And so it came to pass: Mail on Sunday - gay male couple offered fertility treatment including surrogacy

[Needmoresleep]

www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-6636419/Gay-male-couple-offered-IVF-treatment-NHS-time-Britain.html

Oh ffs, think of the women.

Funkyfunky I thikn you are completely not understanding my posts for some reason.

I'm going to leave it there. I don't knwo what you're arguing wiht me about. But clearly to get pregnant with a man, you just need the semen, you dont' actually have to fuck him, and I'm not sure why you think that.

Hold on

They don't fund thyroid treatment on NHS?

WTF?

They do nothing but not the most appropriate medications and levels have to reach a much higher (lower?) Level than gmc guidelines to merit treatment.

Happy to be corrected if I've summarised that badly.

I didn't say you had to fuck him, nothing. I just don't see why people are so surprised about the use of an IVF clinic when I think one is involved in the majority of surrogacy situations. The only difference here is that the NHS is paying for it.

And to be fair, if I was offering to have a baby for a couple, I would 100% want it done through a clinic. Not mess around with a jar of someone else's bodily fluids in my own home.

Once again the discussion involves safeguarding, and the need to centre the safety of a child over any needs of adults.

we can be pretty certain then that the NSPCC wont want to be involved in ensuring the right framework is in place

Iusedtoban

The interesting thing for me is that when it comes to "safety" and surrogacy, the thing I think of first is the safety of the woman who will be pregnant and give birth, not a risk free activity, and apparently even less risk free if IVF (due to teh common practice of implanting multiple fertilised eggs to try and make sure one "takes").

There was a site I read about USA and where surrogates have died (always a risk when a woman has a baby) it is beign hushed up somewhat by the industry - and it is an industry.

The fact that when this chap says "safe" about surrogacy he is not thinking of this at all but rather making sure he gets what he paid for (baby) says it all really.

"I didn't say you had to fuck him, nothing"

What on earth? I'm not looking to get pregnant!!!

You said this "I think nearly all surrogacy is done through IVF clinics, not the surrogate sleeping with the father of the child. It does also tend to be donor egg. If it was a heterosexual couple wanting to use a surrogate, would people be expecting that the surrogate has sex with the man?"

No clinic =/= having sex with the man.

That's all I have been saying.

Iused2BanOptimist thanks for that summary. I hadn't really considered the surrogate being left with the child, for one

OK Nothing- crossed wires i think. Yes, I accept that you can get pregnant via DIY insemination in the home. However, this is not how the vast majority of surrogacy happens. Therefore- the use of a clinic= not unusual, as some posters were suggesting.

Fleetwoodsnack

The NHS, and many countries, are shit useless when it comes to thyroid disease- endocrine disorders generally. They only test something called TSH- thyroid stimulating hormone. It’s a pituitary hormone and tells you nothing about what level your active thyroid hormones are at. I had to pay private, and still do, for full hormone panels. I asked for them, was refused and told it was quackery to ask. For real. The threshold for treating in terms of TSH, is far too high at 10.0. Eurothyroid, normal thyroid function, will have a TSH of 1. What happens then, is you get sicker and sicker as your TSH rises and the active hormones Free T3 & T4 lower. It makes it harder to treat and obviously you get more severe symptoms. In addition, they only fund a certain drug, roughy 1/4 of women don’t respond to it because our body can’t convert it to usable thyroid hormones. Some have started giving synthetic versions of T3, but the company that produces it just raised the price by something like 5,000% so the NHS can no longer afford it. They don’t fund an animal hormone replacement that’s identical to our own, because despite being the oldest thyroid hormone in the world, it hasn’t gone through the same safety testing ( no money in it, it’s a cheap drug ). I can’t tell you the hell i, and millions of women worldwide, go through with this bastard disease. Hypothyroidism is hell. Now I am peri menopausal after just getting my hormones right after 4 years!!! I actually had an endocrine collapse because I was untreated so long. My GP told me to, ‘reduce my expectations of life’ now I was getting older ( 39 at the time ). My husband insisted we use our savings for private care, overall initial cost £2,000 and monthly costs of £60 not including quarterly testing. But I am very fortunate I could go private. I had a support group and almost none of them had the money to do what I did. Still haven’t found a way of preventing the excruciating mid cycle pain from endometriosis!

Anyway, as long as gay guys can get women to carry their babies, that’s the main thing.

Yes indeed Nothing. I'm trying to remember if there was any mention at all of the "safety" of the surrogate as per health risks. Of course his top notch agency screens surrogates for health as part of the screening for suitability.

As much as I am opposed to surrogacy, if we are to have more regulation then protecting the surrogates and screening is a bonus I suppose. I was appalled at the British woman interviewed who has had 13 babies through 10 pregnancies. (Not sure if that includes her own two children or if they are an additional two pregnancies). Everyone knows risks of things like PPH increase the more babies a woman have. No way should anyone who has had more than four or five be accepted for surrogacy. The NHS has to manage these high risk pregnancies remember, apart from the risks to the mother etc.

