Privilege
Sometimes…
Huge increase in UK same-sex couples seeking IVF and surrogates https://t.co/S7p16EdCMx
— Peter Tatchell (@PeterTatchell) May 10, 2019
That is, huge increase in gay male couples seeking to rent women’s bodies to make them their very own bespoke baby. Lesbian couples don’t need to rent women to make a baby; men think they’re entitled to rent women to get whatever they want. Isn’t it funny how men don’t recognize or acknowledge the exploitation of renting women’s bodies, yet do manage to remember to disguise what they’re doing by talking about “same-sex couples” in the headline and the tweet?
I saw a play written a few years ago on this very topic. It was written by a young gay man, and the gay couple spent a lot of time trash-talking the young woman who was having the baby for them. They worried the baby wouldn’t be good enough because she was common and ‘trampy’. The young men were supposed to be the positive couple in this play. And the title says it all: Breeders.
In addition, they had a concurrent pair of hamsters breeding at the same time, comparing this young woman to an animal breeding, essentially. I found the experience revolting. Then, in the same festival, there was another play about IVF where a young woman has a baby for an infertile couple (opposite sex) and it was presented as if the usual pattern of this is to find a self-employed, upper middle class friend of your upper middle class self who is willing to carry the baby. No mention of the reality, and the desperation, of many young women who agree to be surrogates for whatever sum the hopeful parents are willing to cough up.
It’s infuriating how the selfish consumerism of these gay men can’t be confronted because “homophobia” will be the first objection.
There’s nothing phobic about objecting to renting women’s wombs on the basis of harm to the mother and the child by commodifying her body and the child’s. Then purposefully taking the baby away from the mother, usually forever.
No one has the moral right to purchase a woman’s body, and purchase a child, in order to satisfy a desire. There is no “right to have an infant of my choosing no exceptions”. Being gay doesn’t change that.
Yep. I’d been pushing down any qualms on this subject until Julie Bindel wrote a book about surrogacy, writing dispatches on her research in I think India and elsewhere. The days of pushing down the qualms are over.
I’m really struggling to see why there is anything wrong with this. Surely what she does with her womb is none of my business, including if she rents it out to gay couples?
“Renting women’s bodies” sounds really bad, but isn’t this just what employment is? Like, if you hire an engineer you are renting their brain, which sounds more exploitative than renting someone’s womb. But we don’t usually think of engineers as being victims of exploitation.
What am I missing here?
Infertile couples of any sex pairing think they’re entitled to rent women’s bodies for the purposes of producing “their own” child. The number of well-to-do straight white American couples who rent out poor Indian women’s reproductive organs until the planned c-section after which they whisk the baby home in a plane is disgusting. But it’s cheaper than using an American woman’s uterus!
It’s mostly gay male couples because gay men 100% of the time lack a viable uterus. I don’t think they feel entitled to using women to make their babies because they’re male though so much as because Western culture reinforces the belief all people are entitled to reproduce, even if someone else has to be harmed for it and that adopting is inherently less great. Couples in which there is no functional uterus opt for surrogacy all the time.
At first glance, and based on a very quick scan of the HFEA’s report (and it’s possible that I’ve missed something), you might be reading a bit too much into the figures here, Ophelia. The report (pdf here) reminds readers that
Of course, some male same-sex couples will use a surrogate and IVF or DI; but many won’t, and so they won’t show up in the HFEA’s stats.
Arrangements with surrogates amount to 0.4% of all treatments provided. I can’t see anything in the report that breaks that figure down by the orientation of the commissioners; but we might expect that at least some of those 302 cycles of treatment may be provided to female same-sex couples, since there will be female same-sex couples that have the same reason to seek surrogate as will heterosexual couples. For example, it’s entirely possible that there’ll be two women in a couple who happen to have a uterine disorder that prevents gestation, and so will be seeking a surrogate. Or – perhaps more likely – it might be that one partner chooses to provide the egg, and the other to carry the pregnancy, so that each has some kind of “motherhood” tie, genetic or gestational, to the child. I think that that’d count as a surrogacy arrangement for the sake of the figures here. (Whether you think their reasons good, or good enough, to make use of a surrogate would be a further matter.) Thus:
Presumably, the HFEA could have collected more data about the sex and the nature of the relationship of the people whom it records to be using surrogates – but, like I said, at first glance, that information doesn’t seem to be in the report.
The PinkNews article does a reasonable job of reporting this. And in percentage terms, the rise is pretty big. In absolute terms… maybe not.
Your general point about renting women’s bodies stands, of course. (As an aside, under English law, surrogates are not paid, though they can be given reasonable expenses.) However, who is doing the renting and why isn’t quite as clear.