MIC Ollie Locke & husband on their Brazilian surrogate

[roombaclean]

https://twitter.com/David_Challen/status/1730710614824103984

Video in link. They say it is a bit 'prostitutey' but main concern is she's hot...

This has been said many times about people who exploit the fertility of others to add to their family. Unfortunately, some people don’t see it.

These men were saying that the chose Ivy League educated ‘supermodels’ which is why the eggs are expensive. You need money to get an Ivy League education.

There seems to be some British women who come here and talk about human beings being objects that you can ‘gift’ to others, and to them it is all a very beautiful experience ‘giving’ a living, breathing, extremely vulnerable, commoditised and unconsenting person away. Although I doubt these women are wealthy, they are not poor like the exploited Ukrainian and Mexican women that are popular with British child-buyers.

Money is just one way to coerce women,

Maybe they won’t but I believe we will collectively look back on surrogacy with horror.

Yes, it’s true. The ‘ivy league supermodels’ are likely looking for a quick way to be free of their huge debt from paying for their college fees.

I feel though, that the women in the UK who are the birth mothers, have other stuff going on because of women’s low status in a sexist world, so they can be more easily manipulated/coerced to do this objectively terrible thing, by the idea they are doing something ‘worthwhile’.

They say it is a bit 'prostitutey' but main concern is she's hot...

That awkward moment when someone says the quiet part out loud

Off topic but I'm always slightly fascinated by the need some straight women seem to have to 'minimise' or metaphorically neuter gay men by characterising them as 'sweet' and 'lovely'. So patronising.

Also, finding a 'hot' woman to be your surrogate a la prostitution is neither sweet nor lovely

It's all giving me Owen Jones 'must find a broody lesbian' vibes

As somebody said recently-
" I deem deplorable the practice of so-called surrogate motherhood, which represents a grave violation of the dignity of the woman and the child, based on the exploitation of situations of the mother’s material needs. A child is always a gift and never the basis of a commercial contract. Consequently, I express my hope for an effort by the international community to prohibit this practice universally.”

The 'somebody' was actually none other than the Pope! Summed it up neatly, didn't he?
Declaration “Dignitas Infinita” on Human Dignity (2 April 2024) (vatican.va)

I’d prefer it if the Pope had been explicit that the word ‘gift’ was more akin to ‘blessing’ rather than like an object that can be ‘re-gifted’ or sold on Ebay.

They didn't " traffic" the babies. They were approached by a woman who lives in Chester who said she'd read about their plight and who offered to carry a baby for them. She was in close contact with them throughout the pregnancy and she is now, after their birth, apparently still in their lives.

Whether or not you agree or not with surrogacy, and personally I do think there are issues - at least get your facts straight.

If someone in your local area approaches you with an offer of a human being, it's still trafficking.

I've been on a few anti-trafficking seminars now. Never did anyone say "it doesn't count as trafficking if someone else cold-calls you to initiate the transaction". Nor did anyone say, "it can't qualify as trafficking if it solely involves people in your local area". Quite the reverse on that one, actually. They were at pains to emphasise that UK residents are trafficked within the UK.

If you don't think it's trafficking, you can say that, but not with those justifications.

Also ‘carry’ a baby means - ‘to pick up a baby and take it from one place to another’.

This woman offered to gestate a baby to term.

This means she offered to be a baby’s birth mother but also agreed to reject the child at birth and ‘give’ it away, circumventing normal, legal adoption procedures. I assume she took payment of some kind, so she also sold her baby. Just because such a woman might try to dissociate from the terrible deal she has entered into, bargaining over an innocent baby’s life with thoughts of ‘it’s not really mine’ and ‘I am only carrying the baby’, she is still the baby’s mother and she is still rejecting her baby to give to other people like it is an object, not a person.

I find quite incredible / totally unbelievable. As IF that happened! Nothing happens to Ollie Locke by chance

Some decades ago I had a couple of friends( in the alternative squatting movement in 1980's London), one of whom was not able to have children with her new husband, but who was the very definition of Mother Duck - for whom motherhood was the whole purpose and point of life. Her close friend ( who already had a child of her own) offered to carry a pregnancy for her. She did. They paid her living expenses. And when the much wanted child was born she was referred to as 'Aunty'.

Was this trafficking too?

The irony is that Ollie is too stupid (or too arrogant and entitled) to realise that the moral and ethical implications of what he is describing are grotesque. You see him for what he is - a gay man buying a baby. To publicly admit that you spent £££ to ensure that your egg donor meets certain criterium of looks and brains strips the transaction back to what it really is: consumerism. Fucking disgusting.

1. did the baby consent to be traded?
2. selling yourself into indentured slavery was also slavery.

While you were making mocking comments, ridiculing the idea of surrogacy being trafficking, the charity Unseen got some media coverage of a report about the number of calls to their helpline. I emphasise again that trafficking happens within the UK.

Excerpt from an article yesterday.

Calls made to an anti-slavery helpline have reached a record high, with the number of potential victims in the care sector rising by almost a third.
According to anti-slavery charity Unseen, the number of calls to the Modern Slavery & Exploitation Helpline in 2023 increased by more than 19%, up from 9,779 in 2022 to 11,700 last year.

