The thing is broken
Man opens up about using woman as baby-gestating machine during COVID-19: ‘different hiccups.’
Sweet touching photo of baby-wanting couple:
Awww, one daddy is cuddling other daddy’s non-existent bump, how sweet.
Lance Bass has shared a heartbreaking update about his road to fatherhood with husband Michael Turchin, noting that it’s been a journey full of setbacks.
“We’re two-and-a-half-years in and we keep running into a lot of different hiccups,” Bass told TooFab last week. While the pair have embryos “ready to go”, the coronavirus pandemic has made their search for a surrogate more difficult.
Their search for a what? Oh they mean their search for a woman to spend nine months gestating their baby for them and then x number of hours pushing it painfully out of her body. They mean a living breathing thinking feeling human being, not a 3-D printer.
“Unfortunately, we just lost our surrogate that we’ve had for over two years,” he said. “And so now, now begins the process of finding a replacement surrogate, which is hard … because a lot of surrogates really don’t want to get pregnant during a time like this.”
Selfish bitches. Why aren’t women rushing to do this tiny favor for this nice caring generous man who refers to them as “surrogates” as one might refer to toasters or immersion blenders?
In March, the couple’s surrogate experienced a miscarriage at eight weeks. It followed nine rounds of IVF.
That is, a woman who was gestating a baby for this entitled pair but who does not belong to them had a miscarriage. She’s not “the couple’s surrogate,” she’s a human being who belongs to herself. If you find yourself talking about people this way it’s a sign that you’re dehumanizing them.
Despite experiencing “way more downs than ups” on their journey to parenthood, Bass said it’s brought the couple, who married in 2014, closer together.”
It puts you on this different level of relationship — it’s beyond being in love with him; you’re this partner now, and you’re creating this life that now it’s no longer about yourselves, it’s no longer about you as a couple. It’s about someone else.”
Except that you’re not. You’re not “creating this life.” It’s the woman who is doing that, the woman you refer to as “the surrogate.”
There’s just no end to the ways men will belittle and ignore and exploit women.
“Hiccup”.
And here I was thinking I was already sufficiently furious for one day.
This makes steam come out of my ears.
Men are claiming to be the real women, and other men are treating real women as farm animals.
It wasn’t this bad even in the Middle Ages, was it?
I’m surprised there’s not already an agency supplying undocumented immigrants for these purposes. Or documented, for that matter: they’ve already demonstrated it’s a job no American wants to do.
Is working in a baby farm considered agricultural work or non-agricultural work?
Yes, a higher plane of entitlement where you can look down on those below you (meaning women) and insist on service.
So many stories around the difficulties two men experience when they want to have a baby; meanwhile, women go through these things everyday, and no one gives a shit about their struggles. My sister wanted a baby for years; eventually she adopted once she discovered neither of her sisters was willing to surrogate for her (she expected us to do it for nothing, to boot). It was the rational thing to do.
It’s possible this couple may make great parents; I certainly hope if they do have a child, it is not a girl. They have already demonstrated their contempt for females.
Certainly, one of the things about this that most fascinates me is the question of why they don’t just adopt.
I understand that some people would prefer not to adopt because they believe they will have more in common with, or appreciate more, their biological progeny. That answer isn’t really applicable in this case.
One of my gay friends, in a long-term relationship with another gay man, sorted out an agreement with two lesbian friends of theirs, and they all procreated together and shared custody. Now that’s an impressive idea, and it was surprisingly successful. The boys just finished college.
Another of my gay friends adopted two little girls with his husband. The girls are biological sisters. They are great dads, and they love their lucky little girls very much.
Why can’t this couple just adopt? There are lots of kids who need a forever family.
It really does just seem that there is a class issue at work here. Maybe adoption is just too declassé for them, and they want top shelf proj. No adoption, because then they couldn’t make the mother eat organic and listen to classical music.
Once again my spectrum adjacency is probably giving me trouble, but I’m having a hard time understanding this critique. There are two lines of reasoning that I can see, one intrinsic and one extrinsic.
Intrinsic: Referring to a person by his or her role intrinsically reduces that person to his or her role. Thus, it is dehumanizing. When a woman is referred to by “surrogate”, this reduces her to the role of surrogate, negating her humanity and personhood.
Extrinsic: Referring to a woman by her reproductive role is peculiarly dehumanizing, as a result of women’s historical reduction to their reproductive faculties. Such language should be avoided, because it echoes that history.
I suspect the extrinsic line is intended, but I’ve never seen either explicitly laid out in the context of this sort of critique.
“Certainly, one of the things about this that most fascinates me is the question of why they don’t just adopt.”
As any adoptive parent would tell you, there is no such thing as “just” adopting. The adoption process is a complicated one — it has to be, for the sake of the child. Few babies are in need of adoption — most are older children with a traumatic past. Not all potential parents can cope with this. It’s not to do with organic food or classical music, but with a realistic attitude about dealing with traumatized children.
Given the selfish attitude of this couple, an ethical adoption agency would turn them down. That would be the best case scenario if they chose to “just adopt”.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/09/why-just-adopt-is-more-complicated-than-it-sounds.html
Good point; thank you.
Nullius @ 6 – I don’t break it down that way. It’s not so much a line of reasoning as an interpretation. You can see it as a form of lit crit perhaps, or as the criticism of an editor. Or both. In literal terms there’s nothing really wrong with it; it’s not weird to say things like “our lawyer,” “our doctor,” “our gardener” and so on. In literal terms it’s just factual, just a shorthand for “the person who tends our garden” and the like. But in the overall context of this piece and the way this insufferably entitled guy talks, it’s just one more example of the clueless person-ignoring way of talking.