However, if the "industry" is regulated in a way Dustin and the lawyers dream of I can't see how that can prevent people doing their own diy version. The regulated version will be a lot more expensive with lots of lawyer fees for both commissioning parents and the surrogate, screening, counselling etc.

Those who can't afford it will try a cheaper method with all the risks that involves, both legal and medical.

Thanks for explaining, more complicated Than my understanding of it. Is the animal the porcupine ones or did I make that up?

Flying one of the programmes mentioned it briefly, I think they said there had been five such cases in Canada (no time scale as far as I recall) and cited relationship breakdown between commissioning parents. Not something I had thought about either. Baby being damaged goods for whatever reason would be the most likely cause to spring to my mind.

I really recommend listening to his programmes which are available on bbc iplayer for a long time yet, sorry I can't post a link, for some reason, perhaps because they are podcasts, it doesn't have a "share" button, you have to find it for yourselves, use search work "surrogacy".

It has done nothing to change my mind regarding the acceptability but I definitely feel more educated on the subject and they were well presented and an enjoyable listen notwithstanding the subject matter.

Fleetwoodsnack porcine! From pigs! Called NDT. You can also get it from other animals, cows. My preference is synthetic but I was advised it wouldn’t work for me and i was so bad I urgently needed to start taking something- you can start to affect major organs etc my friend ended up with heart problems. Ideally, they would create a synthetic single drug to replicate our own thyroid hormones, we have 6. You can only get 2 synthetic ones, the active ones, because they don’t know what the other 4 do. They must do something important because so many women like me only respond to NDT. I’m going to wait till my other hormones come right and then try synthetic again. It’s just a flipping pain because it might not work and then you get sick again and sick adjusting back to old meds... sorry to ramble about something off topic!

Not a bad summary, FlyingOink, though I'd quibble slightly with the last bullet.

The main issue is that adoption (in the UK anyway) means parenting children who are bloody hard to parent, and it requires bucket loads of resilience, doggedness and empathy. Not everyone can do this (which is fine!), most people don't want to do this (also fine!) and I'd suggest that people who have hurt feelings because someone expresses a biological truth aren't likely to be able to cope with parenting a traumatized child particularly well.

NHS Scotland user here.

Have to buy own wound care dressings, wheelchairs, incontinence supplies and quite a bit of equipment.

Add to that the total reduction in charitable help and being ill is getting very expensive in this country.

But hey as long as IVF is there for all that's ok right?

'Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.' Kant
Women's bodies are being systematically reduced to a means to the fulfilment of men's 'wants' (not even needs)

OlennasWimple I agree, but I do think it's a serious problem. We have a large number of people who just can't cope with not getting what they want. They must make terrible parents, I know they make terrible employees, and I guess they must make terrible partners too.
An example to prove your point though, while I think of it: Daley and his bloke would be the last couple on Earth I'd choose to raise an abused child with a drug addicted mother.

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/i-want-nhs-to-pay-for-four-surrogate-babies-wrl9nvs83?shareToken=6c24b3bb9bf1f0087565beec270ecd4e This article seems relevant - the NHS is fighting a Supreme Court ruling that says the NHS should fund the commercial surrogacy (in California) for a woman whose late diagnosis of cervical cancer has led to her infertility.

porcine! From pigs! Called NDT

Anyone doubting that women are overlooked/ discounted/ dismissed/ ignored?

Tl;dr It’s always always about the menz and finding different ways to prioritise their demands above women’s

minecraft
Thank you. Was going to post the same link.

If you read the link, you’ll see this decision has NOTHING to do with the couple involved being gay so please don’t make this about ‘evil’ men. The link in minecraft’s post is a woman who has ‘won’ the right to have FOUR babies via surrogacy paid for by the NHS. This is not about men.
It’s about how the hell we’ve ended up with so many unbelievable entitled people feeling that they are owed everything by everybody and a judicial system that seems to support this.

MinecraftHolmes wow that's sickening.
I feel bad for her but I don't like her "I deserve" attitude.
I wonder if she decided to press on after £600k because UK surrogacy has different laws or because she had the NHS over a barrel for missing her cancer?
If you're a child whose parent is murdered you get £2000 a year from the government. Does a child need a parent less than a woman needs a baby?

This is not about men.
It’s about how the hell we’ve ended up with so many unbelievable entitled people feeling that they are owed everything by everybody and a judicial system that seems to support this.
Yes and no. It's about men because in the OP the reason they need a surrogate is because neither of them is female. The woman who died doesn't have the right equipment either now, but that was due to illness, not being born male. Agree with the rest.

And I guess it's partly the disneyfication of the family, too. If they've had the big wedding the next tick box is a child.

There should be public service adverts made explaining that you can't always get what you want (and not to hog the middle lane)