Another potential celebrity baby purchase 🙄.

[AnAlpacaForChristmasPleaseSanta]

Today I've been hanging around waiting for an appointment with a dwindling phone battery and the only reading materials on offer being last weekends newspapers. I was having a flick through the Mail on Sunday 😳 and saw this story by someone called Louise Thompson, who casually mentions that she and her partner would like to have another child "but would have to use a surrogate'.

I have to admit I'd never heard of her but a bit of nosy googling revealed that she's from Made in Chelsea and during the birth of her first child she suffered a major hemorrhage and months of PTSD afterwards. Something she seemingly has no qualms about potentially putting another woman through. I just despair.

The link to the article is behind a paywall but hopefully this will work.

This makes me think of all the current uproar (and rightly so) about that US woman who was in Australia who took a baby wombat from its mother. There was absolute outrage that someone could do such an awful thing and not even consider how traumatic it would be to the baby.

But take a human baby away from its mother and that’s absolutely fine.

Where did I mention you?

I love that analogy, very true

The previous poster asked me a question and you answered it on my behalf

You used the words
I don’t think the rhetoric and analogies with rape, etc. are helpful.

While it may not have been your aim the word "rhetoric" has more negitive connotation than positive.

@nothingcomestonothing outlined instances where adults can have no memory of an event and asked why children are not offered the level of thoughtfullness when it comes to the memory which may be stored but not accessable while conscious.

No, I was talking about the pro surrogacy posters as a whole. And I'll reply to whichever posts I wish on an open forum

Yet another entitled "celebrity". Doesn't want to risk another traumatic birth, but more than happy to potentially put another woman through it. Disgusting.

You are not wrong @Ihateboris (great name btw!).

I don’t know what it is you’re trying to achieve on this thread.

I’m not pro-surrogacy and I’m interested in understanding better the outcomes involved in surrogacy.

You have been extremely hostile and spoken to/about me in a disparaging way.

I am not a ‘pro-surrogacy poster’, so when you say I ‘probably’ have X view, you are just talking about me.

And more broadly, what is the point in just assuming you know what someone else thinks rather than actually finding out.

I don't feel that surrogacy can ever be positive. It's exploitation of the mother and baby and is only done to satisfy the egos of the buyers

@kungfoofighting Yes, exactly. I have my thoughts, and I'll keep them to myself.

I loathe being pregnant, so doing it for someone else seems baffling to me. I'd also rather saw off my own leg than be a SAHM, but I don't say anything about that to her either.

@kungfoofighting I am not a ‘pro-surrogacy poster’, so when you say I ‘probably’ have X view, you are just talking about me.

If you don't have 'pro surrogacy views then you can rest assured I am not talking about you.

A full answer to the post about why adults not being able to remember traumatic events isn't ok but the same not applying to babies would have been nice rather than a dismissal about it being "unhelpful" but I guess we can't always get what we want in life.

Oh and to all the posters scratching their heads over what I'm trying to achieve from this thread, I'd like to understand why a woman who has first hand experience of how dangerous giving birth can be, who nearly lost her life giving doing so and then suffered extensive PTSD afterwards can feel it's acceptable to potentially expose another woman to the same fate because she wants another child.

Imagine how it would blow the family apart if that happened in an altruistic surrogacy case. Does the couple whose desire for a child killed their sister/sister in law get the baby? Does the widower keep his wife's last child? Can the grandparents forgive one daughter for the loss of the other?

Imagine being the child growing up in the emotional aftermath of that.

That's definitely not an argument for banning commercial but keeping altruistic surrogacy.

Immediately following the birth of my daughter, I said I’d love to have a baby for someone so that they could experience the immediate and intense love I felt for her.
I’d have done it for free.

Of course I never followed through with it, and I wouldn’t even consider it now.
But it was how I felt at the time.

🤣 so you don't have an answer then.

Yes please do stop engaging, most of your recent contribution has been a series of personal attacks on me which is frankly tiring.

I would be interested in any response you might have to the excellent posts made by @nothingcomestonothing and @NoBinturongsHereMate but I won't hold my breath.

I can quite believe it's how you felt at the time. But you were high on birth hormones, which aren't the best aid to rational thought. And if you did do it for someone else, they wouldn't have that same hormone rush - so they wouldn't have the same experience.

.

Surrogacy isn’t analogous to date rape; it’s not a helpful or relevant comparison.

It isn’t going to bring anyone round to your way of thinking.

You would be much better off talking about actual facts around surrogacy, such as research showing how children born with surrogates are impacted.

The tone you use also undermines your position rather than strengthens it. It doesn’t make you sound very credible, it alienates people who might have been open to listening, and it trivialises the thread.

Oh gosh it's donkeys years since I had that to hand as my children have been home many years now. Nancy Verrier was required reading in my day, though lots of adopters find her hard as it's very 'all adoption causes irreparable damage' which is daunting to read when you're adopting.

There's loads of research on non adopted children too, all the stuff about the 4th trimester, the need to not take babies away to a hospital nursery at birth (as used to be the norm), how babies breathing regulates when they can hear the mothers heartbeat, the effects of unavoidable separation eg if mother or baby need medical care.

And it's all pretty common sense really, and it's interesting that as a society we know this stuff is important, right up until it is inconvenient to some adults to know it. As is often pointed out on surrogacy discussions, you can't take a puppy or kitten from it's mother at birth, we acknowledge that that's cruel and harmful - but humans are animals too.

One of the arguments made for surrogacy is that it's fine because the baby wont remember being removed. That's where the date rape analogy comes in - we don't think it's ok to do things to adults on the grounds that they won't remember it so why is it ok for babies?

My son (adopted) is very clearly affected by something that happened when he was 7 weeks old. He wasn't physically harmed in any way, and obviously has no memory of the incident. But the impact is obvious in his reaction to certain stimuli (not going to be any clearer than that because it's his private information, so you'll have to take my word for it or not).

Do we as a society think it's ok to do stuff to babies because we think they won't remember it? Maybe. At one time babies were given surgical procedures without anaesthetic on those grounds, but that doesn't happen now. Psychological harm is harder to quantify but surely we should try to avoid it, if we count babies as full humans.

I agree it’s definitely important what happens to babies, whether they remember it or not. I agree that not remembering something doesn’t mean it’s ok.

I just think date rape is not a useful analogy to use – rape is its own very specific conversation and overlaying it as an analogy here just undermines the argument as there are so many clear points of differentiation to what is actually being discussed.

@nothingcomestonothing Do we as a society think it's ok to do stuff to babies because we think they won't remember it?

I think a lot of people tell themselves this to take away any uneasy feelings that might creep in "oh it's fine, they won't remember".
And no, they won't remember but their whole system will have had a huge traumatic shock happen to it that no amount of being fed and warm will be able to make up for.

'Celebrity' is an overstatement here, but I've just read this article about a straight couple from Ireland [surrogacy here is mostly associated with straight couples with infertility issues] and their difficulties 'collecting' the baby they ordered from a Ukrainian woman in North Cyprus.

I was struck by this sentence:
“If we hadn’t succeeded in starting a family, it’s not that our lives would have been empty or a failure or anything like that.
“It was just a little gap in the background and now we’ve filled it.”

When the baby grows up and reads that they were purchased to fill a little gap - not even a big or deep one - I'm sure it'll do wonders for their self-esteem.

RTÉ's Darragh McCullough turned away from EU border while bringing home baby born via surrogacy