Adam Kay and his husband’s babies

[MatildaTheCat]

Apologies if this has already been covered.

I read in the paper this morning that AK and his DH have welcomed TWO babies into their lives, born to two different surrogates. One child is six months old and their sibling is two months old.

I genuinely cannot wrap my head around this. It seems so very odd to me. Is it a case of ‘one each’ or ‘get the baby stages over asap’?

Obviously nobody but the two parents can answer this but AIBU to find this really quite disturbing?

He's vile.

I also don't agree with surrogacy in general (few exceptions). A close family member did it in the US, as I believe AK did, and it's a business transaction at the end of the day. The woman is literally used a commodity and can be left with long term consequences e.g. never fully recovering from surgery.

I wonder if he was as much of a cunt to the women carrying his children as is was to the ones he treated.

Odious little prick.

YANBU. Commercial surrogacy is vile. Misogyny on steroids, and no thought for the babies taken away permanently from their mothers.

Dreadful man.

The story shared of the surrogate that had a negative experience is sad, but not exactly representative of all surrogacy arrangements. She went into the process with very little knowledge about it and then something dreadful and unrelated (and not common) also happened.

Surrogacy where women are being taken advantage of or where they don’t understand the process or are unprepared for it or doing it out of desperation are of course wrong. But there are lots of loving families that have been created through successful, well prepared surrogacy arrangements where the surrogate also had a positive experience.

So many children come into the world in unfortunate circumstances - parents who are completely useless, unloving, abusive or whatever else, and probably didn’t want the babies in the first place. Parents going through the surrogacy process seem much more likely to me to give their children a great upbringing where they are truly cared for.

ManyMaybes can you come up with a plan for how to allow altruistic surrogacy but properly ban commercial? As it stands in the uk commercial is technically illegal, but it happens (as do pretty much all illegal things). When the cases get found out by the authorities nobody actually gets into trouble because at that point the baby exists and sending the parents to prison is really not good for anyone.

Excellent, so, blah blah blah, surrogacy good etc etc. So we’ve established that you are totally fine with selling human babies - what’s the going rate? £10k, £20k? How much money would you personally be comfortable with selling a, say, Five year old human child for? £50k? £60k? What price would you think that was ok at???

So many children come into the world in unfortunate circumstances - parents who are completely useless, unloving, abusive or whatever else, and probably didn’t want the babies in the first place.

As awful as that is that is no justification for selling babies and people, usually rich people, using the reproductive capability of women as a commodity.

But there are lots of loving families that have been created through successful, well prepared surrogacy arrangements where the surrogate also had a positive experience.

Is a positive experience for the child at the heart of this? This is a child being sold to gratify adult's wishes.

I do think that would make a difference yes.

The baby doesn’t care about its DNA. But their instinct screams at them to be near the woman whose heartbeat, voice and smell it has known for the months in utero.

The lifelong trauma that we know occurs in babies adopted at birth can’t be mitigated (no matter how loving or privileged the adoptive parents may be), but it’s accepted as that is what is deemed necessary and best for the baby at that time.

Deliberately creating a baby whilst knowing that you will remove them from their birth mother, not because it is best for the baby, but because of the selfish desire of adults can never be morally right.

I found this thread so confusing until I realised it is not about Peter kay!

I’ve witnessed first had the trauma of being given away at birth, not sold as these children have been which must add an extra layer of trauma.
Im in no way anti adoption,it’s a completely different thing than buying babies in inducing this trauma on purpose and as a known by product of buying a baby to be taken from its mother sooner than a pet rat would be.
Buying babies and women’s bodies should be illegal everywhere.

Fair enough. My brother is a pathologist. But doesn't take that sort of humour out into the wider world and make jokes about it in public.

My sons father was adopted as a young baby, don’t know anything about the birth family only to guess as that as he was adopted in Liverpool his mother might have been Irish. He could find out but has decided not to, when our son was born he was really thinking about it a lot more and wanting to know.
He was adopted to an upper middle class family, doting mother, grammar school educated, every opportunity i would love my own son to have.
He has suffered from abandonment issues, addiction, failure to meet his full potential in work or relationships. He’s a good dad and I’m grateful for my son for that.
Being given away, even to good people has obviously affected his whole life, i can’t imagine the trauma of knowing you were brought to order like a piece of made to measure furniture. But nobody seems to think of the babies in these situations, only when the parents can’t adopt and women are choosing to sell their lives. What choice do they have? Why are rich women not carrying other people’s babies for altruism or fun??

How can these rich and priviledged people be lauded for dealing in slavery?! Whilst in other parts of the country statues are being chucked into canals, and old institutions changing their names for having any connections to slavery.
Imagine growing up and finding out you'd been bought! Denied your own mother and family connections. Your history and ancestry. Shame on them.

