Mother acted as surrogate for her gay son

[nellodee]

www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/apr/06/us-woman-61-says-being-surrogate-was-gift-for-her-son-and-his-husband

I think this is a pretty good solution, actually.

I would be a surrogate for my child, in a heartbeat, if they needed me to and I was able to.

Existing thread here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3550686-Surrogacy

I am concerned about her age, as it is well beyond typical menopause.

However, altruistic surrogacy (such as that within families for those unable to carry a child) is OK with me. If this were a 38yo whose own family was complete, acting as surrogate for a sister unable to carry a pregnancy on medical grounds.

It is very rare for women over 50 to seek IVF, and becomes headline news. The cut off is usually much younger, especially if it is NHS funded.

What's an 'old fashioned delivery' when it's at home? New-fangled way of saying vaginal I expect.

Am also very surprised, given the woman's age. I'd have thought the uterus wouldn't want to play ball at that age (younger than me btw).

Hideous. How is that baby going to feel when it grows up and discovers its origins?

How is that baby going to feel when it grows up and discovers its origins hopefully happy that they come from such a wonderfully loving and caring family. Far better than being born into a family with inbred hate of unconventional families. I'd happily do the same for my children, wouldn't you?

I said this to ds1 and partner the other day

They said 'eargh'

I said ' i wasn't bloody volunteering!!'

(I would)

Nu2u no I would not do that, nor would I ever have done it, for my children

Exactly how much female self sacrifice is required before it's enough? Surrogacy seems to be the new frontier.

This makes me feel a bit sick if I'm honest. Sorry.

How on earth is it taboo?

Presumably it wasn't the mother's egg and they didn't have sex.

How is it incest?

It wasn't the mothers egg.

The egg was donated by her son's partners sister and fertilised by her sons sperm.

So the baby is genetically related to both men.

Because she's literally carrying and giving birth to her son's child - using her body so he can reproduce. Can you really not see that? The incest taboo isn't just about sex, it's about the creation of children too.

Do you consider it incest if the woman carries a child for her daughter?

The taboo is connected to the impact on a child of its bloodline being too closely linked - it’s not the woman’s egg so the mother and father in this case have no blood relationship.

When I read "mother" in your post Tunnock I thought you were talking about the woman who gestated and birthed the baby, not the egg donor. The former being the woman whose body literally grew the baby and protected it as a foetus - you can't get any more motherly than that.

This man fathered a child with his mother. Of course it's breaking the incest taboo.

Yet a surrogate with egg donor has no legal rights to keep the baby do they - so not viewed the same as a mother in terms of the one who provides the genetic material. So you would feel differently about it if it had been the partner’s sperm that was used?

Ooh that’s not right actually - not in the UK anyway.

I think part of the question here has to be ‘what kind of a man allows his 61 year old mother to carry his child?’. And which idiot doctors facilitated it? 61 years for god’s sake.

I''ll have to take your word for it but I wouldn't use men's law as the standard for deciding who or who isn't a mother of a child. It isn't designed to work for women's interests or needs though, so it wouldn't surprise me in the slightest that a woman who gestated and birthed a child is treated legally as a literal incubator.

I don't support surrogacy in any form, this is another example of why it's a bad idea and harmful to women and children.

What is this supposedly a 'solution' to? If a daughter wants a child and later discovers a health issue that means she can't, that is a totally different issue to the fact that a male cannot carry a child. Why should it be the job of female relatives to sort out males wishes whether that be gay sons, or trans people like Jazz who previously seemed to suggest utilizing their own sister.

Isn’t pregnancy more risky with increasing maternal age? That was my understanding, but I haven’t got data to hand...

I can’t get worked up about this specific case. The grandma surrogate will presumably remain an involved part of the child’s life as will the egg donor aunt. The child will not be “motherless” in the sense of commercial extrafamilal surrogacy. I suspect that if her child had needed a kidney she’d have been a living donor if she could, I don’t view this as dissimilar to that.

Stories like this help normalise surrogacy as an institution so you end up with the situation we're in now where very poor women in developing countries are risking their lives and health to be paid peanuts to give birth to babies for rich white westerners.

It's not a news story when a woman gives birth, it is a story when a woman acts as a surrogate and gives birth then gives her baby away. it's the same with trans. Living as a woman when you're a woman is not a news story, living as a woman when you're a man is however. It's about making the unacceptable acceptable in people's minds.

The baby will be motherless unless its granny and aunt are called mummy and able to act as the baby's mother(s). Which of course is wrong too - splitting motherhood in half just because it's possible to do it in a test tube.