"Surrogate lost" - did she die?

[OhHolyJesus]

I struggle to post about Lance Bass due to the overt misogyny causing me nausea but here it is .

He and his husband 'lost' a surrogate and now he's sad as finding one during times of a global pandemic are really hard. I don't think she died, but 'lost'? She wasn't yours to lose.

I think the poor woman was likely quite broken wants to now run far and fast away from these awful people. I hope she has a good therapist.

toofab.com/2020/08/21/lance-bass-gives-update-on-surrogacy/

They did a documentary which is on the British Surrogacy Centre Facebook page and YT.

I particularly like the bit in the doc where they pledge friendship with the surrogate mother and swiftly drop her when they return from the US, when the twins were maybe just a couple of weeks old. Barrie and Tony have two other sons, I forget their names. Barrie's insta is choc-full of his lavish Florida lifestyle which is funded by surrogacy and prize poodle breeding and centres quite heavily I think on Saffron.

Barrie has been appearing on Good Morning Britain etc as some kind of expert on surrogacy. TBF he's dined out on it for years and sees no sign of stopping.

Oh and I understand that Tony and Barrie will not divorce due to the financial aspects and the cancer so they all live together as one big, about to be bigger, happy family.

Yeah, on Tony's Twitter, his profile pic appears to be a picture of him and Barrie, so I was a bit confused as I thought Barrie was engaged to Saffron's ex boyfriend?! Blimey!

Each to their own I guess, but I hope everyone in that family is OK.

I’m sure it’s been said many times, but I’m always amazed at the “rights” of the commissioning parents trump everyone else, despite the fact (assuming they haven’t have their own eggs harvested, such as a gay male couple) they have absolutely no physical pain or risk in this, neither are they are not being born with massive intentional holes in their history and background. They can have as many goes at getting the perfect child (or perfect twin boys born under Taurus) that money can buy, and despite describing the disappointment like infertility or miscarriage, it really isn’t the same thing.

Previous medical scandals centreing around commercial/commodification of bodies, such as selling organs or blood have proven that when money is involved, people are often coerced into doing things that are risky to themselves, or behave dishonestly because money is at stake.

Even to a woman who is not in a desperate situation, the thought of using your body to pay off your mortgage or put your kids through university is somewhat persuasive, especially when the risks are minimised. Those kids could end up orphaned or lifetime carers for a mother who suffers a stroke in labour.

There is a reason that selling body parts is illegal in most parts of the world. Hiring out bodies to the highest bidder really is a horrible idea.

Sorry for grammar fail

When I was younger I didn't consider egg donation a big issue, I didn't need them as such so no harm in one else having them. Ah the folly of youth.

I had actually sort of forgotten about this but when I was at university I got a flyer in my pigeonhole (which actually is quite grim in the first place - it was a Cambridge college so they must have decided they wanted 'clever' eggs) which was/purported to be from a couple who needed donor eggs. It said how much money you got, which seemed like a lot to me at the time (it doesn't seem like nearly enough now) and so I rang the number for the fertility clinic out of curiosity and the very nice receptionist explained to me that it really wouldn't be a good thing for me to do, at 20, without having had my own children. I remember being very surprised by this, as I thought it would be a very easy thing, like sperm donation. I've seen friends go through IVF now, so I know how very easy it is not - and given that my first three goes at conceiving, aged 28, all ended in miscarriage I guess my eggs probably weren't all that, anyway. As you say, folly of youth - at 20 I thought making babies was very easy and the only concern was to not get pregnant - but I do look back and wonder how, as a bright, well-informed young woman who read the news, read a lot of feminist works, etc I had somehow got the impression that donating eggs and donating sperm were not far off the same. I do think it says something not just about my idiocy but about a culture that doesn't like to acknowledge what reproduction takes from women and so why it's so problematic if it becomes a transaction.

A culture that doesn't like to acknowledge what reproduction takes from women and so why it's so problematic if it becomes a transaction.

Hardback, I totally agree.
I remember my DExH telling me that I wasn't ill, I was pregnant and to get on with it......as he asked me to lift a heavy object from the back of his car/walk up a steep hill at 36weeks/go to work after having no sleep due to a pregnancy related condition.

Foolish me, I didn't disagree but wondered what was wrong with me that I wasn't blithely pregnancy-ing properly .

OK, I live in a developed country, peri-obstetric complications are as low as anywhere in the world, far fewer women are left with long-term disability than in the past.

At the same time, I personally know of 1 woman with significant birth injuries, still requiring surgical intervention 4 years later.
I know of one woman who had a stroke during pregnancy.
I know of countless women with pelvic floor weakness following pregnancy.
I know of one woman who was admitted to hospital with post-natal psychosis.

We live in a culture that doesn't name or value the risks of pregnancy and certainly doesn't value the work that women do to keep humanity going.

Absolute narcissistic bastards! Babies are not commodities to be bought to satisfy adult desires.

I agree our culture as a whole doesn't respect pregnancy and postpartum women. I'm now wondering if part of the reason I've never really been OK with surrogacy is growing up with a DM who openly talked to me about her pregnancy complications. I always saw it as a serious thing to undertake.