Regarding whether gestational surrogacy (where the birth mother is pregnant using another woman's egg) is better, I have two points to make.

First: pregnancies conceived using another woman's egg(s) carry higher risks of complications; medical risks of surrogacy and egg harvesting

Second: until surrogacy became, for want of a better word, fashionable in the last decade, the main use of donor eggs was by women undergoing fertility treatment to achieve a pregnancy themselves, as opposed to women and men paying another woman to go through pregnancy. In those days, everyone was quite clear that the baby's mother was the woman who finally gave birth. No-one thought the genetic connection to the woman who'd had eggs retrieved could supercede the nine months of gestation; no-one thought the baby would have a greater emotional link to the unknown egg donor than to the woman whose heartbeat and voice had been the background to his/her fetal development.

No-one thought mothers who had IVF using donor eggs had a duty to hand their babies back to the university student who'd sold her eggs, and I am willing to wager no-one thinks they should now. If you pay to have IVF treatment using someone else's donor eggs and you succeed in a full-term pregnancy and birth, the baby is regarded as yours.

However, in commercial surrogacy, the attitude flips. Suddenly, the genetic connection to the woman whose eggs were retrieved is prized beyond all else. If you pay another woman to have IVF treatment using your donor eggs and she succeeds in a full-term pregnancy and birth, the baby is... regarded as yours.

It seems that newborns are expected to recognise the person with the money and to bond with the person signing the cheques, above any other considerations.

“Dedicated people “ ?? They aren’t “people” they are women.
How many of these women are “dedicated” do you think ? Dedicated to trying to feed their own children because they live in a relatively poor country perhaps. I know a couple who chose a specific country to buy their children from because it was the cheapest, and yet who boast all over their business about how they love to help people in impoverished nations.
Show me an affluent , well educated and confident woman, with no childhood trauma that has left them vulnerable (to the glow of attention, or emotional manipulation), who is also a surrogate and I will show you the tooth of a hen.
Possibly there are sisters out there who have done this out of love and not out of emotional coercion, but this is not the vast bulk of surrogacy, and it still does not take into account the effect on the child, or the ethics of accepting this offer from a sibling. I have two friends who have needed a hysterectomy post birth. There is also the increased risk in donor egg pregnancies, so popular in surrogacy to reduce the chance of a mother deciding to keep the baby. These pregnancies have a higher risk of pre-eclampsia which has a lifelong impact on health.

Spot on

Was it somebody known to them or a stranger? And if a stranger, someone nearby or overseas?

i would wonder how much agency the women carrying the babies were allowed, his book openly talked about it being bad for women to make their own decisions in childbirth or have choices available or give consent, very much ‘doctors should be fully in charge’. Surely that attitude would be even stronger if said vessel woman carrying his own baby 🙄

Dows he say where the surrogates are from? The Ukraine is shocking for it and I know someone who got two babies from there from different mothers only a couple of weeks appart and during the war there.

They bought the babies from American women

Ah, the more expensive route. Like hundreds of gay men before them. Im literally sick of them coming up on my instagram. Every single gay couple in Hollywood and New York does this. Very few adopt.

It really upsets me that surrogacy is becoming accepted and mainstream. It's messed up. That poor surrogate who had a "difficult birth". Now she's living with the consequences and two rich men are swanning around with their motherless daughter.

No, but surely you can see that it’s not a good idea to intentionally bring children into the world to be traumatised at birth.

Or do you think it’s good for children to be born to drug addicts? Would you purposely ‘commission’ a drug addict to have a baby? If your sister was a drug addict would be encouraging her to have a baby at all costs before she was clean? Your argument makes no sense and is irrelevant to the issue of surrogacy.

Except of course to say that surrogates are more likely to be abused, traumatised women themselves who may have a background of susbstance abuse.

Adam Kay is a disgusting misogynist so I am not the least bit surprised that he’s been entitled enough to think he can just borrow a couple of women’s wombs to suit his agenda.

So that makes it OK to openly mock people with Down’s Syndrome and make money from it?

Bullshit

If you have to be a misogynist, racist, ableist etc to get through being a doctor then you need to immediately resign from the role

footballdramas · Yesterday 18:44
He also missed the birth for some reason. And yes he'll get a book out of it. When men parent children it's some kind of extraordinary challenge and sacrifice.
Sorry to derail but here is another man buying his children (twins in this case) via surrogate and now monetising them on every possible channel plus a book.

https://womensagenda.com.au/life/womens-health-news/the-mini-period-why-fathers-must-take-active-roles-in-their-daughters-health/

If I knew my father had written that about me - and this girl will one day - I would feel fury, anguish, embarrassment and shame.
It is a complete breach of this girls’ privacy.