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.

The baby doesn't know that these people are related to them biologically or are close to them, all they know at birth is that birth mum will protect, nurture and feed them because baby knows birth mum's smell, voice, body. When this doesn't happen and someone else looks after them, trauma is created - their brains develop different neurological pathways to what they would have done normally, and the babies create survival strategies that they shouldn't need to. The trauma that this separation from birth mum creates has been discussed in many research articles, and brain scans show the difference, no matter how well meaning the intended family are, this trauma cannot be underestimated.

The baby will never going looking for their family because they're in their family

There’s a child in my daughter’s grade at school who has two dads and was born via a surrogate in India. She tells everyone that when she’s old enough she’s going to go to India to meet her mum 😥.

Why do you assume that taking a biological child from birth mother - against her will is comparable to surrogacy?
That mother has gone pregnancy knowing that the child will be ripped away from her - with all the associated stress associated with it.
That pregnancy is and child development under increased stress is completely different from surrogacy.

Surrogate and the biological mother of the future baby build a connection. The biological mother of the embryo is involved in pregnancy, similar in a way to how a father is involved. The biological mother is not a stranger to the baby when they are born. And she is genetically related.

And surrogate is not under stress of losing their own biological baby.

So a surrogate birth is very different than the forced adoption scenario you described.
And there is no reason to assume you can extrapolate from one to another.

OP I follow that woman as well - the ‘tablescaper!’ - I think she’s a friend of a friend of a friend - and I had a similar reaction to you.

The endless fawning and ‘you’re so brave’ comments from her friends and followers felt so tone deaf to me. Another woman is literally recovering from giving birth and giving away her baby and it’s this other woman who is the brave one??

I feel there’s a slightly odd dynamic with that family though. The young photogenic kids seem to be featured on her page frequently but when they’re no longer little and cute they are sent off to boarding school and are shown a lot less.

I think @MMmomDD you believe what people imagine they’ll feel is truly what they do feel.

Birth, death, separation, etc. We imagine we’ll feel a certain way in the future and be completely wrong when reality hits, we can even imagine ourselves to feel a certain way in the here and now, when actually , the primal, animal part of ourselves is feeling exactly what the primal, animal part of ourselves should feel, unregistered in our consciousness. It’s why people sometimes burst into uncontrollable sobs and don’t know why. They thought they weren’t actually upset.

A woman who agrees to gestate a child, going through all the natural hormonal processes, getting the nesting instinct, etc. She might be telling herself “don’t start getting emotional and attached, you aren’t keeping this baby” but her body and instincts will be telling her a different story, no matter how much she tries to tune it out.

Human beings are not machines. We have instincts and emotions for very good reasons of survival and going against them isn’t good for us.

How would a new-born infant know that their genetic parents are their genetic parents?
They have just come from the womb of their birth mother.
Putting aside my argument about the primeval bond that exists between (birth) mother and child and just addressing your argument about genetics/DNA:

Genetic material passes both ways from birth mother (I'm only using this term to be clear in the language) to foetus/un-born child throughout the pregnancy.

I had no idea about this, never thought about it to be honest, until I heard Elizabeth Day discussing it in in a podcast in context of her own infertility and exploring her options. I think she decided not to use a donor egg partly (or maybe fully) because of her 'ick' (I'm paraphrasing) that another woman's DNA would be absorbed by her body if she used a donor egg.

"As early as the second week of pregnancy, there is a two-way flow of cells and DNA between the foetus and the mother. Cells containing DNA from the foetus cross the placenta and enter the mother's blood circulation, while cells from the mother cross in the opposite direction and transfer into foetal circulation."

"The (birth)mum’s cells also stay in the baby’s blood and tissues for decades, including in organs like the pancreas, heart, and skin. In one study, more than half of adults still had maternal cells in their blood. In some cases, even cells from maternal grandmothers – acquired during a mother’s own gestation – can be transferred to the foetus."

"Regardless of the reasons behind it, what is certain is that mothers and their children carry a piece of each other for many years following pregnancy and birth"

https://arielmedicine.com/mothers-day-genetics-how-long-does-a-mother-carry-a-child/

You do know some surrogate mothers are living on entirely different continents than the commissioning parents for the entire pregnancy/birth?
Yes that's the extreme, but I bet it's not many that all live together in the same house, eating the same foods, sleeping in the same bed for 9 months?

Physically, it's the birth mother's body that creates the baby. The DNA and original cell or few cells may come from elsewhere, but the physical material of the body is from the gestating mother, and everything that is influenced developmentally is regulated by her body and hormones.

These infants truly have two mothers.

You’re not describing an extreme scenario; the vast majority of world wide surrogacy is intercontinental.

Oof.

On a related note, if I was in midwifery or nursing, I'd be furious at these people who make the job look like one big musical lark.

@NotBadConsidering I suspected so, but hopefully not for parents from the UK? I assumed that we had laws against that, even if the law is actually primarily to prevent migration

Weirdly enough, people in the UK can return with a baby they didn’t leave with and there seems to be no issue of citizenship or child-trafficking confronting them at passport control. Lots of celebrities do. Buying babies in India used to be popular (cheap) then Ukraine, the USA seems to be preferred for those who can afford it.

