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.

To me Pro-choice means a lot broader than only about termination or proceeding with pregnancy.
It is about what a woman can do with her own body.
Choosing to donate or sell eggs.
Choosing to get pregnant and give birth to somebody else’s embryo.
Etc.

Choice vs absence of choice… It’s pretty simple.

I think you are wrong.

Pro choice is the right to gestate the pregnancy to term or terminate it.

The other options- surrogacy, egg donation, etc, are making a choice about someone else’s quality of life - the child’s. It’s no longer the binary of ‘to live or not live’.

If you are seriously that extreme about what a woman can do with her own body, do you think a pregnant woman has the right to choose to take thalidomide, or have a cocaine habit, or purposely contract rubella, etc, too?

So this is about you and your difficult pregnancies then? Ok.

Not sure how origin of some else’s child has anything to do with your trauma.

Personally - I carried my babies during my pregnancies. Tiny ball; basketball; and eventually what felt like a whale. My pregnancies were difficult as well and i was bedridden for some time. I would have died without modern medicine - and had 2 emergency C-sections.
So - I won’t choose to be a surrogate myself.

But I believe in people having choices.
And I believe that other people may make different choices.

Yes. Different people make different choices.

Some people choose to abandon their children.
Some people choose to abuse their children.
Some people choose to buy their children.
Some people choose to sell their children.

These are all indeed choices.

People can and do make different choices, but as a society, we agree that there are some choices which people ‘may not make’.

So - a choice to ‘kill an embryo’ VS ‘give a life to embryo’ - seems perfectly OK to you.

But same exact choice ‘give a life to embryo’ - you equate to intentionally harming them? causing disabilities and disfigurement???

With that approach - if a baby is not raised by bio mother who gave birth/father - they are essentially permanently harmed?

Based on what data, i wonder…

You are moving the goalposts. Do you agree that a woman has the free choice to do whatever she wants with her body and reproductive capacity, irrespective of its impact upon any offspring, or not?

Take a little look at this website someone else mentioned upthread while you make your mind up

But there is no agreement ‘in the society’ about surrogacy. Some societies agree, some disagree with it.
Medical advances will not stop and how we view things will continue to evolve.

But my friends did NOT buy her child.

Neither are my friends who gave birth to donor egg kids.
They are mothers - like me and you.

Agree with Flakypoet. Pro choice is about the right to terminate a pregnancy. It will not impact in the same way as surrogate child birth. Abortion is usually done to prevent the life of a child who is not wanted - you cannot have a worse start in life than being unwanted.

Choosing to have a child relates to creating a life and a personality- creating a lifetime of experiences. Surrogacy is about the deliberate gratification of an adult need. It could be said that termination also gratifies an adult need but it can also be argued that it can be for compassionate reasons (towards mother and the unborn) to prevent unwanted misery.

Surrogacy is pretty new in historical terms, it has had a recent sudden spike in demand. Societies around the world are currently chewing it over and deciding whether it is acceptable or not.

Furthermore, a women who did not gestate her own baby from her own eggs is not a mother ‘like me’. They are using the word ‘mother’ differently from the way it is understood.

Whether money was passed through hands or not, it was a transaction. One that exploited at least one woman and a child in terms of resource utility.

There is no way to dress this up.

As I said - no one puts down women better than other women…….

Some mothers are more deserving of being called mothers than others…

All those who adopted your child - don’t hold your breath.
If you carried a donated embryo - looking at you too.
If your embryo was carried by someone else - no no no

Ah, so when I specify why pregnancy isn't "carrying", it's trauma, is it? Nah, you're just rude.

What other MNers have is knowledge, and the capacity to develop ethical frameworks more complex than "I don't want to find fault with my friends, so if they did it, it's all right".

You are expecting us to look more kindly on the farming of human babies for sale than I do on puppy farming. Human babies deserve more protection than dogs, not less.

"Choice" is not the only thing that matters. People used to be allowed to choose to sell themselves into indentured slavery to pay off debt. That's not a choice people should have. Nor should they have the choice to farm themselves like livestock so they can sell their own children for money.

Choosing to create a life is BY DEFINITION a gratification of adult need to procreate.
As my kids have reminded me over the years - we did not ask to be born.
And it is no different for any baby - none of them asked. Not my bio kids i carried/birthed. Not my friend’s embryo someone else carried/birthed.
Adults decided to have kids. Personalities were created.

