Yet another Times uncritical article about celebrity surrogacy

[Sittingontheporch]

I never know if the share links work:
https://www.thetimes.com/magazines/style-magazine/article/the-celebrity-hairdresser-going-down-the-surrogacy-route-alone-l7xlt8nbh

This is a really frustrating article because the comments are closed off and so there's no redress. I think the journalist at least tries to pose some of the arguments here:

Some people are highly critical of egg donation and surrogacy, saying women should not be “wombs for rent” and that no one has the “right” to a baby. Northwood shrugs. “This is modern families now. I’ve grown up with people’s opinions about me being wrong to date men. Keep your opinions to yourself.”

There are some real shockers. Generally there's nothing that isn't about him and his need to for a baby to fix his 'trauma' of having grown up gay - i'm not minimalising the difficulties of coming out but that's not a reason to buy a baby.

He says he 'feels like a pregnant woman' because he's having to make sacrifices like regular STD tests and giving up hair loss medication. Yup, that's absolutely analogous to being pregnant and giving birth.

I could only read the first paragraph,

In which country will he be purchasing an infant? The UK or overseas?

https://archive.ph/6EN5t

Hope the link works…

The UK because it's too expensive in the States.

A lot of the article (which hopefully can be read thanks to @Myalternate helpful link) is about how excited everyone is for him and how he's making a room for the baby and a room for the live-in nanny in his flat etc but not much about how it's really quite a longshot if he's going to try to do it here. He seems to be acting as if he's already actually pregnant himself (and he practically is, what with having to forego the hair loss meds).

Apart from everything else, if a single man wants to make a baby he doesn't NEED to find an egg donor AND another woman to carry the baby. That is a choice, to deliberately try to weaken the biological and legal connection to the mother. To deliberately try to create a motherless child.

And it helps the 'surrogate' mother disassociate from the reality of what she is doing - selling her baby.

His first step was making himself “fertility fit”, ensuring his sperm are top quality. “A lot of gay men think, ‘I’ll have no problems, I’m very active.’ But I had a test and they said I could make things a lot better.” Now, Northwood says, he feels “like a pregnant woman. I already don’t drink, but it’s a lifestyle of no saunas, no hot baths, a healthy diet, no STDs — which, for a single gay man, is a thing you’ve got to be careful about. And I’ve had to stop taking hair-loss medication because that affects things.”

Oh FFS!

Now, Northwood says, he feels “like a pregnant woman.

Really? Fuck that.

And fuck telling women to shut up about any person exploiting women's fertility to deliver them a child as a transaction. Those people who do so need to own their actions and understand that they have just transacted a human life, while exploiting at least one women's life to do so.

At least Hadley has called it out (and she's a columnist in the same paper): x.com/hadleyfreeman/status/1840471575474192543?s=46&t=gJtk-FNawQwi-NEuJixmEg

Reading that makes me feel quite tearful.

The article was utterly sickening. He’s a narcissistic character.

Poor kid

That’s one of the most fawning articles I’ve read in a long time. Bring a Dad is ‘non-negotiable’ as if that is how life works. But maybe it does if you have money and power. Which he has both.

Going it alone feels positive, “in that I don’t have to take anyone else’s feelings into consideration”.

Yep, says it all!

Including the infant’s right to have a mother.

Sounds like a dickhead.

But to some extent, I think it should be no surprise people think that way. We have been for years weakening the idea that our biological and physical relationship to parents is significant or real; telling ourselves that being a mother or father is about a name on a paper much more than it is about who contributed your DNA or knitted your flesh, that children don't need two parents, or fathers or mothers, and can adapt to any family situation, even pretty weird ones, and it's all just fine as long as they are loved.

You can't have all those ideas promoted and not expect a lot of people will believe them.

What I find weird is that the world of adoption has been moving away from those ideas for a long time. But it hasn't affected the general culture much it seems.

So many things in that article that I would like to challenge him on.

I was particularly struck by his saying that he so desperately wants a child that he is going to all these lengths to get one, even though he will be nearly 50 by the time he actually does get a baby, and yet he says he couldn't be at home with the baby all day.

