California commodifies women and babies for gay men

[collateral]

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

If you are really curious about how the sense of male entitlement manifests maybe you could take a quick look in the mirror, because you are oozing with it.

Yet we are encouraged to be organ donors, surrogacy is the legally under the same framework here as organ donation.

I don’t see any evidence there is any social harm from surrogacy, your argument seems more moralistic than evidence based.

It’s not true that it’s 100%. Two of my four pregnancies had no complications at all. So now you know me. Also statistics say it’s more like 31.5% will have a pregnancy or childbirth complication. Nowhere near the 100%.

I know for a fact it’s not 99.9% because surrogacy is extremely popular in Asia. I also know for a fact that it’s not 99.9% exploitation when so many countries either have banned commercialised surrogacy or have strictly regulated it.

Do you mean it’s popular in Asia for Asian couples to seek out a poor woman, not just westerners? If so, I take it back. The commercial surrogacy industry is increasing, not decreasing:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/07/womb-for-rent-more-women-are-working-in-commercial-surrogacy-industry.html

No such right exists in surrogacy. The right for women to choose to be a surrogate is not the right for someone else to hire her….the way you wrote that is ignoring no one has the right to hire a woman to be a surrogate. The women choose and they consent as they do with any other job that requires physical labour and has health risks.

Can you define “choice”? If it’s a choice between no food and no roof over a woman’s head vs 10,000 dollars, is that choice? And it shouldn’t matter even if a woman is genuinely freely choosing to do it, no one with any morals would use that woman’s body for their own gains.

No one is buying a baby. This isn’t a baby market. This is entirely different and simply a pre-planned adoption.

Keep telling yourself that. If party A, gives party B money, be it just expenses or profit, in exchange for a baby, party A is buying a baby. It’s the simplest part of the entire thing to understand.

No choice is a free choice so this is a red herring as it is an impossible standard that can never be met. 100% of jobs are not freely chosen because it is a necessity to survive to work and earn money to buy food, shelter and so on. Surrogacy is no different and to demand it must be a “free choice” is utterly ridiculous.

But you said above that women choose! So they don’t choose? Which is it? Are you saying it’s ok for women who are desperate to make ends meet are suitable surrogates? And you’re still saying it’s ok for untended parents to select such a woman?

You can’t hold up a sample of one and claim it’s like that for all surrogate mothers when studies show for the majority of surrogate mothers, they are happy to hand over the baby- it was in the survey that only a tiny minority regret this decision and one of the changes to the law that surrogate mothers demanded was that the adoptive parents have parental responsibility from birth instead of the current wait time we have.

The point of this story was to highlight the part of my post you have conveniently skipped: what framework do you propose that deals with all the myriad of complications, changes of mind, regret etc etc? How do you protect everyone’s rights? And if you can’t, whose rights do you sacrifice. To continue my example: what happens if that woman develops PND? Who looks after her? Who pays for her therapy? If she can’t look after her own kids who pays for the time her partner is missing from work? Explain how you can make it work, otherwise you’re acknowledging that surrogacy is effectively everyone crossing their fingers and hoping it doesn’t go to shit, then if it does go to shit, the courts have to figure it out (multiple examples of it going to shit exist.) So how do you propose to organise surrogacy?

Well we do know that adopted children, and babies by surrogacy are simply pre-planned adoptions are always curious about their birth mother. One of the law changes was to lift the seals on these records and give children access to information and the ability to contact their birth mother if they wanted to. In addition, parents who adopt don’t feed their children nonsense like you would about being ripped away and bought like a life accessory which devalues them and makes a mockery of adoption. But that said, longitudinal studies have shown that so called the ‘trauma of being adopted’ from birth has no effect on life chances or rates of mental illness as an adult.

Do you have a reference for that last point? So if a child is curious about their mother, but the child was born in Ukraine, or India, what do you propose to be the solution to that? There have been no law changes about this, has there? There are no long term data on the mental health of babies born by surrogate to adulthood, but there are studies that show increased rates of adjustment issues.

Do you think a baby born by surrogate should always know its mother? Please explain again how you would make surrogacy work. I would also if you could address points 4, 5 and 6 of my original post.

Why do we need a judge to decide it’s best to remove a baby from its mother in all non-surrogacy circumstances?

Example of point 6: a prenatal test shows high risk of Down Syndrome. The intended parents want to abort but the mother doesn’t. Who decides? Who looks after the baby afterwards if the intended parents don’t want it? Or vice versa: the intended parents don’t want an abortion but the mother does. Should she be made to carry on with the pregnancy?

Now answer the same questions with any other of the things that can go wrong.

On Desert Island Discs Adam Kay talks about him and his husband becoming fathers to two babies born four months apart in America. So, one each presumably. Article on today’s Guardian online.

