California commodifies women and babies for gay men

[collateral]

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

Because in that case the mother doesn’t want to put her baby up for adoption. So there is rightly a process by which the woman’s rights are overruled.

In surrogacy, the mother doesn’t want to keep the baby.

But why a judge? Why is it considered so serious a thing, to remove a baby from its mother that a judge has to decide? Even in adoption there is a process that is followed.

Because it’s considered such a serious thing to do, whether the mother wants the baby or not. It is inflicting a trauma on that baby regardless of the mother’s capabilities or wants. Decades of research shows this. So it has to be a judge who decides this.

So why is acceptable to remove a baby from its mother instantly in surrogacy with no such process?

I find the whole thing haunting and horrific and this weird happy sheen that is placed over it is even more horrifying.

This slippery slope/short hop thing is pure diversion.

Saying that it’s not ok to grow and sell a human infant in no way implies that women should be forced to see a pregnancy through and give birth.

Abortion and adoption are in the space of responding to a current pregnancy. Surrogacy is carefully planning to ensure one happens.

your argument is sort of like comparing an accidental gas explosion to a planned bombing by terrorists, and somehow saying that people should be careful in condemning terrorists because accidents happen. Not exactly the same obviously. But the logic is similarly twisted.

Denying a baby its mother deliberately just seems evil to me.

Yes! The weird happy sheen is so creepy.

This “In surrogacy, the mother doesn’t want to keep the baby.” isn’t necessarily true though is it? There are cases where the birth mother realises that she doesn’t feel able to give up her baby.

Which is precisely why the commercial enterprises making money from the trade in women’s bodies and the trade in human infants want the legal entitlement to remove the newborn baby from its mother.

They want to protect their fee-paying customers (and the income from those fee-paying customers) by ensuring that the human infant purchasers paying for their intermediary services get the human infant that they’ve paid for.

“This slippery slope/short hop thing is pure diversion.

Saying that it’s not ok to grow and sell a human infant in no way implies that women should be forced to see a pregnancy through and give birth.

Abortion and adoption are in the space of responding to a current pregnancy. Surrogacy is carefully planning to ensure one happens.“

Spot on.

As for women being taken advantage of, that is a problem, but to ban all women from making decisions about their own bodies for their own protection is infantilising and patriarchal. The focus should be on regulation and taking steps to prevent women from being taken advantage of
I think the focus should be on providing women with other choices. There is inevitably an economic inequality and power imbalance when it comes to surrogacy. Rich women are not lining up to volunteer themselves. It is renting out a woman's body, similarly to prostitution. If a woman had a different option, can anyone honestly say they believe she would choose to be a surrogate? There is a reason these women are most often sourced from countries where women have few or no other options. It's exploitation pure and simple. And don't even get me started on the still thriving surrogacy business in Ukraine. Absolutely horrific.

Our of interest @L3ThirtySeven , are you in favour of/ok with commercial surrogacy, or do you think the current UK laws are better?

It really depresses me when surrogacy and sex work as dressed up as some sort of ‘empowering’ ‘choice’ women must be allowed to make. And anyone objecting to it as tools of the patriarchy.

Do the people making these arguments even stop to think?

And people like to ignore the attachment issues because it’s much nicer to assume the baby isn’t affected at all. It’s denial.

“While you’re at it why not ban women from all high risk jobs then?
Armed forces, police, fire, bin woman, postie, lorry driver, construction, farming, paramedic….nope all women must be protected from deciding to take on a risky job where they might end up injured or dead.”

Producing new human infants is not a job. Although clearly there are countries/ organisations already treating it as a commercial enterprise. And individuals and campaigning organisations heavily invested in it becoming a legal commercial enterprise in even more countries; and energetically lobbying to that end, deploying whatever spurious arguments and emotive appeals might support them in achieving their financial goals.

There are no examples in your list of occupations where significant physical changes to the person’s body are an integral part of - indeed wholly fundamental to - the occupation even in the most low risk of circumstances.

In an employment situation, employers are required to remove foreseeable and preventable risks to life. The simple and straightforward way to remove the risk of death/ injury in a scenario where two men wish to adopt a child is for them to adopt a child which already exists and whose mother is unable to care for it. Their disinclination to adopt a child which doesn’t have the DNA of one of them isn’t a justification for putting a woman’s health, and even life, at risk. Nor is it a justification for denying an infant access to its mother.