Another thing he said which makes no sense at all is that nobody would want him now because he's got too much baggage, he then lists having a business as part of this baggage which means nobody wants him. What a stupid thing to say.

Another stupid thing he said is that he wants the child to look like him so that there aren't any awkward questions about it's origins. And yet here he is telling the world about his surrogacy plans in one of the biggest most famous newspapers in the world.

I think it's really horrible that he wants to bring this child into the world in order to have another childhood through it vicariously, because his childhood was not a very happy one. All of his reasons for wanting to bring this child into the world are so selfish, I just can't believe that everyone around him is cheering him on. By the time he's got it all sorted he'll be about 50 by the time his child is 10 he'll be 60 years old.

Also I would like to point out that there are not two women involved in this, there will be three, because he's going to employ a full-time nanny to be with the child all day, because he doesn't want to be with the child all day.

He can’t advertise, although organisations such as MSJ can act as a conduit. Despite the scarcity of donors, it has warned Northwood to choose carefully, ideally selecting one who physically resembles him, to minimise nosey questions about the child’s origins.

He can’t legally advertise for a woman who looks like him in the UK but yet he can pitch to the Tines to give him a glowing interview telling women exactly where to find a surrogacy business if they want to go on the books.. How is this not advertising for himself or for MSJ, with the allusions to his personal wealth and celebrity connections to incentivise.

Note absolutely zero interest mentioned in exploring co-parenting with a lesbian couple, for example. Not for him, because he says he has ‘boundaries’ and ’doesn’t mix business with pleasure’ (so; the baby-taking arrangement is ‘business’?) Surrogacy is not the only way he can have kids.

The turnover of Nannies, the attachment figures for rich kids whose parents aren’t going to be around much, is extremely traumatic for children. Five minutes on MN would show how temporary even the best laid live-in childcare plans can work out.

I've no doubt that he didn't intend to sound like such a wanker. I always wonder what goes through people's heads when they agree to interviews now. Newspapers aren't there for the interviewees' benefit, they're clawing for market share in a dying industry.

'Mexico, which is cheaper' for example - holy colonialism, Batman. But those are the journalists' words, not his. A paraphrase or an insert of their own?

I guess he'll be no worse or better a parent than anyone else. I just feel sick at the renting and exclusion of women.

Of course, he's all about 'boundaries' - but only the ones that he considers important for HIM. So shove off, irritating women with other, unimportant, ideas about boundaries.

I do think it should be illegal for single men to get a baby through surrogacy, whether in this country or importing from abroad. It just rings too many alarm bells for me. And to intentionally deprive a baby of its mother should be against the Hunan Rights Act.

What a selfish prick!

His entitled attitude explains why neither his sister nor any of his supposedly wildly supportive female clients are willing to gestate a baby for him.

You can’t heal your own childhood trauma by buying a baby and paying a nanny to raise it.

I think that surrogacy uses two different women not to break the maternal bond (though this is convenient by-product) but because the characteristics wanted in an egg donor and a surrogate are so wildly different.

Egg donor - tall, Harvard educated, athletic, blue-eyed etc. It's really stark and eugenics-like when it becomes a choice. I remember one of that awful couple with all the surrogate children (Drewett Barlows) saying that his first daughter hadn't been very tall and slim so he wanted a model for his next egg donor.

Surrogate mother - sturdy, poor, compliant, willing to take orders about what to eat and drink, how to give birth.

Thanks for the link to Hadley's tweet. Great to read the comments that would have been at the bottom of the article had they been allowed.

Thank you- I posted about this yesterday too: www.mumsnet.com/talk/feminism/5176218-article-on-surrogacy-in-sunday-times-style-supplement?reply=138659003

Oh gosh sorry @DiamondGoldandSilver I looked to see if anyone else had posted it and clearly didn't look hard enough! Doh.

Still, we're all very much on the same page.

I don't know whether the Times has a particular agenda in all these largely uncritical pieces. I think there are at least two staff members who have had used surrogates - one wrote a book or something about things we can learn about parenting from gay couples. Or maybe Murdoch has bought up a surrogacy agency or something.

I'm not criticising the journalist here, btw, as I think she did at least say, look, this isn't uncontroversial.