Voices we don't hear from - a child of surrogacy

[OhHolyJesus]

I've found MN to be a source of voices we don't hear from, like trans widows and children of transitoners, children born from are not voices we often hear.

Surrogacy is often portrayed as positive, focusing on an infertile woman having her wishes come true by the kind and generous surrogate mother, bestowing the biggest give one can give...and all that BS.

This is Kylee, a 36 year old woman who was "Donor Conceived". Even if this short video you can see how she is struggling to express herself but she does so clearly and intelligently. I'm going to check out her blog too, there are clearly more like her.

twitter.com/StopSurrogacy/status/1246122272093540353?s=20

The planet is overpopulated-there are hundreds of thousands of children in care homes desperately in need of adoption. Surrogacy is obscenely selfish when so many children already exist that need love and protection. Having yr own biological child is not a right-I can't see any reason its allowed to happen (other than that its a business.)

Brilliant thread. Michelle you are so insightful and eloquent in your posts. The individualism is so pervasive it’s hard to see it a lot of the time. People also often feel very uncomfortable with it being pointed out as it shows something so deep and entrenched in society. so it can be hard to talk about and develop views on.

The primary law on this is made in Westminster and many women on here will be able to say, based on their experience of campaigning on other ‘women’s issues’ that the vast majority of MPs (male or female) will not have thought about this issue in any depth nor have sought to find out what their constituents’ views on it are.

Plus oftentimes when it comes to voting in Parliament on ‘beginning of life’ issues, like with ‘end of life’ issues, MPs are usually offered free votes as these are seen as ‘conscience issues’.

As the two Law commissions covering GB (not sure about NI) will be advising government about changing the law on surrogacy in the next year or so we need to keep on with letting MPs know what we think. All the questions are not already settled and it’s really important for them to listen to the voices of all women who have been surrogates and to the voices of children born from surrogacy.

I think donor conception and gamete donation are also wrong. I do not believe everyone has a right to be a parent and to go about it in ways that will be detrimental to the child's future emotional health and sense of self.

I find this attitude really homophobic. Lesbians are unable to have biological children without using sperm donors and it's insulting to suggest the children of lesbians are disadvantaged and will have problems with their emotional health.

There is absolutely no evidence that children who are donor conceived are less happy or fulfilled than other children as a general trend. Plenty of studies have been done on it.

whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-wellbeing-of-children-with-gay-or-lesbian-parents/

Really interesting thread. I have recently had a child, she is a few weeks old (my biogical child, conceived the "normal way"). What with coronavirus, I have been contemplating recently that I don't know what world she is being born into or whether she will have a good life, whether she will be happy etc. She has not asked to be here but there is no going back now. It was not her choice, it was mine. I appreciate that she won't have to contend with questions about her heritage. However I know plenty of biological children who have difficult relationships with parents and feel like they were created for a parents need or have to live up to an expectation. I also know people with complex relationships with step parents, not knowing who their father is etc. I have not experienced surrogacy so I cannot say whether this is innately different or not to these other experiences.

I had a similar struggle Keha around climate change mainly, becoming a mother suddenly brought all the things I thought were wrong, into sharp focus. It came like a wave. I cried a lot and I don't think that was just hormones. He didn't ask for this, I thought, what have I done to this poor child? Having to live in this horrific world we made?

The anxiety I feel around this drives much of what I do and decisions I make, including ones around surrogacy, safeguarding, discrimination and the environment.

You can only do what you can but you can do your best and that's all anyone, including your child, can ask for.

I protect him from the fear I feel, I try to manage my anxiety too and he is so loved and so happy, I know I would never want to 'undo' him but I recognise that my wants are ultimately selfish.

You might be interested to read about Birth Strike and others who struggle with the enormity of 'what we have done' if you know what I mean. Be gentle on yourself though. It's all new and raw. Park it until you are able to make space for it.

I find this attitude really homophobic. Lesbians are unable to have biological children without using sperm donors and it's insulting to suggest the children of lesbians are disadvantaged and will have problems with their emotional health.

At no point did I mention that children of lesbians or gay men specifically would be disadvantaged. This is about children of surrogacy arrangements. I think we can allow space here for the voices of the children who are born from surrogacy arrangements, without relating it to whether the commissioning parents are same-sex attracted.

I recognise that if one of the women gave birth the child is raised with the mother and if the other women provided the egg too the child is raised with someone who they share biology with as well as the mother who gave birth, they are just missing the sperm biology element. In the same way as if a heterosexual couple had an egg or sperm donor from someone else but were also involved with fertilisation. A child of lesbian parents would still be missing out on knowing the father though, unless they had a relationship with the sperm donor or co-parented in some way.

I really don’t want to detract from the child’s voice here, there are several different circumstances how this can come to pass.

I really wish I could share this video with you Sapphos – I’m still looking for it, but the women who had was raised by two women had this same accusation levelled at her and I believe her reply was, was she not allow to ask questions or feel sad about not knowing her father as it was homophobic? She still loved her mums.

