Janice Turner on Surrogacy

[Igneococcus]

I can't see Janice Turner's comment about surrogacy in yesterday's Times shared anywhere. Sharetokens don't work for me at the moment and I can't get archive to work either. I hope someone else can. It's a very depressing read.

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/why-allow-mother-of-all-abuse-8kz9sk572

Bump. Would love to read a share if someone could help. Thanks.

Nobody's archived it. Sorry, I thought they had. Would be very grateful for a share token.

I'll keep trying the sharetoken in case whatever the problem is sorts itself out.

Thank you @Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

Here you go, great article.

It’s time to curb the mother of all abuse

www.thetimes.com/article/49c8f8bb-bcd8-452b-a7cd-937996368d8f?shareToken=ed50bc55c03741b83eecfe4383a661c2

Thank you. She is right.

Archive
https://archive.ph/XhwDl

Thank you. I’ve never seen it written so clearly. Surrogacy is human trafficking.

Well said 👏🏻

It’s a good article. I can be sympathetic to be altruistic surrogacy between family and friends but anything else is gruesome. No one who cares about the mother would want to buy the service. The very role of organised crime is evidence of its unequal power dynamics. We will never see many wealthy women offering this to random strangers.

I had an unwanted pregnancy - in Ireland and as a Catholic so I decided to treat it as surrogacy. It wasn’t my baby, deserved a better start, met the excited parents to be and they got the baby at the end. My understanding of the situation has changed over the years hut one constant is my incredulity at their willingness to exploit me. To be happy to meet me, take my photos, my baby and to never once offer support instead. Obviously I understand their need for a child, that they have been good parents and that adoptive parents are both fabulous and are meeting their own needs but I could never, in their case, remove my judgement of them for looking at a capable but young and poor woman/girl and not wanting to support rather than to take. They were not the only ones which represents the devaluing of women and motherhood.

Janice Turner is excellent and this article is spot on.

All surrogacy is exploiting at least one woman’s body and an infant, whether it is altruistic or not. It is always a transaction where the end product is an infant produced to fulfill the supply to the demand of another person.

Brilliant article.
She is right this needs to be banned
No surrogacy in any circumstance, no anonymous egg or sperm donation.
It’s just not in the best interests of the child.

So glad The Times published this, Bit surprised, because they’ve had quite a few ‘good news’ stories about people who’ve had children via commercial surrogacy and always switch off the comments.

Thank you for the share, such an important article. Well done Janice Turner 👏. This is something we can all support.

I used to be on the fence about altruistic surrogacy, but seeing how many things can go wrong I think all surrogacy is wrong.

Yes, and this is also the opinion of the European Parliament.

Absolutely abhorrent practice.

Nobody's archived it because The Times has changed something in how it writes URLs for articles that when you archive it, it just catches the headline and the button to "continue reading" by signing in. So impossible to read without a share token or subscription.

I completely agree with the basic point in this article: surrogacy should be banned.

However, I notice that she concentrates on gay men buying babies through surrogacy. I don't know what she basis that emphasis on - are there stats that show that gay men are over-represented in those seeking to buy babies?

I find it odd, because here in Ireland, surrogacy is almost entirely presented as a solution for heterosexual couples who have fertility issues and can't have their own babies.
This is often presented in highly emotive terms such as the basic, primeval need for the woman to have a baby 'If you've never experienced childlessness and infertility, you don't know how awful it is' and by extension, you have no right to question the couples 'right' to be a 'real family' via surrogacy.

It's all about 'mom and apple pie' and 'the ideal family' of 'Mammy Daddy and Baby/babies', and the undeniable urge of motherhood, and the 'cruelty' of denying infertile women and men the right to having babies.

Basically, it's all equally wrong, whoever is doing it, but I find the emphasis on gay men questionable - I'd like to see the stats that support their prominence in these otherwise very valid critiques of surrogacy.

thank you for sharing

it's puzzling that it needs to be said, but as a rule of thumb, if you are buying a person (even a really small one), you're in the wrong

I recall reading about the dominance of gay male legal bods in the Law Commission review of surrogacy a few years ago? I'm sure there were concerns expressed by women's groups that this dominance resulted in issues about safeguarding children and the rights of the mother being deprioritised?

Excellent article. As she said , the traffic and exploitation of both women and children is about first world rich entitlement, it’s not about motherhood, or even fatherhood, and it is most certainly not about the rights of children.

I think anyone can be sympathetic to women who have been told for whatever reason that they can’t bear children. I think far fewer of us are prepared to be hugely sympathetic towards people whose lifestyle automatically precludes naturally conceived parenthood. But I find it impossible to sympathise with anyone who thinks that their right to have a child trumps the rights of a woman not to be exploited and the right of a child not to be sold on the open market, no matter how it is couched in terms of the financial opportunities offered to both.

She mentions gay men in the context of the fact that it is two gay men who have been the ones campaigning to have the law changed. There is a lot she could have said about the specific issues of gay men using surrogacy which she didn't mention tbh.

For example, agencies have been set up specifically to target gay men, who are basically told that they are entitled to a baby, that they have a treatable infertility problem with surrogacy being the answer. These men have no need to ever speak to a woman - just use their economic power to bypass women altogether. This is not how ivf or surrogacy was sold to us back in the day. It is Handmaid's Tale stuff, where women are reduced to a biological function then discarded. Itvis bad enough when a woman does it, but men.... Motherless babies used to be regarded as a sorrow, a catastrophe. Now we are setting out to deliberately create them. Except there is a mother - probably two, as there is an egg donor and a gestational carrier. The child gets no say in not having a relationship with these women. And men always have to use egg donors whereas women often use their own eggs. These men choose eggs from super models, athletes etc. It is eugenics. And often gay couples have two surrogates on the go at once, each carrying one man's baby, so they end up with two biologically unrelated babies (see Adam Kay for how hard he found that).

Critics will talk about the woman's right to be a surrogate and "earn" money, but I think we've all forgotten how dangerous pregnancy and birth are. Because we have access to good hospitals and antenatal care most of us are lucky enough to not know anyone who has died in childbirth, but it remains the most dangerous thing that a woman can do.

For that reason alone surrogacy should be banned, let alone the right of the child not to be taken away from its mother.

and given that the death of a woman in childbirth drove adam kay to end his career in medicine it's simply astonishing that he's all good with surrogacy