“I wanted them to be super fit”
This is how they talk about the woman they pay to gestate a baby for them:
The egg donor. Them. That person. Someone.
And then the consumerist box ticking – must be both gorgeous and brilliant. Nothing but the best for team Manufacture a Baby!
“Fabulous” my ass
I think I’m going to be sick after reading that. Who do these people think they are? And who do they think they’re talking about? The level of dehumanization is infuriating!
Lucky for them that there aren’t people on the other side of the process screening out assholes like them.
John Reed – same. Also “absolute smoke show.” ARRGGHH
Armchair eugenics and commodification — how dreadfully intersectional.
Their wording completely ignores pregnancy itself. They talk as if the only thing this woman did was deliver an egg, maybe right there at the meeting, fifteen minutes tops.
They’re not only commodifying the women, but their future child as well. Imagine being product? Imagine not living up to their expectations completely for your entire life. Having some physical imperfections, not making the grades or the schools expected of you, just not being perfect. They’re such utter arseholes and I pity the kid.
Rob #6
Wasn’t there already a case where the purchasers refused to take a defective product? It was a few years ago but I think this is the one I remember.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-20/ukraines-commercial-surrogacy-industry-leaves-disaster/11417388
Well you *are* a product, on some level that’s how sexually reproducing creatures choose their mates because having successful offspring is important to continuing the genetic line. How interesting it is though when the males become the particularly choosy ones though, which you can do if all you’re relying on is $$$.
It’s possible that’s “all” she did; someone in the comment thread said they were referring here to the egg donor and another woman was the surrogate.
So there might be a woman involved who does all that gestational work and doesn’t even get mentioned? Good gosh. And they care about the fitness of the egg donor (is fitness heritable?), but don’t give a crap about the physical health and fitness and stamina of the woman acting as surrogate?
If I may, “just deliver an egg” is quite minimising language about what actually happens. Egg donors aren’t like sperm donors, it’s not a pleasant process where she can just have a wank and catch millions of eggs in a sterile container.
Egg donation requires extensive hormonal medication to induce her to overproduce eggs, trigger shots to release them, lots of vaginal ultrasounds to determine the progress of the eggs, and the eggs are retrieved with a huge needle. None of it is fun, and risks are attached for her at every stage. Many women note how awful IVF is to undergo; egg donation is that process – the only part missing is having an embryo transferred. And all this may produce perhaps twenty eggs (if you’re lucky), of which perhaps half are viable. I’ve done IVF three times and the most I ever got was seven eggs, four of which were viable, two of which successfully fertilised, and none were suitable for embryo transfer.
I personally find it strange that so many members of the public are aware of how hard and risky IVF is, but are unable to connect that to any sympathy for egg donors.
None of it is easy, fun, risk free or even successful. She incurs all the risks, harms and the disappointment in the event that she “fails”.
#10 Sackbut
The people conversing are British (“we probably spent a quarter of a million quid“), so they most likely use fit to mean attractive. Which is somewhat predictive of the child’s appearance.
[…] a comment by Arcadia on I wanted them to be super […]
But not entirely. Attractive people do tend to have attractive kids, but there are exceptions. If the woman is attractive and not the man (or vice versa), there is no reason to assume any or all of the kids will be attractive. Also, there are recessive genes, environmental influences, potential mutations….so on, and so on, and so on.
Genetics is messy and complex; the vast majority of people think it’s actually simple. A gene will code for a trait; it will express. Nope. Not how it works, especially with the complexity of sexual reproduction. You can’t just look at the donor, either. You would need to see her parents, her grandparents…some things might not be seen in one generation, but will in the next.