The overblown attention to how the embryo came to life VS what life the baby/child went on to have is strange to me.

We are judging women (or gay couples) who procreate in a different ways from ourselves. And this is the part that I disagree with.

Kids can grow up with issues in regular bio/2parent families. Or not. Same can happen in alternative birth families; or parental setups.

Don’t try to use a guilt trip to shame me out of what the definition of a mother is in mammalian species.

Choosing to create a life is BY DEFINITION a gratification of adult need to procreate

Im going to disagree with you here. People ‘choose’ to gratify an adult need for sexual intimacy, procreation is the bi-product if you are heterosexual and don’t have fertility issues.

Procreation is not a level playing field.

I haven’t read the full thread, just the first page and a few other posts. Surrogacy horrifies me and I try to avoid the topic. My kids are adopted, they couldn’t stay with their birth mum because they weren’t safe. But they have to live with the consequences of that decision that had to be made and the trauma It created every single day. I have no idea why anyone would purposefully create that.

I used to support surrogacy. The so-called altruistic kind, where the parents and surrogate are known to each other. Viewed through the lens of the parents, they are receiving a much loved and wanted child from a woman who was willing to give them that. And I thought it was beautiful.

But surrogacy should not centre the parents or the surrogate. It should centre the baby. From the baby's perspective once born it is taken away from everything it knows and given to complete strangers. Its life starts with a major traumatic event.

Surrogacy, in the end, is a selfish act requiring a woman to go a pregnancy, which may be complicated or even lead to death, to create a life that is traumatised from the off.

"To me, pro-choice is pro-choice. If another adult chooses to sell their kidneys, or their cornea or any other body part, then it is their body to do as they please with. In many cases the money they can make from this is truly life-changing - meaning that both the buyer and the donor benefit. Win-win. Its a wonderful gift to give to someone and why shouldn't the people receiving it pay some money as a gesture of their appreciation. Besides I think we are patronising people in other countries by suggesting that just because they are poor they don't have the agency or judgement to decide whether or not they want to sell their organs. In many situations I imagine it is in fact the persons selling their organs with the power - not the people buying who after all are desperate for those organs. And under capitalism people sell their labour (produced by their bodies) all the time. Why not also their organs. Besides- people are going to do it anyway or go to other countries where it is legal so we might as well be pragmatic and legalise it in this country."

If organ trafficking makes people feel iffy, then why is surrogacy OK? Some things (the human body) should never be monetised and doing so is inherently exploitative (see also prostitution but that's another topic).

see also prostitution but that's another topic

I actually think it's relevant. It seems to me the type of feminism that calls prostitution empowering and "sex work is work" is the same type that celebrates surrogacy as a valid and feminist choice.

I am not trying to shame you.
I am pointing out that your views are offensive to many mothers and fathers raising children that are either not biologically theirs. Or were not born in the way you approve of.

I think there is a difference between celebrating surrogacy and saying that it has a place in society as it solves infertility/inability to maintain a pregnancy for a small group of women. And it helps gay couples too.

But yes - people who are more liberal in thought processes tend to believe in personal choices. And think there are very few absolute right/wrongs. And it applies to lots of areas - reproduction os just one of them. Sex work is another. But it goes beyond sex/gender, etc.
There is a great book about how people form opinions on moral issues by a moral psychologist Jonathan Haight ‘The Righteous Mind’…. A great read, btw.

Who are you not trying to shame? My kids are not biologically mine. I have absolutely no shame attached to that. We talk positively about birth parents almost every single day. I am proud that my kids are still standing after what they have been through, being separated from birth mum was catastrophic. There is an amazing book called The Primal Wound, which details this. I love them so much that I wish I could take away their trauma….I wish birth mum had been able to raise them…even if that meant I wasn’t able to be their mum.

The baby most likely came from California. And if so the surrogate mother would have been paid well at least. We know a few people who have had babies via the Californian surrogacy route and it's worked out well for all involved. All the children were the biological children of their parents though.

But babies aren’t aware of their biology, all their instincts tell them when they are born is that the woman who birthed them will protect, feed and nurture them. When that doesn’t happen (either through neglect or through other reasons) their neural pathways in the brain develop differently. This is why adoptive kids often have quite deep seated issues, particularly around attachment. Apologies, it’s complicated and I’m way oversimplifying.