I’ll have a look at that study, thank you for sharing it, but we can also listen to the personal stories of the children who live with this experience can’t we? And not shut them down with words like 'homophobia'. Here words like 'secrets', 'truth', 'toxic' and 'isolation' shine through for me.

www.wearedonorconceived.com/

I am not sure what disapproval of conception by donor sperm has to do with women's rights or feminism. It is saying that only women in straight relationships can have biological children and lesbians should not have biological children. Deeply conservative and hardly liberating for women. Lesbians have been having kids by donor sperm for decades, in informal non-commercial arrangements more often than through the fertility industry. There have been multiple studies on kids born to lesbian couples and there is no evidence that kids are psychologically damaged by it - rather they do as well as kids born to straight couples.
Lesbian couples are no more motivated by selfishness or treating kids as commodities than straight couples.

The fact that woman is calling her mother her ‘social mother’ suggests background problems between mother and daughter. She would have found something to be bitter about even if the woman who raised her was biologically related to her. Take all of this with a pinch of salt. In the US many extreme Christian groups are trying to ban everything to do with assisted conception from IVF to gamete conception to surrogacy.

Ah found it - finally! Millie Fontana:

She would have found something to be bitter about even if the woman who raised her was biologically related to her.

Many people dismiss the feelings of adopted children and adopted adult children like this. I understand it's more pleasant to write it off as a bit of teenaged angst or a personality fault rather than unpack it, but I'd suggest doing some reading about this A pinch of salt is a convenient escape from facing the real issues here, albeit inconvenient ones for adults who long to be parents.

If you do some reading about this, you find that the evidence is that having lesbian parents does not harm children.

whatweknow.inequality.cornell.edu/topics/lgbt-equality/what-does-the-scholarly-research-say-about-the-wellbeing-of-children-with-gay-or-lesbian-parents/

Plus oftentimes when it comes to voting in Parliament on ‘beginning of life’ issues, like with ‘end of life’ issues, MPs are usually offered free votes as these are seen as ‘conscience issues’.

Honestly I think this is better. These issues don't belong to any particular political philosophy. When they are whipped all too often everyone is obligated to vote for what the party leadership thinks will be most popular.

It is saying that only women in straight relationships can have biological children and lesbians should not have biological children. Deeply conservative and hardly liberating for women.

This is just ends justifying means. "Lesbians can only have children via X and so saying X is wrong is homophobic." Substitute anything you like for X and you can see the problem.

Lesbians can't have kids together because it requires a father and mother. That's not anyone's fault, it's just what happens when you are a sexed species. Nature isn't homophobic. We all face boundaries set by nature at one point or another, it doesn't mean we can do whatever we feel would be required to overcome them.

Goosefoot, you're setting a moral boundary. Nature isn't setting a boundary - human biology allows lesbians easily to get pregnant from donated sperm and have children together. You're saying that's immoral. But the evidence shows that children do as well with lesbian parents as straight parents.

I posted the video earlier Mirror, this child, now grown, Millie Fontana, did suffer because her parents lied to her about her father, the sperm donor, according to her story. I think the fact they were lesbians is secondary.

This is only one woman's story, I get it, to be clear, I'm not saying (and didn't say) that all children raised by lesbians suffer but this one woman who did, not because her parents were lesbians but because she lacked a relationship with her father, the sperm donor, which is of course connected is connected to the fact they were lesbians and needed a man to complete the process.

(I'm not appraised of adoption laws in Australia but I imagine that as a fairly progressive country they could have adopted.)

Mille Fontana's situation is quite different to Jessica Kern. A sperm donor baby is not the same as a surrogate baby, I would also argue that an egg donor baby is not the same as a sperm donor baby, though I think it's obvious how they can be fairly compared.

A man selling his sperm is not the same as a woman selling an egg, nor is it the same as a woman growing the baby and honestly, this thread is not about lesbians, or gay men, or commissioning parents, it's about the children. Children who grow into adults and explore emotions and experiences and can at a certain age articulate that. I want to hear from them.

It's also the same study as posted by Sapphos but thanks.

Goosefoot, you're setting a moral boundary. Nature isn't setting a boundary - human biology allows lesbians easily to get pregnant from donated sperm and have children together. You're saying that's immoral. But the evidence shows that children do as well with lesbian parents as straight parents.

Yes, it's a moral boundary, but you are missing that I was criticising the form of the argument.

The natural boundary is that a woman cannot impregnate another woman, so they cannot in fact have a child together biologically. There must still be a father. That is all nature.

The argument was that it is homophobic to not allow sperm donation because there is no other way for a lesbian couple to have a child. So the form of that is that because "something" is what allows lesbians to have a baby, it must therefore be moral - to say it is a problem is homophobic

Try the same argument for surrogacy - if someone has doubts about the ethics of surrogacy, is that homophobic for gay men? What if surrogacy wasn't technically possible and the only option for gay men was to buy a baby, would that therefore make it ok?

Means justify ends arguments very rarely work. You have to show the thing is ok in itself. If a practice or scientific procedure or technology is immoral, it does not become ok because it allows lesbians or gay men to have babies. Saying that it is immoral doesn't make someone a homophobe.

