered babies in similar circumstances in India and Ukraine.

Not forgetting of course the Georgian couple who are planning to have 100 babies by renting women’s bodies.

The richer you are, the more babies you can buy from the poor. A human status symbol.

Oh it’s a chat forum? I hadn’t realised @PorridgewithQuark 😂 Thanks for that.
Yes people discuss the issues. But lots of people are conflating the two different issues : surrogacy itself and the inconsistent insurance policy.

www.womensforumaustralia.org/russian_couple_s_plan_to_have_100_children

In this case the women had a diet plan to follow during pregnancy.

That's genuinely a very good point.... and surely opens up the possibility that others could claim this

But really paying for a baby is not fertility treatment is it? As others have said fertility treatment is something you have done to your own body. Surrogacy should not be any part of any medical insurance and thank heavens it isn’t supplied on the NHS. I know that some men in the UK would like it to be and would like our laws changed.

At the moment the woman who gives birth to a baby is the legal mother and will remain so for the first 6 weeks before adoption papers can be signed because the baby and the birth mother are better protected here than in the US where the men in the OP article are based.

Fucking hell. I didn't previously know the nuts and bolts of the womb rental payments.
So they're like the drawdown loan you take out when you build a house. The surrogate only got the staged payments as she successfully jumpes through each hoop in the pregnancy process.
Presumably if there wasn't a live birth she wouldn't receive that final payment then?
And this man could afford $45,000 for the last baby but there was no money/motivation for him to pay a home nurse/nanny for the woman after she had a major surgery to provide his baby?
She was dumped. Discarded.
An absolutely visceral example of why this is so wrong.
But it's ok because she can still peer in and see the purchased children on Facebook. Even though the fathers don't actually speak to her.

The way he kept tapping the table to emphasise his point. So arrogant.

It's all about them. They are not contemplating anyone else.

I'm not across the legal aspects of it. Morally, I find surrogacy problematic. and I don't think employers or insurers should cover it.

From an anti discrimination perspective, they should cover the IVF cost the same as they would for any employee - it's not really the employer's business what the relationship is between the sperm giving father and mother who carries. IVF is about fertilizing an embryo and implanting it, that's medical treatment.

Financing the womb itself is not medical treatment, it's not science stepping in where the body needs help. Two men have no womb. It's not the employers job to solve that for them.

If the law allows them to use women to gestate a baby, that's the law but they should finance that themselves.

We're taking them at their word that a female colleague was in the same situation with everything paid for - I suspect that isn't the case.

Also I'm calling bullshit on the idea these men can't afford it. At least one comes from a very wealthy family, they both practice law in NYC. They have no dependants. C'mon.

Just came on to see if anyone was talking about this as I've just found it on the guardian.
So so sick of all this sex and gender nonsense, denying women's bodies, telling us what we can, what we should do, how men can be women, how it's unfair that gay men don't have women's bits.
Ffs it's just biology. It's just how things are. You can't have it all ways.
I imagine it would be heart breaking not to have kids if you want them, unimaginable. But come on!