Acronyms will eventually be a casualty

[PatatiPatatras]

Reading up on https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-66860266.

I couldn't help but think, you mean homosexuality is being targeted. It feels like everything else is hanging on to homosexuality because ???

It started out as cool to look out for each other and for everyone to be lumped together. Now it feels like you can't state when something specifically targets homosexuals.

The article does use the term same sex but it just feels tagged on. Something about this feels demeaning.

Why not?

They knew that what they were doing was a problem. They did it anyway and thought they could just force everyone to accept it.

Maybe it’s actually better if the child is adopted by people who don’t view it as a commodity.

It is thinking of hypothetical children whilst punishing actual children for things they didn't do.

I think if you are going to tell yourself that you're taking this approach to protect women and children, you need to ask yourself this.

The woman in this case is a commercial surrogate in the USA. The child in this case is a child living in Italy with the people it thinks of as its parents.

Your draconian new laws are not actually going to help that woman, they will have no direct impact on her, and it's entirely possible she doesn't want to be helped and is perfectly happy with her decision to gestate and birth a baby for a nice gay couple and get paid for it.

So what about the child.

Is denying them citizenship of the country where they are growing up and of which their parents are citizens going to help the child?

No.

Is sending one or both of their parents to jail going to help the child?

No.

Is taking them away from loving parents and putting them in care going to help that child?

No.

Is messing around with their birth certificate going to help that child?

No.

Is refusing to recognise a parental link between the child and one of their parents going to help that child?

No.

So why are you really doing this?

Why not?

Erm, because it would fuck the child's life up, that's why not.

Jesus Christ.

‘SSo why are you really doing this?’

Probably to establish that Italian law, passed by a legitimately elected government, is observed by Italian citizens who wish to live in Italy. Is that so wrong? It’s basic democracy.

We are all seeing the results of not sticking to the rules in other matters often discussed here, and the continual making of exceptions to those rules eventually results in them being overturned.

Yes, but generally the people who are punished for breaking the law are the people who actually broke the law, not their children.

Should we never punish parents? After all taking away loving parents who commit fraud (for example) is punishing the child.

I’ve found this thread by turns perplexing, fascinating and enlightening.

I’ve often wondered how it is that colleagues who are intelligent, thoughtful, and genuinely committed to women’s rights can argue vehemently in favour of something which is harmful to women and children, fail to acknowledge the harm to women and children, in fact entirely deny it, and convince themselves they are morally right.

In this thread we’ve seen the power of:-

• DARVO
• narratives about victims and punishment which are misleading
• thought terminating cliches
• “awww, babies”

Lots of inaccurate assertions in the thread….

”The twin babies are stateless”. Not true. They are US citizens.

“The twin babies don’t share the same nationality as their parents.” Not true. They share the same nationality as one of their parents: their birth mother. They don’t share the nationality of their biological father or his husband.

”The twin babies are being punished by the Italian State.” Not true. For several reasons.

1. It wasn’t the Italian State who removed the twin babies from their country of birth and from their birth mother. It was their biological father and his husband who did that.
2. It isn’t the babies who are having to find the money for their private healthcare and private nursery fees. It is two adult males - their biological father and his husband - who are having to find the money for the health and education needs of the babies they paid a woman to risk her life and health to give birth to.
3. It isn’t the babies who care about whether they have a piece of paper with “US citizen” or with “Italian citizen” on it. It is they adult males who removed them from the US at birth who care about that.
4. It isn’t the babies who are being put through the tiresome inconvenience of a form-filling / bureaucratic / legal process to save money on private healthcare and private nursery costs, it is the adult males - who, let’s not forget, had the money, capability, skills and motivation to go through a form-filling, bureaucratic, legal process when they wanted to acquire the right to remove the twin babies from their birth mother - who are being subjected to the “punishment” of that tiresome inconvenience of form filling to save on nursery fees.

In contrast, I do see the argument that the twin babies are being punished by being removed from their mother at birth and denied access to their mother throughout their childhood. It is the biological father and his husband who have done that, not the Italian State.

In practice a judge will try and find an alternative to putting both parents of a young child in jail unless the crime is so severe that they really have no choice.

I can't think of a single crime where it is something that is legal one day and illegal the next, and yet so severe that only a custodial sentence is appropriate after even one infraction, and where the person is not a danger to either their child or the general public.

Can you?

As it happens, I used to know someone who went to prison for fraud when his daughter was a baby. The differences were:

• fraud has been illegal for a very long time
• there were identifiable victims
• he committed the crime to have more money, not in order to have a family, and
• his wife did not go to prison.

Even then he only got a few months.

If he'd been a single father of two small children I expect he'd have got away with a rap on the knuckles, even for fraud.

I really doubt whether the babies in question would see it the way you do.

