Normalising buying babies

[HarrietSpying]

I’ve been randomly following a bloke on Instagram with a wife who’s into tablescaping 🙄 No idea how or why I started following him, possibly due to his foodie posts. Anyway recent posts revealed a new baby, with mention of the ‘person’ who gave birth. His wife’s page reveals her ‘greed’ at wanting another baby - with other photos showing three other children - so they resorted to, what is in my mind, buying a baby. Obviously the birth of a baby is lovely news but is it so normal now to procure one from a ‘surrogate’ (awful term) that nobody really bats an eyelid. Just find it so depressing. Also very aware that there may be some jealousy on my part. Cancer meant I could only ever have one baby and I’d have loved a big family. But surrogacy never ever an option for me for ethical reasons.

It's deeply disturbing. I have a friend who bought babies from a surrogate and while I do indeed judge her for this, I also think she's a good mom. But her being a good mom doesn't at all mitigate the wrongness of it. I also have some sympathy because she did it to give her husband bio children when I know she would have been happy with foster or adoption situations. Men can exert pressure on getting a surrogate as much as women. I think they behaved unethically.

Sadly, now her DD is a teen and struggling a lot with her sense of identity. I often wonder if it's partly due to surrogacy and having an egg donor. Friend's DD is extremely different (not just looks, but temperament, personality, interests, reactions, emotional interpretations) than my friend and I feel both have always struggled connecting. Of course, this can be the case with bio moms/daughters and adoptive. But this girl has no access or knowledge of her donor bio mother as it was done in the States where there are no laws guaranteeing right to data. And the family doesn't seem to be in contact with surrogate mother either. I think it's a cluster TBH because you can't turn back time but kids will still go through the repercussions of their legal parents choice of surrogacy.

Is it ok for same sex couples to buy a baby in your mind?

I don’t think it’s right for any couple or individual to buy a baby. Because that’s what it is, regardless of how it’s dressed up.

Babies are people, and people can't be bought or sold, or given as gifts.

In the unfortunate case that the parents are unable to care for a child, or unwilling (for which they should usually be censured,) it's up to the state to find suitable care in the best interests of a child.

Surrogacy has nothing to do with that and is a form of human trafficking. Mnay people find that difficult to understand because it's been so normalized, but many societies have normalized bad things to the extent that they were seen as normal.

@TempestTost

Rich people have normalized....

I fully support gay or lesbian couples raising children. The vast majority of people who use surrogates and buy babies are straight, but I'm as opposed to gay men doing this as I am to straight couples. (can't imagine this comes up much w/ lesbian couples, but probably a few instances).

Is this some kind of trick " aha you're a homophobe !" question?

It's wrong for anyone to buy a baby, whoever they are. Adoption is ok (not ideal) cos the baby is out already and needs taking care of.

I want to hear more stories from the babies after they're grown up. I know adopted kids often struggle, is it the same for surrogate kids?

Surrogacy has its place, when it’s properly regulated and all parties are protected and have agency.
We can of course judge the celebrities for lazyness, etc. But they do what they do.

My single childless friend who had a baby via surrogate was down to her last own frozen embryo. Her own body was not capable of maintaining a pregnancy. Her surrogate lived in a neighbouring state and had a right to chose for herself. She was not exploited in any way.

My friend was not rich and lazy - she scraped and saved and had another woman help her carry her baby to term.

This is not baby trafficking or selling babies.

Surrogacy has its place, when it’s properly regulated and all parties are protected and have agency.

But this isn’t possible. At least one of the parties has to sacrifice agency. It is not possible to properly regulate and not possible to ensure all parties are protected.

Too many unethical practices have become normalised because "it saved the mental health of someone close to me and they are alright jack" .

Her surrogate lived in a neighbouring state

In the USA, isn’t it a federal crime to traffick minors across state borders?

Your sanitising language. A birth mother of a baby hasn’t just ‘carried’ that baby. She gestated that baby and the baby grew inside her. She is the baby’s mother.

The removal of ‘mother’ from ‘surrogate mother’ does a lot of heavy lifting in the baby consumer culture model.

That nonsense means you can say something like this woman ‘had a baby via a surrogate’. No. This woman entered into an agreement with another woman to become a mother and sell her baby.

Do you not see that your “all parties are protected and have agency” is a nonsense, because the one person, whose existence and destiny is being bargained over, has no say, no agency at all. The baby.

Lots of women get to the last chance saloon stage of potential motherhood and end up not having children. I personally know a fair number.
People don’t have a ‘right to parenthood by whatever means necessary’. All the sickening sanitising language around surrogacy and the galling sense of entitlement that’s been normalised, doesn’t change that.