These are all issues that relate to the rights of children. You don't get to over-ride the rights of children because it benefits lesbians. The question of whether such kids "turn out fine" isn't the only issue (and in a lot of ways its a crude measure anyway.

Goosefoot the conscience vote point is that MPs should want to weigh their constituents’ views as well as their own personal prejudices when they vote - and if we don’t tell them what those views are, then because women’s issues aren’t something they’ll ever tend to research I fear the MPs will just vote with personal conviction or with which lobby groups seems most valuable to them on that thing. worst case scenario is the MP gets the emails from women explaining how these proposals would affect them and just ignores them because ‘conscience vote’. (Like a lot of the MPs opposed to abortion do.)

Some ‘conscience vote’ issues affect women more than men, or affect women entirely and not men at all in a relevant way. I would rather those weren’t seen as personal moral decisions to be made in a vacuum by MPs, many of whom will never be personally affected by the laws they want to vote in.

I don’t know what the alternative should be but what we have doesn’t feel sufficient to safeguard women and children because it’s ‘conscience‘ vote not ‘vote with the evidence of harm/benefit’.

Goosefoot, it is fair to point out that the consequence of your position is that lesbians should never have biological children.

If you say that the rights of children are violated by being born to a lesbian couple, this would be more convincing if you could produce some evidence of that harm. Particularly given the number of studies which have looked for this harm and failed to find it.

Trauma to children and adverse childhood events have well evidenced consequences in the future lives of those children - their health, relationships, stability. You would expect to see evidence of these adverse effects in the lives of children of lesbians if their family situations were damaging them. Except there is no such evidence of that harm

Chatty Lion - I'd have said considering the views of the people they represent should be part of making a conscience vote. Though not the only part. That's always a difficult point to navigate though I think.

I tend to see the alternate as whipped votes which usually means the central party leadership makes the call.

Goosefoot, it is fair to point out that the consequence of your position is that lesbians should never have biological children.

Um, no, lesbians can't have biological children. There is no should about it.

If you say that the rights of children are violated by being born to a lesbian couple, this would be more convincing if you could produce some evidence of that harm. Particularly given the number of studies which have looked for this harm and failed to find it.

The whole of the thread is discussing this. Rights of the child include the right to have a relationship with the biological parents, not to be concieved with the intent to be given away or treated as a non-child by the biological parents.

"Evidence of harm" - how would you even show that? Do people generally have to show harm to justify having their rights considered in policy and law?

Except there is no such evidence of that harm or maybe it is beginning to come to light. But I don’t think it is a necessarily a’ same sex’ issue. I think it might be a wake up call to acknowledge that some, most likely not All, but some children need to know more about their biological family, maybe to the point that ‘donors’ may have to be disclosed. Millie said it wasn’t that she was a child raised to mums, it was not knowing about the biological father’s side.

I think it’s very easy to sit here and say egg donation/sperm donation/surrogacy shouldn’t be allowed if you are heterosexual and have no fertility issues yourself. Preaching that people should be happy to adopt is hypocritical if you have your own biological children, yes there are thousands of children needing homes, so why didn’t you adopt one of them yourself? Probably for the same reasons as the people you’re criticising.

Having biological children is just as “selfish” and “unnecessary” whether they are created “naturally” or through other methods, people create children because THEY want children, there’s nothing altruistic about it. How many children created “naturally” have issues with how they were raised and their parents? My fiancée has suffered greatly due to her mother and her “parenting”, you can find many children from all backgrounds who feel they deserved better from their parents for a variety of reasons. Anecdotal evidence does not prove something is inherently harmful.

Lesbians can definitely have biological children. I am a lesbian and I'm sitting with my biological child whilst she goes to sleep. No-one pretends that a child can be the biological child of two women. You say that a lesbian ought not to have children through donor sperm and bring them up with her wife/partner - that this violates the child's rights.

You are asserting the existence and extent of certain moral rights - for example "not to be treated as a non-child" by biological parents - which presumably means the right of the child to be brought up by both biological parents.

How are you to justify the moral imperative for a child to be brought up by both her parents - that there is such a right - without showing that the child is harmed if such a right is not respected? You have to show that the right, the moral requirement exists - and it would be an unusual sort of right if it's violation led to no harm.

Anyway, I'm going to leave this now and get on with being a good mum and a good wife.

But I don’t think it is a necessarily a’ same sex’ issue.

No, it isn't, and I think it's the worst kind of power-levering identity politics to present it that way.

All kinds of people cannot conceive kids because of biological constraints, from lesbians to people with infertility to people without partners. It's no more homophobic to discuss the ethics of gamete donation that it is phobic of infertile couples or single people.

some children need to know more about their biological family, maybe to the point that ‘donors’ may have to be disclosed.

This has been the law in the UK for ages now. I agree that there shouldn't be secrecy around donors and the children should be able to know about their biological heritage. My kids are welcome to contact their donor when they are old enough.

Stating that donor conception should not happen at all is very backward imo.