For the record, I am against surrogacy.

It's just that I am also against making life harder for children born to surrogacy just to set an example.

It's just that I am also against making life harder for children born to surrogacy just to set an example.

Once again, it’s not the babies who are having to find the money for their nursery fees and their health care. It’s the adult males who paid for the right to deny them access to their mother who are having to find the money.

It’s not the babies who are having to go through a form-filling process to acquire the legal right to Italian taxpayer funded nursery and health services. It’s the adult males who paid for the right to remove them from their mother at birth who are having to go through that form filling process.

It’s the adult males who are being inconvenienced by bureaucracy, not the babies.

And in causing inconvenience to the adult males, the Italian State has understood one thing correctly: to influence the behaviour of adult males who don’t think twice about removing babies from their mother, the Italian State needs to inconvenience those adult males, as their own convenience is what really matters to them.

It's astonishing that you are dismissing something as major as citizenship as mere bureaucracy.

It’s astonishing that Italian citizens think they should have a bureaucracy-free right to import infant US citizens into Italy without having to be inconvenienced by paperwork.

But perhaps not all that astonishing from men who think it’s unproblematic to deny infants the right to their mother.

Yes, you've made your point. We get it. The people doing this are immoral and wrong.

But the fact remains that it is very difficult to punish them for using a surrogate abroad without that punishment having hugely negative consequences for their child.

Negative consequences which the Italian government could choose not to inflict on that child.

So once again, who are you doing it for? Because if your concern is for the child, making the child's life objectively worse is an odd approach to tackling the problem.

“hugely negative consequences”

That’s reminded me of something missing from the list

In this thread we’ve seen the power of:-

• DARVO
• narratives about victims and punishment which are misleading
• thought terminating cliches
• “awww, babies”
• hyperbole

This statement

“So once again, who are you doing it for? Because if your concern is for the child, making the child's life objectively worse is an odd approach to tackling the problem.”

is already covered under ‘narratives about victims and punishment which are misleading’.

I don't understand the point you're making here.

Clearly being denied citizenship of the only country you've ever known, the only country of which your parents are citizens, and facing the possibility of being kicked out once you turn 18 and are no longer the dependent child of a citizen, is a hugely negative thing.

It certainly is. Perhaps it should be factored in as part of the surrogate parents decision making process?

“the only country you've ever known”

They are babies. Citizenship is a meaningless concept to them at this stage.

The concept of not having a mother is something they will encounter much younger than the concept of citizenship. I would agree that being denied access to their mother could be described as a hugely negative thing for the babies.

But I can see why the biological father and his husband might regard the financial implications of not having instant access to Italian citizenship as a hugely negative thing and one that is of greater importance to them personally.

A PP has repeatedly pointed out the various ways in which it would be possible for obtain Italian citizenship to be obtained. The biological father and his husband have got another 17 years to navigate the citizenship issue before your hypothetical age 18 worst case scenario. If the biological father and his husband had the skills to navigate the commercial reproductive exploitation of women industry, no doubt they’ve got the skills to navigate the citizenship process in the next 17 years.

the only country of which your parents are citizens,

The biological father and his husband are both Italian citizens, not UK citizens. As EU citizens, they’ve got more than one country to choose from.

FFS.

Yes, it should, but if it isn't, that isn't the fault of the baby.

Again, you're relying on people with a track record for poor decision making to suddenly start making good decisions. (Not that Italian citizenship is even guaranteed, as I explained before.)

I'm not interested in the men's behaviour because we are all in agreement that surrogacy is bad and wrong.

I'm interested in the Italian government's behaviour towards the child, i.e. someone from a class of people the surrogacy ban is supposedly aimed at protecting. If you're going to ban surrogacy on the grounds that it's exploitative of women and unfair on children (which it is), you can expect your behaviour towards those children to be scrutinised by people who are wondering whether you really do care about the children or whether you just don't want gay men to have children.

Well that took a turn.

I'm pretty sure what makes me uncomfortable in the article is not relevant to many.

And I'm not entirely sure why Italy has to solve a problem created in America...

And then there's the babies born with a different nationality to the parents. Eh... that's pretty standard? I had to do the paperwork for mine... and they still don't have dad's nationality because paperwork.

I'm out.

So your children don't share a nationality with either of their parents then?

I would say that was highly unusual.

Very very normal...
Parents from 2 different countries to current country of residence.

Baby is born.
Baby gets automatic nationality of country of residence (sometimes... for my first, it wasn't automatic and she was technically stateless). parents need to do paperwork for baby to get parents nationalities.

Come to think of it... I haven't done the paperwork for my last born. He doesn't have either of our nationalities 😂

I better do something about that...

Anyway, for those who live within these paperwork systems, paperwork is just part of life... this is hyper normal.