California commodifies women and babies for gay men

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(100) Telling it Like it is Without the Gaslighting (substack.com)

Not trading in babies (i.e. human beings), and women's bodies as commodities is unconvincing? Especially when you want to remove that mother from the baby for no good reason. Blinkin' heck!

Taking a baby away from their mum cause you bought it to complete your life style is despicable. There are many babies looking for a family because a variety of reasons
I concur

Put yourselves in the shoes of an individual who is involved in the commercial access to a woman’s reproductive organs in exchange for payment and supply of newborn infants (most frequently cross-border) in exchange for payment trade, whether as a purchaser or a procurer. Such an individual could feel really quite angry and defensive at that trade being described accurately.

Absolutely this! What a world we live in.

L3’s position seems to be that, in their world view, the only people permitted to operate within an ethics framework would be members of Humanists UK - as the Humanist society claims to arrive at a position taking account of science.

Well exactly.

There’s a whole corner of the apparently ‘progressive left’ that seem to be extremely invested in preventing anyone from describing the things they promote accurately.

Behind a great deal of it seems to be a great deal of profit for the medical-pharmaceutical industries and services aligned to it. Which is curious. Why is it that activism under the progressive left banner is so utterly determined to brush that under the carpet? And to insist that any objection if any kind must be coming from the awful ‘right’. 🤔

The thing is, my wager would be that the genuine ‘mainstream’ position in all of this would be that any trade in human infants is a sign that things have gone terribly wrong. Where children do need to be transferred from the biological parents’ care, that should be driven entirely by the needs and interests of the child - not by the wants and desires of the adults.

But activists and promoters have been very effective in deploying euphemism and mobilising many people’s fears around being ‘unkind’ or ‘discriminatory’ to prevent people from saying: wait a minute… trading in human infants is just not ok.

Our surrogacy advocates on this thread are very keen to gloss over or deny all the ways that a whole set of industries under the banner of ‘fertility’ gain enormously from being allowed to run an (often international) trade in women-as-incubators to supply infants to order to meet the emotional and social desires of adults who can afford to pay.

@DarkDayforMN Yes, and the thing I’ve found most striking about this thread is the pro-surrogacy advocates’ dismissal of the moral and ethical points as irrelevant. Jaw dropping, really.

Many would argue (regardless of whether they hold to a religion or faith) that humankind’s ability to consider and place weight on moral and ethical considerations is fundamental to our humanity. And those who don’t hold that view would, at the least, acknowledge that recognising and taking account of moral and ethical considerations is vital to society operating successfully.

But I suppose we all know that there are people who don’t believe that anything - whether it’s the law, morals, ethics, or the welfare of other humans - should prevent them getting what they want. (The war against Ukraine being an extreme example of that. The (seemingly huge numbers of) supporters of the commercial trade in images of sexual abuse are another example.) So perhaps it’s unsurprising that the moral and ethical concerns about payment for use of a woman’s body and the cross-border trade in gestated-to-order babies would be simply hand-waved away by some posters in this thread.

A huge problem for me is that if there is something wrong with the baby the intended parents can just leave it behind - not pick up their goods so to speak.
There have been examples of this happening.

Since there is always a risk of a baby having health problems, the baby is being created to live with its intended parents on the condition of it being healthy.

Otherwise what happens ? It gets put up for adoption in a country that might not have the resources to adequately cater to it's needs ?

it’s unsurprising that the moral and ethical concerns about payment for use of a woman’s body and the cross-border trade in gestated-to-order babies would be simply hand-waved away by some posters in this thread.

It feels like a huge case of hiding your cognitive dissonance to me. I think the posters concerned have a lot to square in their minds now, which is likely why they've left the thread.

How does banning surrogacy force women to raise children they don't want? I just can't see the connection. Adoptions would still happen.

Having rights over our own bodies is important. We should not be able to sell away or rent out those rights to others but rather we maintain those rights to bodily autonomy by definition.. That's one of the reasons why surrogacy should be illegal.

Adoption is completely different to surrogacy. As is abortion.

All of this is just a pathetic attempt to pretend that allowing the trade in infants gestated to order is somehow OK.