Absolutely agree, this is so sad

Your first paragraph said it brilliantly.

Not the same.
Not by a long shot.

In addition, many of these surrogacy businesses operate in countries where people are very poor and the regulations for protecting the women are sketchy at best.

If you want to educate yourself you can look at the death rates for women in pregnancy and childbirth where there are fewer options for medical help.

Agreed. But I think there’s a pretty simple explanation: money. There is a LOT of money to be made from the exploitation of women’s bodies. Pornography, pimping, human trafficking whether for sexual slavery or reproductive slavery purposes - all money-making enterprises.

Which means those enterprises have LOTS of money to spend on protecting their commercial interests. Money to spend on: eg setting up “research” bodies and “research” reports; behind the scenes lobbying of politicians, charities and other institutions; media “content” with heartwarming stories of a couple’s “struggle” along with the cute baby photo, to be supplied to broadcasters and the press; media content about the “easy money’ to be made on Only Fans; sock puppets to post on social media forums; payments to “influencers” to boost their “content” online. No doubt lots of other activity as well. In the case of surrogacy, these commercial enterprises are also helped by various privileged, educated, wealthy individuals in an influential position who have personally benefited from a women risking her health and life to provide them with an infant and who are deeply personally invested in ignoring the exploitative aspects of surrogacy and only presenting a positive picture of it. These individuals get masses of media coverage; some of them are newspaper columnists, some of them get book deals, some of them are “national treasures” of the sporting or arts world. In the case of pornography, it clearly has a lot of users and many of those users will be in roles which give them an opportunity to “normalise” pornography use by writing jokes about into scripts, news articles, twitter posts and stand up sets.

In that wider context of the sexual exploitation of women being sold as an acceptable economic opportunity for (some) women, it’s perhaps unsurprising that so many people accept the surrogacy sales pitch at face value. When are they ever presented with the counter argument? The answer to that question is: basically never.

I found it interesting in the threads about Philip Schofield that there were so many comments along the lines of “wow, the crisis management team are busy, look at all these minimising posts on here and in twitter”. So people were able to observe the attempts to influence the narrative in that situation, but in contrast don’t seem to spot when a similar phenomenon happens in discussions about women’s rights. Whereas, to me, it’s very noticeable on here that certain topics (notably prostitution) invariably trigger a sudden flurry of posters descending on the thread with a set of clichés that they start deploying.

You could not be more wrong, educate yourself and do better. There is decades of research available showing that babies are definitely not 'blank slates' and attachment does not only begin after birth.

The trauma of disrupted attachment, even if the disruption occurs very soon after birth, is a known risk which should only be risked if it is necessary for the baby - eg if the baby needs medical care, or the baby would be in danger if left with the birth mother. That the best interests of the baby mean that is the least worst option. Not the wants of the adults inflicting it on the baby to get their wishes met. Your need to believe that the most humane thing is to take the baby and give it to the purchasers asap doesn't make it true.

@L3ThirtySeven As someone who is pro-choice, I would urge you to ask yourself, 'Do I believe in x because I genuinely believe it' or 'Do I feel like I have to not believe in x because if I do actually believe in x, it means something else down the line'.

Your post is written like someone who almost has a foot in both camps. If you mainly believe or not believe in something because of a certain consequence, then you don't actually believe in it. Rather, it is a fiction that you are sustaining for yourself in order to make sure that other beliefs or wants you have are strongly supported. I don't think this is the best way of getting to know what we really feel about things, and I don't believe that all opinions or beliefs can be streamlined in this way.

I think that poster isn't here to have a debate, they're here to entrench themselves in a position and not listen to any evidence or information that doesn't support their position.
Doesn't that behaviour sound familiar?

Curious. Is denying a baby it's father also considered evil?

Where does using a sperm donor factor into this conversation? Is that the same thing?

We are talking about newborn infants here, not foetuses.

//

This. In surrogacy a baby is created to be taken away from the mother who gestated it

Women do not get pregnant with the premeditated intention to have a termination

Adoption of a child who isn't your own pick and mix isn't as good a look on the socials I guess

You’re defending human trafficking. The buying and selling of babies, the commercialisation of women’s biology for the benefit of men. It’s not rich women doing this as some kind of liberated free choice is it? It’s poor women, what does that tell you?
Why are you pro human trafficking? Do you think poor people should be able to sell body parts too?

There are numerous straight couples who use surrogacy but this article just focuses on gay men.