In the situation where two adults entered into a legal contract specifying all terms and conditions - and both sides did it of free will - of course both had agency.

Why do people feel like they have to judge a decision of another woman who willingly chose to carry someone else’s embryo. What right do you all have to such judgement without knowing anything about the process involved and her thoughts?

In her particular situation - she already had two kids, solid marriage and comfortable financially. Was a SAHM. She registered with an agency because she wanted to be a surrogate.
Long selection process. She wanted to make sure she helped someone who will he a good mother.
Everything was done completely legally and there was no trafficking of minors. 🤷🏻‍♀️

And yes - she gets updates as the child is growing up. But she is not the child’s mother.

I (randomly) know someone whose wife is a surrogate and find it very disturbing to talk to him about it. She loves being pregnant apparently. But it doesn't seem that fair on the rest of the family (one of her pregnancies was high risk) and certainly not on the children that are born. I am assuming there is a heavy financial motivation too (don't know him well enough to ask).

I too think it should be banned. Being a parent is not a right and it's psychologically damaging to the baby.

she is not the child’s mother.

What part of gestating and giving birth to a child makes a woman ‘not its mother’ @jsku?

You seem to be using different meanings for words than those that are currently accepted as their definition.

What right does anyone in society have to exploit the body of another person to get what they want when that transaction involves the outcome of that transaction being another human that has been created using components of that person that takes at least 9 months and puts the person's life at such risk?

What right does anyone in society have to create a child to be gestated outside their own body just to fulfil a demand that they have?

All surrogacy is transaction by nature. It exploits at least one female person's body. What is the sticking point however, is that it exploits a child who cannot consent at all.

It's looking like they may, as would be expected.

These days, parents adopting newborns via social services are home-checked and are given training about attachment and child development, because lessons have been learned. Commissioning parents don't go through that process.

I was born via surrogate... but this cruel practice should be banned

Not really. We all know that being a mother is not only about giving birth.
People who were raised by mothers who didn’t give birth to them can explain it better.

But OK - if we need to have a technical definition - she is a surrogate mother. She carried the foetus to birth.
My friend is the biological mother - her body created the embryo. She is also the Mother - who has taken care of the child for about 10years now - since the moment they were born.

Families and mothers come in many shapes and forms.

She didn't carry the baby. Pregnancy isn't just strapping a rucksack to your chest.

Her body grew that baby from blastocyst (IIRC) on.

No one should be buying another human being,regardless of their sex.

Indeed. And the use of ‘biological mother’ to mean ‘gamete provider’ is up for debate. A man’s role in biological fatherhood is simply to be the gamete provider. However the mother/baby biological relationship and connection goes a lot deeper and more entwined than that. The biological mother both provides a gamete and gestates the baby to term. The recent unnatural interference into the biological mother’s role, separating it out into two different people doesn’t change it.

Calling the female gamete provider the ‘biological mother’ is a degradation of the importance of women and mothers in reproduction in mammals. Fathers do not play an equal biological role as mothers in reproduction.

Well for one thing there are two different things at play here:

1. Gestating an embryo that's not yours. So the baby is still raised by at least one of its biological parents though gestated and birthed by the surrogate.

2. Gestating your own biological baby and then giving it away/selling it.

It sounds like your friend was in the first category. So she is the mother in the biological sense, yes?

I have more time for that (under very limited circumstances) than I do for the one where the baby is just sold. You can't use adoptive children as a 'gotcha' because almost all adopted children have a deep need and desire to find or connect with their birth parents in some way. Whatever they may feel about their adoptive parents (and many do love them and feel they are very much their 'real' parents, and I'm glad), your biological parents are still tremendously important.

I kind of hope that we are only a few years away from the first wave of surrogate/sold babies speaking out.

That's not fully true.
There are plenty of animals where the parents play an equal role. Some where the fathers do more, some where the mothers do more, some where both really do very little.

Other animals aren't relevant to human parenting, in the same way clown fish aren't relevant to human sex.

There is no need to overstate the role of "mother" to make your point.

Not only did that surrogate mother's body build that child, but because that child was related to the surrogate mother, that pregnancy was considered a much higher risk than a normal pregnancy.

I have to wonder just how much those women who offer to do this understand the increase risk, or whether they are so intent on doing this for whatever the reason, that they ignore the risk. I remember a thread we had where a surrogate mother posted and she had no idea about the risk. And confess she would not have listened to advice anyway. That pregnancy was fulfilling a need that she, personally, had. One reason, if I remember correctly, was to please her friend.

I question that 'agency' whenever I see it being used with regard to surrogacy. Because exactly how robustly is that 'agency' assessed? I suspect that it is very little. And that 'agency' is not as freely given as many people like to present it.