Why hoard it?
Janice Turner on women as spare parts factories:
Throughout the exultant coverage of Britain’s first womb transplant, I waited for news about the donor. We met the shiny-eyed, triumphant surgeons who’d worked a Sunday in their special double operating theatre. We learnt about the recipient, born without a uterus, now having periods and waiting to start IVF. But of her sister who had donated her womb there was just a cursory, “she’s recovering well”.
The gravity of her sacrifice was wafted aside, although this was a radical hysterectomy, removing not just the uterus and cervix but the “cuff” (upper part) of the vagina. Given the complex transplant process it took many more hours, with greater surgical risk than a conventional hysterectomy, an operation that can throw women into menopause, cause blood clots and nerve damage, make sexual climax weaker, even unachievable. A tenth of womb donors suffer complications and need further surgery.
It’s not something a sister should let a sister do. It’s not something a friend should let a friend do; it’s not even something a stranger should let a stranger do. It’s too much. It’s way too much.
There are already concerns about women being coerced to donate. In the UK case, the 42-year-old donor sister had borne two children and completed her family. Many of us would give a life-saving kidney to a sibling. But now there’s a new yardstick of sisterly love. If you have no further use for your womb, why hoard it? Women in conservative cultures could also face strong parental pressure.
And life-saving is a whole different thing from chance of gestation-saving.
The surrogacy industry has also laid the way by erasing women as human beings with rights, needs and feelings from the whole reproductive process. Celebrity couples pose with a new baby while the woman who carried and gave birth to it is invisible, a “gestational carrier”, never a mother.
Maybe we should focus on just manufacturing people, and leave women out of the equation altogether.
I am so sick of this biological narcissism.
Freemage, I agree. But it doesn’t help that women are raised to believe that they need to have children to be complete women. Even a lot of women I know who didn’t buy into that, or thought they didn’t, felt it deep down. I’ve known a number of women who just “had to have a baby” because that’s what you do. I was subject to it myself for a short period…long enough for me to have one child…but it wasn’t so much narcissism as it was a compulsion that society builds into us. Women must be mothers.
Our biology is no help, either. For a species to survive, there must be some level of desire to have children. Thing is, our species is more in danger right now from having children than from not having children. Funny, I can’t convince anyone of this…unless they already agree with me.
Nebraska has a higher birth rate than the national average. They have a low growth rate, somewhere around zero. So they keep having kids, because they need to grow! They could try making Nebraska a better place to live so their kids would stay.
I look forward to the first testicle transplant onto a trans identifying female, all in the name of ‘reproductive equity’
Testify!
I’ll see myself out.
“Maybe we should focus on just manufacturing people, and leave women out of the equation altogether.”
It’d be a more efficient use of human potential; no sense having women being quasi invalids for nine months when they could be doing so much more…