Something I’ve wondered re:surrogacy it is strange to me how blithely it is assumed that women will be at no higher risk from surrogacy (where they have no relation to the child and are pumped full of artificial hormones to maintain the pregnancy). Is this even being studied (the rate At which women are likelier to die/be disabled/become infertile) compared to control pregnancies?

If not why not, other than misogyny?

Can't quote anything but I have heard being pregnant with an unrelated foetus is more dangerous.

We live in a culture that doesn't name or value the risks of pregnancy and certainly doesn't value the work that women do to keep humanity going.

I'm always amazed when the phrase, "you're pregnant, not ill" is spat with such venom on here (well not FWR but the rest of MN). The anger that accompanies it is very strange. FWIW I was pretty ill in pregnancy (I threw up multiple times a day) and had horrible insomnia. Had I felt like that NOT pregnant, I would have been seeing a doctor, not going to work.

https://twitter.com/misscawright990/status/1449944576181997583?s=21

Some quotes from the article, I have no words to contribute myself:

Michael: We went through nine different egg donors, which is rare. We got all the way down the path of about to retrieve their eggs. Some just wouldn't produce enough eggs; some weren't good genetic matches. If you're going to be a match, you don't want to even risk it.

Lance: When we were pregnant last year, our surrogate miscarried while being pregnant with twins. When you fast forward and be like, "Oh, what's the wedding going to be like? Oh, if they're going to have kids, I'm going to be a grandparent?" You just automatically put this in your head. And it's very disappointing when that dream gets popped.
Michael: This time around, we had to start all over again from the beginning. Not only did we need to get a new egg donor now because we found out she had early lupus, but on top of that, when we did our egg retrieval, we only had two healthy embryos. Normally, the number's much higher. So we put both in and once she miscarried, we had to start all over from scratch again this past year.
Lance: And during a pandemic.

The video posted above made me feel sick. Disparaging comments about a woman's genitals were vile; how dare they!? Waxed? FFS- the sheer entitlement.
Women as a commodity: it's just awful.
And I speak as an egg donor. Before donation, a friend said " you do realise you are risking your health and maybe your life?"
I was OK, but it's painful and invasive. But it was for a good cause and we got a good amount (clutch? Not sure of the collective noun)
But I did this for other women, not narcissists.

Oops sorry just seen its an old thread.......

This is completely repulsive. Its like an episode of Black Mirror has collided with the Handmaid's Tale.

And those men stood like lemons in a delivery room freaking out over a vagina. Utter bastards. That poor woman and that poor little baby girl.

@Eyesofdisarray

You may be interested in this. It's the story of a woman who donated eggs but has chosen to withdraw/have stored eggs destroyed due to the ethics of surrogacy.

(I haven't explained that very well, best you read it yourself.)

stopsurrogacynowuk.org/2021/08/20/egg-donation-and-surrogacy-guest-post-from-kat-howard-radfem_kath-short-read/

That poor woman and that poor little baby girl.

I think it's quite interesting to see what influence the views on women or how the surrogate mothers are treated, when the baby born is a girl.

Saffron Drewitt-Barlow has herself said she would donate eggs to her dad (and his boyfriend, her ex) and also plans to have a surrogate mother have children for her. Being surrogate born, having Dads who run a surrogacy agency, and seeing brothers and now a sister, also born from surrogacy must influence your own view and even perhaps how you see other women (being useful vessels).

Her male twin, Aspen, hasn't said anything publicly but he might be heterosexual and have a baby with a female partner in the future, but his view of women may also be affected. Who knows. They don't see their mother.

Surrogacy is how they make their massive income (alongside other business ventures) and it's how their family was made.

They don't even pretend to see women as fully human.

And isn't the word "surrogate" being used wrongly? Surely the people who take the place of the original mother are the surrogates? So those blokes are surrogate parents; the biological mother is not a surrogate mother.

Thank you @OhHolyJesus- interesting read, I can understand her reasons.
Interesting also, that women can be paid- I wasn't and wouldn't have wanted to be either.

@CoastRoad

'Sunroof' is a charming way of describing a CS -- the woman is imagined as a car, and the baby is extracted via the 'sunroof'.

Yes, it's wrong in a number of ways, and you don't actually have to have had a CS to see why...

'Sunroof' is one of my pet hates. Is my vagina a door and my body a car? A good friend said it to me once and I still wince at the thought.

”Oh, what's the wedding going to be like? Oh, if they're going to have kids, I'm going to be a grandparent?" You just automatically put this in your head. And it's very disappointing when that dream gets popped.”

My children are young adults and I don’t think I’ve ever been arrogant or shallow enough to think about weddings. I vaguely wonder, now and then, whether I’ll ever have grandchildren (and indeed found myself unexpectedly excited when my eldest briefly dated a young woman with a child) but the thoughts don’t go any further than that.

I guess what I’m picking up here is that his entire comment is about him, and things he might play a part in, or that might affect him directly. He already can’t see the child as a separate person. I have never done more than hope that my children will be healthy and happy. If grandchildren came into the picture, of course that would be lovely, but it’s never been the focus.

@PaleGreenGhost

They don't even pretend to see women as fully human.

Yep.