I'm very intrigued by how keen people are to push choice for women when it benefits men.
Eg sex work is an empowering choice - which men benefit from
Surrogacy too now is empowering.... for wealthy men or gay men to get children....

I just can't comprehend the idea of getting someone to take such a massive risk so you can have a baby with no inconvenience. Pregnancy can kill, it can leave you with life changing injuries and pregnancy that involves someone else's egg is even higher risk. Some people on this thread have made out like the surrogate mother isn't even involved because its not her genetic egg... how does that work if there's a disagreement and she's perceived as having something belonging to someone else inside her? There's too much potential for disaster and exploitation, that's why most civilised countries ban it.

I get that it means there's no easy way to conceive for some couples- isn't that life? That heartbreaking, unfair things happen that can't be easily fixed? If it was really a choice, wouldn't we see a fair balance of wealthy women being surrogates too?

I just think it’s really sad. And I am 😳 at all the uncritical responses to the handmaid’s tale tablescaper on her Instagram. She makes it look so easy and so palatable.

I find it so wrong. In adoption the primal trauma of separating a child from his or her mother is well known and in the UK adopted children have support in knowing about their birth mother (eg letterbox, information about her in.life story books).

Surrogacy? Nada zip zilch the dyad is just ignored and never referred to.

I get that it means there's no easy way to conceive for some couples- isn't that life?

The thing is, if people believe there is a political obligation to create equity, then it's not just life. The state, in order to be just, to fix or compensate people for problems like infertility or even (especially) being unable to conceive due to being in a same-sex relationship.

It's very tied in with the politics of equity.

So, following that logic, if no women volunteer, the state would be required to demand women give their bodies in fulfillment of that right.

Like the draft. Instead of going to war, you go to IVF clinics.

I, too, have found that the positioning of surrogacy as a means for some people to obtain ‘fertility equity’ ie. to have a family on demand and tailored to their demand, to be a concern.

Fertility Equality gets thrown around falsely in my opinion. Fertility equality would be more aligned with giving each person the ability to use their own reproductive organs to produce healthy gametes to contribute to a family. I don’t believe it should be to give one human the use of another human’s body to gestate that family in a surrogacy arrangement. Use of a surrogacy arrangement is ‘equity’ to me, yet it is label equality by some people.

And considering the potential price of making that accommodation to achieve ‘equity’ is so high, it has to be said that sometimes an equitable solution is not possible.

Yes. Reality is harsh.

Some people are more fortunate than others.

We can intervene politically to make things as fair as possible, but there’s no getting away from it.

The entitlement and bloody-minded certainty that every one has a ‘right’ to equal fortune (on the left) or the ‘right’ to choose to buy/sell whatever we want (on the right) is getting us into dystopian territory.

It is definitely buying babies and doesn’t and can’t compare with adoption at all.
As the least worst option, adoption is all about the child, not the adopters.
Surrogacy is the complete opposite
As a side note, is that the commissioning mother in the DM link? Why is she in a hospital bed? With ID bracelet?

I remember when it used to be a fairly regular occurrence that women would snatch babies from maternity wards, then would come forward and hand herself in a few days later when she came to her senses.

People always viewed these women sympathetically, as driven mad by her own frustrated maternal instincts. I can get the mind set. It seems so harsh and unfair that all these people around you are having babies, they look like they don’t fully appreciate it, and they seem like crap parents to boot. Someone like that could get into the state of mind where they think they’d be a much better, more deserving parent. It would seem so ‘unjust’ and ‘unfair’. In the same way as it feels when a loved one is diagnosed with a terminal illness.

This feeling that health, relationships, families, etc, should be meted out fairly, is an instinctive one that makes no sense in reality. It’s why I always found that lyric “If there’s any justice in the world, I would be with you, you would be my girl” uncomfortable and irritating.

The problem is when that ‘feeling’ of there being some entitlement to everyone getting their ‘fair share’ of human health and relationships is given free reign and legal backing, you get all sorts of horrors. You see it in prostitution, men having the feeling that it’s only fair that they should be just as able to have sex with a sixteen year old girl as the boy she actually fancies.

Reality is harsh. Not everyone is equally fancied, not everyone has equal health, not everyone is equally fertile, not all sexual orientations can create a family together.

I know that we have the NHS to make equal health for everyone a worthy goal, adaptations so that people can have an equal quality of life regardless of disability, but it only works up to a point.

We shouldn’t allow this sense or ‘equal health/equal relationship’ go as far as sacrificing one for the other, because there really are no limits to people’s self interest when they want something. I wonder what the person who commissioned the sacrifice of the boy trafficked from Nigeria “in the red shorts” had going on that they would engage in such an evil and illegal ritual. Had they or a loved one got a terminal illness? Were they infertile? What did they want so badly that they’d do such a terrible thing, believing it would help?

There needs to be a big pause on this sense of equal entitlement to a parent-child relationship. People are being treated like objects.

Sorry I misremembered. The boy wore orange shorts.

Adam. Rest his soul.

I suspect the tablescaper and her posho husband have been doing quite a lot of blocking on Instagram. The truth can be hard to face I suppose.