[Kay, who was portrayed by Ben Whishaw in the Bafta-winning BBC1 adaptation of his comic memoir, said life with his husband, TV producer James Farrell, has been “absolutely transformed for the better” by the arrival through surrogacy of their two children.

“We have a very boring life, or we did until six months ago,” he tells the presenter Lauren Laverne on Sunday’s Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4. “Now, and this isn’t something that I’ve spoken about before, there is no calm whatsoever, because we’ve got two very young babies – Ruby, who’s six months, and Ziggy, who’s two months.”
In a candid discussion of his unhappy student years, an eating disorder and his sexuality, Kay also talks about his disappointment at not being there for the birth of his daughter last winter. A “difficult pregnancy” ended in a phone call from America announcing her imminent birth, but Kay was unable to fly out in time to be there. ]

From page 2 of this thread, at 10.34…….

”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.”

I think the biggest issues is the majority of people with an opinion have no idea what it is to be a mother with a newborn.
Of course you can have an opinion but the people who have carried a baby to any term or experience things like skin to skin contact (or indeed planned to but was robbed of the opportunity for whatever reason) realise that putting the baby first means caring for it throughout the pregnancy as well as after the birth.

I had no idea how important the pregnancy was in getting to know baby until I was pregnant myself. The bond I already had before baby was even here was solid and real. She knew my voice and continued to only want me well after the birth itself. It seems no one is willing to talk about how important a mother is to the baby in the early days (or imo well into the dc life tbh)

That would be making women important though. And we all know who runs society.

I think it is unbelievably cruel to create a baby with the express intention of removing them from their mother at birth. And I think it contravenes the baby's human rights.

Agree with this. Who knew in 2023, puppies would have more rights than human babies?

The reason they don't take puppies away too soon is because it causes mental health problems for the puppies. I'll leave everyone to fill in the blanks...

And the ridiculous straw man argument about organ donation. Organ donation is only encouraged for AFTER YOU'RE DEAD. It's NOT encouraged when alive, except in very specific circumstances (kidneys for relatives) and people are NOT being specifically killed to do it - it's something that happens after someone's died from some other, unconnected reason. Also, the organ itself has no rights, very different from a baby whose human rights are being trampled on in surrogacy.

@DemiColon "Though I'd have thought that even the progressive left is solid on not buying and selling people."

This is the bit that confuses me about the so called progressive left.
Capitalism is bad except when it's specifically profiting from female biology, Trafficking someone as a servant, or to build a football stadium (Qatar) are bad, but surrogacy and sex "work" (not sure if the P word will get me a deletion) are fine and to be encouraged.

Someone please make it make sense.

I had no idea how important the pregnancy was in getting to know baby until I was pregnant myself. The bond I already had before baby was even here was solid and real. She knew my voice and continued to only want me well after the birth itself. It seems no one is willing to talk about how important a mother is to the baby in the early days (or imo well into the dc life tbh). That would be making women important though. And we all know who runs society.

Yes, it's the unsayable thing, we're also not allowed to say that mothers are more important to babies at birth than fathers, but they are. Good men, good fathers recognise this and support the mother. Over time, this changes especially if the man in question is a good father (and puts the child's needs before their own).

Funnily enough though, we know how important mothers are for other mammals right after birth and the risks and harms of taking other species' babies away too soon.

The left is more misogynistic than the right?

They're both not great, but choose your poison.

I read on here once that the left wants to control / own all women (and treat them as sub-human) but the right wants individual men (fathers & husbands traditionally) to control / have ownership over individual women. It's obvious the latter is better (still awful, but better) if you have decent men in your life.

Nothing surprises me about Adam Kay. It's all about him.

It clearly is in the child's best interest to know the mother if they wish to do so, this has been well established, what won't be particularly palatable for children is if the buyers left the mother in dire straits (bit of money for the surrogacy, but then leave the woman with post pregnancy birth complications to get ill and die on her own). Imagine finding out that your 'parents' did this to another human being? Or even just that your mother lived her entire life in grinding poverty whilst you and your parents had more than enough.

Thing is, children will go and find this out, some of them at least. The mental health consequences of this will be huge.

Like in this article. This child will eventually grow up in Australia with Emma and Alex and eventually be able read that her mother Svetlana gave birth to them and went back to a war zone, after being separated from her husband so a rich Western couple could get their paid-for baby.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-60824936

@dimorphism

You’ve misremembered that socialist v conservative quote. The quote is that conservative men see women as private property whereas socialist men see women as public property. But they all see women as property. I don’t know who came up with that quote in the first place. But no doubt someone on here will.

Ah yes @LoobiJee thanks, that was it.