Labour abuse remained the main form of exploitation up by 11% from 464 cases in 2022 to 516 in 2023.
Potential victims indicated in the care sector went up by 30% from 708 in 2022 to 918.
There was also a 21% increase in potential victims of criminal exploitation to 385 in 2023.

Justine Carter, director of Unseen and co-author of the report, said: "Modern slavery and exploitation are heinous crimes that have no place in a modern, progressive UK that cares about human rights.

"It is encouraging that we are continuing to see rising numbers of calls and contacts to the Helpline, indicating that we are succeeding in raising awareness of the issue and mobilising more people to act."

Forced surrogacy was reported for the first time last year, with three potential victims indicated.

Continues at Modern slavery helpline receives record number of calls in 2023, report finds | UK News | Sky News

I suppose that's not trafficking either, right?

Agree with this.

I overheard a hairdresser in the salon I use talking to a client about his surrogate "journey". They bought their baby via a Cypriot agency and while it was unclear from trying to earwig under my highlight foils, it sounded like the birth mother was based on anime country (not UK). He was talking about how they were able to choose appearance characteristics (unsure if this is actually true).

But yes, the fucking fawning over it ("Wow, that's such a lovely story/you'll make such amazing parents, gush gush") was quite gross

I'm not, and wasn't, mocking anything.

As i said I do think there are issues with commercial surrogacy, but I don't necessarily think that a woman having a bay for another woman, or for a couple, is always necessarily a bad thing to do. It depends on the circumstances.

You can’t produce a framework, legal or moral, that protects all three parties from accident, misadventure, ill fortune, development of animosity, breakdown of relationships or possible trauma.

What you propose - that there are some circumstances where it’s not necessarily a bad thing - can only be successful by sheer luck; the pregnancy gods shine good fortune, nothing bad happens, no one falls out, and the child doesn’t suffer trauma from the events of its birth at any stage of its life.

This is so very very true.

I keep thinking about the woman who nearly died in delivery, ended up paralysed I believe, giving birth to her sister's child. The result was that the woman's own child/ren ended up effectively without their mother in their daily lives, all because a couple exploited a female's body to add to their family.

Dressing up the language around such an arrangement, highlighting relationships, does not negate the fact that this arrangement has the potential to cause a woman to die to deliver a child for another person's benefit. And as neighbourhood points out, the child is never considered at all. Because how can it be, it was created specifically for this purpose and consent in these cases cannot be retrospective. Whatever gloss gets put on this transaction, it is a transaction involving a human as the outcome.

Nobody having a child.. even a child that is naturally their own in every way.....can be be protected from everything. Children are abandoned, abused and even killed by their birth parents; women are abandoned by men during their pregnancy; many children do not have the name of a father on their birth certificate. There are many people who were adopted as babies ( especially in the years up to the 1970's) who have no idea about their birth families, or when they find out it brings them no closure at all, and so on.

I find it fascinating that it’s illegal to remove puppies from their mothers until 8 weeks old…

There’s a chasm between misfortune occurring accidentally and by design.

The misfortune is being ‘designed in’ to this innocent child’s life. The exploitation of the mother’s body is designed in.

If people set out to abuse, abandon, kill their own children, the ideal is that social services get wind of this and remove the child for its own sake. So it should be if people set about to bring misfortune upon a child by entering into this wicked bargain. The child should be removed and go through normal adoption channels.

I'm most relieved to hear it. Perhaps in future you might avoid implying that trafficking and modern slavery are exclusively international issues? The charity Unseen gives very good talks, and their speakers make sure to include local data. It's a live issue in 21st century Britain, and it happens all around us, because people don't recognise the signs as their preconceptions of what forced labour looks like get in the way.

Assuming for the moment that everyone in your friends' situation is truly happy, exactly what percentage of unhappy outcomes are you willing to turn a blind eye to, for that one family's happiness? How many people's health and wellbeing can be destroyed for theirs?

Incidentally, I am very well-acquainted with the results of a situation with amazing parallels, also involving alternative parents who lived in 80s squats. The eventual adoptive parents who brought my school-friend up gave the child an amazing upbringing. Nevertheless, in retrospect, I think the signs are there that they suffered consequences of disrupted attachment in infancy, and it's led on to lifelong mental health issues in their adult life. Will any of the parents and other adults involved admit the link? Never in a month of Sundays. They and their friends from the time are rather biased, aren't they?

Also, I must say, I am perplexed by your reply to NotBadConsidering. You are a regular user on this board, so why post a variant on "bad things happen, so why shouldn't we knowingly and deliberately create avoidable situations with increased risks x, y and z, if it will make some people happy?"

Have you not seen how we respond to trans activists posting, "women get raped any way, so we might as well let men access areas where women are undressed or vulnerable, as it will make the men happy"? Did you envisage a different result?

We used an egg donor (Spain). We were told that the donor was 28 and taking advantage of a service offered by the clinic. They freeze half the eggs for future use by the donor as an insurance against future fertility issues (e.g. having a family later in life due to career priorities).

I don't think it's as simple as saying young, poor donors are exploited.

“Assuming for the moment that everyone in your friends' situation is truly happy, exactly what percentage of unhappy outcomes are you willing to turn a blind eye to, for that one family's happiness? How many people's health and wellbeing can be destroyed for theirs?”

This.