'Whole Body Gestational Donation' - Unconscious Surrogacy

[NancyDrawed]

Via Helen Joyce's twitter:

Unconscious Surrogacy?

"Women in a permanent vegetative state or who are declared brain-dead could be used, [philosophy professor Anna Smajdor] suggested, as unconscious surrogate mothers for people who, as the paper states, either “wish to have children but cannot, or prefer not to, gestate"

Takes exploiting women to a whole new depth.

Dystopian futurepresent

Having posted this I've just seen that there is an AIBU thread about the call for reform to surrogacy laws in the UK

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/4773762-to-make-you-aware-that-surrogacy-is-going-to-be-liberalised

This is just another string in the bow of the misogynistic attack on womens right to exist.

Obviously it will only be biological women required to be used as breeding pods for sick perverts who are prepared to even use the bodies of women who cannot give their consent or are dead (because even if they had at some previous point signed something to say they could be used that way, they could have changed their minds & not got around to updating it yet).

This sort of thing can only come to be if you adopt the hateful dehumanising of women by expecting them to be referred to as things like 'breeding bodies/birthing bodies' rather than the word woman.
First you divorce the person from their humanity & call them by their perceived function, then you place expectations on them to fulfil that function for anyone who wants them to.

This is utterly evil.
Even to suggest it is perverse.

The move to take the right to choose bear a child away from the woman who owns the body that would bear it is evil.

I wonder how long it will be before unemployed mothers are required to accept surrogacy as a job or face benefit sanctions?
If this continues I can see it coming to be before I die.

I heard Germaine Greer years ago saying women don't understand how much men hate them, but it seems even she didn't understand the depths of that hate.

I am so glad I have no daughters because I would be terrified for them in this sick world we live in now.

Nobody has the right to have a child.
There is no circumstance in the world that makes it acceptable for them to use a surrogate.

Sheri Tepper's fantasy/science fiction novel (I think it is The Fresco) includes the use of girls and women kept in coma for breeding purposes. Not that far removed from this proposal.

The deeper question seems to be when a living human being stops being one and can just be used as a factory or resources for others, even if still alive.

What the fuck is wrong with people?! No, thank you.

Just the thought of this makes me feel physically ill.

Where do I sign a medical consent form saying Get Your Fucking Hands Off My Unconscious Body You Vile Creeps?

Oh come the fuck on.

Seriously. Are they going to ask people to sign forms pre surgery?

In case you don't come round from the anaesthetic how do you feel about being inseminated, growing a child who'll be then taken from you, traumatised and bereft of its biological history, and sold to this lovely wealth couple over here who have no fucks to give about your and the child's experience and see a child apparently at about the same level as a puppy? Just tick the box.

Me too. However it’s a musing from a medical philosophy professor, not a plan or funded proposal and I guess free speech is important too.
But yes 🤢

Blessed day.

Maybe they can harvest parts of an unconscious body’s liver? A kidney for organ donation? It’s not like they will need it much

This happens in an episode of Blacklist, except the woman are kidnapped for their specific genetic features and kept in an induced coma. The company then front as a ‘bespoke’ adoption agency. The twist in the story is the ‘villian’ uses his sperm for every child but to be honest it wasn’t exactly unrealistically horrifying.

I think CSI might have done a similar story. Young women drugged and impregnated to provide babies for the wealthy.

There are no depths that some people won't sink to for money and nothing that is too far for those with the money to pay for it.

Some of her other works seem to be pointing more towards a conclusion that it should not be done (qualifier: I am not a philosopher) - the most recent paper about consent/assent definitely is leading to the conclusion that those unable to consent fully or verbally should still have their autonomy respected.

It's definitely not an argument in favour of forced breeding programmes - particularly when there is a logical link to those unable due to purely mental capacity or physical inability (locked in syndrome) could be placed under the same category.

It's important, so very important, what she is discussing, as it isn't 'just' persistent vegetative patients, it could easily be conscious stroke patients, those with little awareness but physical abilities. Stop it at the 'PVS' and it's stopped at the 'had a stroke and can't fight back' or 'is under sedation because she's thrashing around' position or the 'had a catastrophic head injury but could be adequate breeding stock in the future, so keep alive until 13/14/38 when the husband/parents/the highest bidder wants to rent space from the facility that owns the body in exchange for sustaining life'.

Horrible ideas, but they have to be discussed because 'Oh, that could never happen here' is proven, time and time again throughout history to be the stupidest thing anybody has ever said.

Before that was "Consider Her Ways" by John Wyndham, though at least the incubating women were conscious. They had to run their society without men, who had all died out.

I am so horrified that someone could even entertain the thought that I can’t look.

It's science fiction, not even philosophical musings. There was a tragedy of a case in Ireland in 2014 where a young woman who was around 14 weeks pregnant was declared brain dead. She was kept on life support because the medical team were unsure if they'd be acting illegally under the law regarding abortion. The family, which was her father and her partner, wanted to switch the life support off. It had to go to court to be decided. Despite rushing the case into court, it still took weeks rather than days to resolve. The woman's brain was decomposing whilst her body was being forced to continue to function. It's just not possible to imagine that you could sustain a brain dead body for 9 months or more in order to produce a living child.

As for using women in vegetative states.... well, I'm guessing this philosopher hasn't heard of consent as a concept??

Daddy and Daddy loved you so much that we paid for you to be gestated with huge amounts of chemical and medical intervention inside of a rotting corpse. Who was definitely not your mother. And no, no one really cared much what happened to your development under such circumstances, because we wanted a baby. Yes I know your little friend Millie's mum wasn't even allowed an asprin in case it harmed her in utero, but we wanted a baby.

You can only hope it's not a daughter, because the thought of a female child growing up with such staggering misogynistic views of their mother is too awful to contemplate.

How about donating MEN'S unconscious bodies to traffickers so other men who are too lazy to date can have someone to ejaculate into? This is the only reasonable response to this b.s. because we will never be seen as deserving of humanity, UT men do

It's stories like this that make me pause and wonder if I was rather hasty in ticking the yes take/use whichever bits you want from me on the donor form!

Frightening that some men would read this and think 'yeah that works for me'

You couldn't do that in a brain dead person. The brain controls the immune system and brain dead people can't be kept on life support indefinitely, the body starts to break down and infection takes hold. They wouldn't last long enough in good condition for a viable baby.

You probably could do it with a PVS person, but as we currently are not allowed to take kidneys from such people, even single kidneys, which is survivable, or blood, or bone marrow, its a bit of a stretch to think about use of the womb.

You could transplant a uterus from a brain dead person into another woman, the same as with a kidney or heart. This has been done before using living donors, although possibly only between relatives.

Woman says " Over my cold, dead body! "
Dr. says " Hold my beer and my turkey baster! " :-/

Absolutely horrendous!
I'm beginning to think, that Josef Mengele fathered an awful lot of children!

NeverDropYourMooncup · Yesterday 18:06

Some of her other works seem to be pointing more towards a conclusion that it should not be done (qualifier: I am not a philosopher) - the most recent paper about consent/assent definitely is leading to the conclusion that those unable to consent fully or verbally should still have their autonomy respected.

Horrible ideas, but they have to be discussed because 'Oh, that could never happen here' is proven, time and time again throughout history to be the stupidest thing anybody has ever said.

I reacted to the title and didn't look deeper before posting and as a standalone point it is horrifying, but as part of a discussion of why it should never happen it makes sense that this point was raised. It struck me as a lay person as plausible, if horrific, which I see from other posts it would not be in all cases.

I also note that this publication is via the Colson Center (an American religious organisation).