Statistics can be dangerous things. Someone can be a medium earner and still be in dire financial difficulties for a variety of life circumstances. The figures about hetero couples vs. same-sex is perhaps not what you're trying to present as given same sex couples are a very small minority your near parity indicates vast over-representation by same-sex couples and logically those would be gay men as lesbian couples have not one but two people capable of doing the natural birth themselves, all else being equal. Not sure that it is especially relevant but just saying it's not unreasonable for the other poster to talk about "gay men" when so massively over-represented by population. In fact, skimming through the abstract that's bourne out because the population of the study was a mere 47 women and 19 of the surrogacies were for gay men. So I don't say whether not it's relevant but if other poster feels it is, then they're not wrong to do so. And I guess their point is that it does feel like children are being treated as something a male-male couple should have a right to. It's not equivalent to fertility problems that actual prospective parents may experience and seek help with.

And just on that fact of there being only 47 respondents, you're holding these figures up as a counter to the suggestion that surrogacies are taking advantage of women in poor economic circumstances. Leaving aside my other concerns about that argument, the fact that it's focused on the small number of UK surrogacies rather than abroad is a critical flaw in using it in this way. Estimates for surrogacies in Ukraine were around 500 a year. And where a mother is paid around $40,000 for their baby. A huge sum where a woman might earn $200 a month at a basic job. Also, the Ukrainian govt. facilitates the trade by having introduced laws that place the purchasing couples names on the child's birth certificate, deny the surrogate mother the chance to change her mind on the birth of the child and protect the mother's identity from the child. (As an aside, Russia also allows commercial surrogacy but protects the mother's right to not give up the child and records her as the actual mother).

Absolutely without question couples are exploiting poor women to have children for them. The fact your paper takes a narrow minority (it captures 47 women between 2014 and 2021 - seven years! Compared to estimated 500 a year in Ukraine) is at best disingenuous. One can't even argue that we're just discussing the situation in the UK as UK couples are the purchasers of the children. Ukraine is the second most corrupt country in Europe behind Croatia. (And having a little familiarity with that area my honest response is not surprise that Ukraine is so corrupt, it's to wonder what the Hell Croatia is doing that makes it rank higher!)

This has been a long post. I guess it can be summed up as "yes, exploitation of women's economic circumstance and yes, gay men".

What do Conservative women see themselves as? There's a lot of them.

There is absolutely no point in engaging with the pro-surrogacy lobby online. Their starting position is that it’s fine and dandy to treat actual humans as commodities. They very clearly don’t see infants as people; they’re possessions adults can acquire to make themselves feel better.

And they view the use of women’s bodies to incubate babies as a thing to accept now while we figure out how to grow humans in vats. All the crucial aspects of being made and growing inside of a human woman (for infants!) don’t matter. Nope. The future is baby factories in poorly regulated countries and a profitable trade in flogging them merchandise to people who can afford to pay for them.

All engaging with them seems to do is give them more opportunities to pretend that this is not a horrific way to view babies and human reproduction.

Grateful possessions to be treasured in many cases, it seems.

It’s all so upsetting and awful. How few rights babies have, as people, just because some people want to pretend they are living the heterosexual ‘happy ever after’ fairytale and will do any cruel and unscrupulous thing to achieve it.

If you allow your kids a voice (because you aren’t invested in suppressing them for your personal validation) it can be surprising to discover that you’d been pulling out all the stops to make them happy for years, but really, they tell you, they felt sad when you were always looking at your phone, or something. The times you weren’t actively ‘parenting’ are as real to them as the times you are. Babies are people, with a free will, their own thoughts, who can sense and feel and gradually make sense of things. They are not little dolls to make a couple’s picture complete.

There are more studies, if you’d care to look and do some research.

At least I’ve posted a study instead of other posters on here simply making up statistics like “99.9% are rich western women exploiting poorer women” or “pregnancy has a 100% complication rate” or the trope that “it’s mostly gay men who hire surrogate mothers because hetero couples don’t, and lesbians don’t”

All untrue pure poppycock pulled from thin air, but you’re welcome to just believe that as I think the anti-surrogacy argument is faith & morality based more than evidence based.

In fact, skimming through the abstract that's bourne out because the population of the study was a mere 47 women and 19 of the surrogacies were for gay men.

Skimming is a dangerous thing. 19 were for same sex couples, which included gay men and lesbians.

the fact that it's focused on the small number of UK surrogacies rather than abroad is a critical flaw in using it in this way.

Not really, it shows that surrogacy doesn’t have to like the worst case of Ukraine or other countries. That the UK is doing a fairly good job at it.

This has been a long post. I guess it can be summed up as "yes, exploitation of women's economic circumstance and yes, gay men"

Yes another long post with zero evidence to back up assertions.