To tell you the Scottish Govt are targeting 18 year old girls for egg harvesting

[VestaTilley]

Yes, really.

Surrogacy Concern broke the news on Friday night. I can’t actually believe it.

Over a month to come, the Scottish Govt are asking for egg and sperm donors as young as 18 to come forward in a series of targeted ads on social media and the radio. They’ve expanded IVF provision and - in their own words - have a supply and demand issue.

I’d heard of fertility clinics advertising (bad enough in my view) but for a national Govt to do this to women is staggering. Women can die from complications arising from OHSS, which can be caused by egg donation. A British woman died in 2006 as a result.

The ads don’t mention these risks; it’s all “be kind” “do something amazing”. I cannot actually believe a Govt could be this stupid. They’ve only just apologised for forced adoption!

AIBU?

To be absolutely clear: my anti-prostitution stance is based on what it allows men to do to women, not on the conduct of the women themselves.

There are circumstances under which even the most communist of civilised societies require the coercion of physical or mental labour to operate. Jury service and wartime military conscription spring to mind as immediate examples. Coercion of physical and mental labour is within the limits of what we consider reasonable at least some of the time, so financial coercion of physical and mental labour (a.k.a. employment) can be within the limits of what we consider reasonable.

There is no circumstance under which rape is acceptable, so there can be no circumstance under which paying to rape is acceptable.

Women who do wish to have children but decide for whatever reason to wait until well into their 30s find out to their cost that with every passing year fertility declines. There is also a much higher chance of babies being born with an abnormality. Many young Women nowadays think they can have it all, including waiting to start a family. One thing is certain you can't fight nature and freezing eggs unless there is a serious reason is not the answer given the failure rate.

The reasons why women collectively are waiting so long to bear children are structural: soaring accommodation costs and falling real-world wages.

Egg freezing and other uses of reproductive technology to buy more time are individualising a structural problem, which is a very "capitalism" phenomenon. It's not for women individually to solve this. The govt needs to intervene with fairer taxes (can I say "land value tax"?) and policies that lower housing costs (can I say "land value tax" again?) and free up the "investment purchase" homes sitting empty after being bought to launder Russian oligarch money (can I say "land value tax" yet again?).

Exactly what I thought when I read this.

I read an article just a few days ago about declining birthrates. If I can find it I can post a link. Iirc, it said families aren't getting smaller but they are getting fewer. Fewer women are having babies but the ones that are have the usual number of children. So initiatives to encourage women to have more children is likely to be a waste of time. The problem seems to be not being in a situation (relationship, financial) to have any children.

My 29-year old niece has always been a bit anti-baby since she was 12 and the first of her two younger brothers came along. She is now in a position to have them - good public sector job, manageable mortgage, husband with good secure job - but still doesn’t want them.

And I have friends young and old in Brixham, where 40 years ago if you weren’t married and pregnant by 20 you were failing at life, and although there are a couple of babies amongst those now in their 30s, all of the younger women have contraceptive implants that they tell me last for 3 years.

Things have changed so much.

I think this has been obvious for a while now.

Men (and women to an extent) less willing to settle down at a younger age.

Single people and couples house/flat sharing into their 30s and 40s because accommodation is unaffordable.

Housing costs rising meaning couples find it difficult to secure a large enough property to accommodate children.

Two wages being needed to keep a family, but the double whammy of damage to their careers when women have children.

The societal shift to having to / choosing to live away from extended family, and the lack of affordable childcare.

The declining birthrate in this country isn't because women "want to have it all". It's because we have to do it all to even have the chance of having a family.

I agree with all the reasons posted as to why women are putting off having children until 30s.This doesn't change the fact that in many respects its also far riskier. If the desire isn't there to start a family thats fair enough. If the desire is definitely there then very often it includes lifestyle sacrifices. It's whether the desire is strong enough to make the sacrifices or risk the many potential problems, especially if well into 30s.

If the desire is definitely there then very often it includes lifestyle sacrifices.

There's "lifestyle sacrifices" and there's "wages do not cover rent and utilities on a home suitable to raise a family". We are talking about the latter here.

Look at how many people are on in-work means tested benefits. That should give the hint. Baseline wages need to be raised. It's not appropriate for the govt to subsidise employers like that.

Yup let's blame women for the disaster economy that capitalism has created, making it a dream for even middle income families to have the infrastructure in place to have a child (a secure home, a steady job, access to adequate maternity pay) before the age of 30, unless they get a hefty whack of help from mummy and daddy.

And then get it in the neck from people like you for 'having children you can't afford'? Uhuh. Head you win, tails I lose.

A properly Marxist and feminist analysis recognises that when a woman has a baby she does essential reproductive work for the State by creating a new citizen. A nation needs to replace its dying citizens otherwise it will cease to exist.

It is typical of the govt of a capitalist society to mismanage the nation such that women cannot produce sufficient citizens (a.k.a. sub-replacement fertility) and then thrust the responsibility for fixing this into individuals. The uttering of "don't have kids you can't afford" rhetoric whilst capping Child Benefit at two children, the handwringing about falling birth rates and ever-older first-time mothers whilst doing nothing to improve housing supply: these paradoxical behaviours are proof that the State has created a problem and expects the citizens to individually act to fix it.