Adoption is about children’s welfare. Abortion is about unwanted or life threatening pregnancies.

neither of these are any more relevant to to discussions of the babies to order trade than the concept of ‘infertility’ is to people who simply aren’t having the kinds of sex where a baby can be conceived, gestated and birthed.

It’s all distraction tactics.

I am actually quite furious that women’s right to choose not to continue a pregnancy is being used to argue for the use of women’s bodies to facilitate the babies to order trade.

It actually feels sinister, almost like some kind of threat. If you don’t get on board with the babies-gestated-to-order trade - indeed, if you’re not promoting the image of woman as happy ‘gestational carrier’ - then you risk losing any access to abortion you might have.

Interestingly, a “you’ll be risking your rights to abortion if you carry on like this!” line of argument (misrepresenting Gillick) was used by those hostile to Keira Bell’s Tavistock case.

I’m sure it’s in a PR playbook somewhere.

No, not that, I already knew that. It's the money bit. It's the root of all evil except when it suits me personally. Maybe they'll smash the capitalist system after they've all bought the babies that they want and feel entitled to?

Apologies if this has already been posted: https://twitter.com/colwight/status/1670356195037822981

This is where this shit gets us. How heartbreaking for that poor baby girl.

Let's face it in some cases refusing to care for the baby will effectively be leaving the baby to die. So they've ordered a baby, something goes wrong so they effectively chuck it A BABY in the trash. This is the ultimate in consumerism over humanity.

It is massive disability discrimination.

Some surrogates, if not all, will be doing it because they are in dire straits financially and can't afford to live - they certainly cannot afford to look after a disabled child. And some of the countries where this is happening does not have anything approaching the welfare state we have. Even in this country disabled people (including children) are having worse and worse quality of life. And why should the state pick up the pieces for people who are that entitled and selfish, as well as rich enough to consider surrogacy in the first place? There isn't enough money to go around as it is.

If surrogacy is to be legal (IMO it absolutely shouldn't be), the commissioning parents should be responsible for that baby and its health and living costs if they choose not to care for it and the arrangement is not terminated by the mother. They are the ones who started the whole process that created that human being. They need to be held financially responsible until adulthood.

Abortion is also used in the pro-prostitution argument too. The exploitation of women is framed as women’s ‘choice’ (the interests of all the male buyers and sellers of the prostituted women are completely invisibilised by this take) and the argument is - if you argue against the sexual exploitation of women and girls, then you argue against women having the right to ‘choose’ abortion.

The wickedness and cruelty of everyone involved in this poor baby girl’s fate is breathtaking.

That story really sets the entitlement to child as commodity thing right out, doesn’t it?

That poor child. She will grow up knowing her fathers bought her and then exercised their consumer rights to sue the clinic because the merchandise wasn’t as advertised.

If you won’t ‘choose’ and celebrate what benefits men, then you won’t get any choice at all.

😩

Just awful.

The article says that the “fertility process” cost the two men $300,000. The baby girl’s mother went through three rounds of IVF; the first two rounds were unsuccessful. The two men refer to the baby girl’s mother as their “gestational carrier” in their lawsuit against the IVF clinic. Their lawsuit is alleging breach of contract, and cites the Consumer Legal Remedies Act.

How disappointing for these two consumers that they didn’t get the product they considered themselves to have a contractual entitlement to expect. Still, plenty more gestational carriers out there to be procured - our disappointed complainants aren’t going to make do with bringing up an unwanted female human, oh no, they’re going to do it all again (twice!) and make darned sure they get better quality human infants next time. They’ll be needing money…oops, sorry, I mean “legal remedies”…from the lawsuit to compensate them for the inconvenience and extra cost of being forced to bring up an unwanted female human, and to make sure they can afford to get the kind of infant human they actually wanted, the next two times they enter into a legal contract for a gestated-to-order baby.

What a heartwarming story. How on earth could anyone look askance at surrogacy?

Well they have the email accounts for the names, so they need to get the right lifestyle accessories children so that doesn’t go to waste.

Just abhorrent. Completely unjustifiable in every single way.