My 29-year old niece has always been a bit anti-baby since she was 12 and the first of her two younger brothers came along. She is now in a position to have them - good public sector job, manageable mortgage, husband with good secure job - but still doesn’t want them.

I think more and more young women are realising that having children isn’t essential to personal happiness and fulfilment and that you can have a great life without them.

Heh, yes, I am an example of that myself. In fact when I hit 40 and my periods got erratic, a few times I thought I might be pregnant and was appalled at the idea! My first thought was “I’ll never be able to retire at 55 if I have a baby now”, which was a bit of a surprise as I’d been really sad in my 30s that I couldn’t get pregnant.

Actually retired at 53, mortgage paid, ha!

Absolutely, its a choice. My own personal feelings & this is by no means saying its unatural to feel otherwise, is that for me it was a natural feeling to want to produce a baby with my DH. It felt like an extension of our love and commitment to each other, something very beautiful that no amount of money or holidays etc could buy. This is why we sacrificed our previous lifestyle for a few years & eventually we got back on track with holidays etc. It's so sad to read women nowadays feel less able to start a family if they really want a baby together with their partners. If they have no desire to have children they should never be judged by others for their choices in life.

Coming back to the Govt making this fertility crisis and expecting individuals to fix it, and thinking of how @PP82 is willing to spend her inheritance fixing its effect on her at the sacrifice of making a down payment on a mortgaged home, I'm reminded that Einstein once wrote that "in the midst of every crisis, lies great opportunity".

Someone is making a profit from this fertility crisis. The people who run the fertility clinics and sell the medications and equipment are all profiting from this. And it's mostly women who the profit is made from, by taking our money and selling and letting out parts of our bodies.

PP82: disbelieves multiple credible sources about prevalence of sexual offending in a certain "sacred caste" demographic, refuses to even read them.

Also PP82: expects us to take her word for it that CPB run the Morning Star even though it was actually CPGB before it became a readers' co-op.

The hypocrisy surrounding standard of proof here is beyond anything I've ever seen before in my life.

Sex work is evil! But forced labour is fine!

Tankies huh?

If you posted links trying to prove the Bell Curve to me should I read those? I don't indulge bigotry.

Thank you for actual evidence. Unlike you, I've not declared the sources unclean and refused to read them. I never paid attention to the schoolyard "who's friends with who", "guilt by association", "SPLITTER!" aspects of leftist politics so that link had passed me by.

I did a little reading this evening and notice that there's quite a correlation between British political organisations with "Communist" in the name, opposition to NATO manifesting as deeply-misguided support for Putin, and a rejection of what they see as "woke" genderist and other identity politics.

e.g. CPBG (M-L) describing genderism as "reactionary".

Either all the Communist groups have turned right-wing or the people who bothered to actually read Marx recognise the individualistic nature of all these bespoke gender identities as a marker of capitalism, did some digging, and realised that identity politics is an "make-work" invention of bourgeois academics that serves only to distract from class struggle.

You don't agree with the right to trial by jury? Or the right of the State to defend the nation? Because both of those are predicated on compelled labour.

I think this must be the first time in history that a Georgist has ever been called a "tankie". I find Marxist analysis useful. Doesn't mean I'm actually a Communist.

I notice that you don't bother to even try to address my treatment of prostitution as paying to rape someone, nor do you attempt to address my point that the problem with prostitution is the male behaviour towards women that it greenlights. You go for a cheap shot that relies on a creative misreading of what I wrote.

I'm going to guess by the "bell curve", you don't mean the Gaussian distribution used in statistics. If you do, then there's no point in continuing to argue with you because the Gaussian distribution is so foundational to scientific study that someone who discounts it basically can't be reasoned with as an adult.

When someone posts factual evidence, such as Prison Service and Census statistics, it is the hallmark of a bigot to ignore it. Only the bigot would be so scared of facts that they'd refuse to even read them sooner than have their worldview challenged.

If someone posts a flawed argument, we can only demolish it if we've read it first. Only a bigot has such "stubborn and complete intolerance" (see Collins dictionary screencap) of other beliefs that they will refuse to even read them. If they've posted a valid argument, perhaps we'll learn from it?

Only the bigot would be so scared of facts that they'd refuse to even read them sooner than have their worldview challenged.

But it's so. much. easier to yell bigot at people rather than engage with sources and open yourself up to views that challenge your assumptions.

Have a heart, yeah? 😆

"The war between Russia and Ukraine is part of a wider conflict between capitalist powers, between Russia on one side and Ukraine and the expansionist Nato powers on the other."

Wait a minute, "between capitalist powers"? Not "between Russia and capitalist powers"?

From the same article: "Putin represents the interests of Russia’s big business oligarchs who profit from the theft of that country’s economic assets from the Russian working class. Far from wishing to restore the Soviet Union, he rejects socialism and has explicitly attacked Lenin’s policy of federalism and autonomy which guarantees the rights of nations and nationalities."

Like fuck is that Putin apologism. The only questionable statement is the demand that Ukraine be demilitarised: every nation has the right to maintain an armed defence force. Talk about quote-mining to suit an agenda.