#7 – yes, adoption is difficult, and babies may not be available. Still, the attitude toward surrogacy is infuriating. We seem to accept the formulation that people have a right to a baby; I don’t think that’s correct. I think they have a right to make their own reproductive choices, and not to be coerced either way by the state (or their partner), but to say they have a right to have a baby is something else. The reason I don’t think this is a right is that having a baby requires another person. For a woman, it’s not tough. If she doesn’t want a man, she can find a sperm donor, or go to the sperm bank. For a man, not so much. He must find a woman to carry it for him.
That’s where I think the right falls down. You don’t have the right to commandeer someone else’s body for nine months (or any period of time). As for consent, the power/money dynamic in surrogacy often means that a middle-class, privileged individual is paying a poor woman to risk her life and perform one of the most intimate acts known to humans…and that leads to abuse. A lot of women might do it out of desperation, but it will impact their life more than most jobs do. I don’t see any way to make it a fair exchange, unless you put the woman in control of the terms, and pay her an ungodly amount. As one who has gone through childbirth, I can tell you I would never do it for pay. It takes over your life for nine months, and then there is the time after when you have to heal from pushing a child’s head out through an opening that is smaller than a child’s head.
Surrogacy to me is as problematic as sex work. And, like sex work, it is the woman who is expected to shut up and spread her legs.
Ophelia @ 9: Ahhh. I see. It’s not the phrasing per se, but instead its place within a larger pattern and what that reveals about the speaker or writer. I hadn’t considered that way of looking at it. Makes sense.
Also, nice anticipation of potential objections, there. If there’s one thing that would go a long way toward improving conversations, it’s that.
Also, mustn’t use the word “mother.” That would suggest the child is something more than the “product” of the two men involved, and that the woman is more than just a rented incubator. Can’t have that.
Rights talk faces a problem of linguistic imprecision in English. There is no good way to distinguish whether “right to x” refers to a potentiality or an actuality. “Right to a baby” can refer to a potentiality, a guarantee of opportunity. “Right to have a baby” can refer to an actuality, a guarantee of success.
It’d actually be easier to express “right to x” as specifically potentiality or specifically actuality in Japanese, I think. Japanese has a grammatical distinction between “to do x” and “to do and complete x” in a way that English doesn’t. For instance, “she opens/will open the door” is kanojo to wo akeru 彼女戸を開ける. “She (has) opened the door” is 彼女戸を開けた。”She opened the door (and it is open)” is 彼女戸を開けてある。I don’t know how strange it might or might not sound to a native speaker, but I can imagine all three of those having subtly different meanings if used to describe a right. Even if Google Translate disagrees …
Related note: I really need to get multilingual keycaps. Having to memorize the Russian, Japanese, and Irish layouts is a pain.
Dammit. Wrong link. Right link.
Hopefully.
Nullius @ 11, about anticipation of potential objections – well I did know all along I was pushing it. I tend to the hyperbolic a lot, especially when pissed off. I think I hesitated about the “our surrogate” point, but went ahead anyway.
Sorry to get into technicalities of Japanese grammar, but the first two Japanese sentences given by Nullius in Verba should read either 彼女は戸を開ける (‘she’ as topic – for which は、pronounced here ‘wa’ is a marker: she, as opposed to someone else, opened the door) or 彼女が戸を開ける (‘she’ as subject, for which が、pronounced ‘ga’ is a marker). The last sentence makes no sense, so far as I and my Japanese wife can see. It should read 戸が開けてある – the door has been opened, is open (agent unknown, the door becomes the subject) . Another way of saying the window is open (without suggesting any interest in who might have done it) is 戸が開いている – to ga aiteiru. Similarly with the past tense example given. The verbs for an action having been completed are しまう(shimau) or 切る (kiru): ビールを飲みすぎてしまいました (I ended up by drinking too much beer – something difficult not to do here in the present heat); 読みきた (I’m done with reading – I’ve read it through). I don’t know how this all fits in with rights!
I should add that of the three examples given on the link you provide, the second two make no sense. Only the first is correct. I wonder if it is not some sort of quiz in which one is required to pick out the correct phrase.
Ophelia points out that there’s nothing in wrong in principle with referring to someone by their role in someone else’s life–‘my dad helped me build a greenhouse yesterday’ is fine. But have a think about, for example, newspaper headlines like ‘mother of two wins Nobel Prize’ or ‘[famous actor’s] wife achieves world record’. We know this isn’t appropriate, and it makes us uncomfortable–doesn’t this person have a name? Why are we erasing them from their own story? And of course this really only happens to women, unless I guess the man involved has a social role related to an extremely famous or notorious woman. This erasing of the subjectivity of women by describing them in terms of their relationships with men is insidious as well–I remember writing about this with respect to a museum display, where bones and artefacts of men were referred to as those of ‘a warrior’ or ‘a farmer’ or some other activity or occupation, while those of women described the woman as ‘a mother’ or, almost worse, ‘a woman’–she was not even dignified with an activity, she just was. You see this in, for example, information about development work–men in images are described as ‘farmers’ or ‘citizens’, but women in similar photos, working in fields or meeting to resolve issues or develop policy, are described as ‘women’. Obviously they ARE women, and there’s nothing wrong with describing them as such, but doing so in this context implies that they are passive, objective things without agency or individuality.
@iknclast
See? That’s why this is not an acceptable point of view. It implies that there is something women can have which is more difficult for men to get. Obviously this cannot be allowed.
PS: Sorry for bungling you name -probably comes from dealing with osteoclasts in my teaching…
Tim:
Yeah, I don’t know how the は got lost there. It was supposed to be there, but between typing very quickly, copy-pasting, and sitting 14 feet from my screen … *shrug* 悪かった。
For the -てある construction, I was attempting (and apparently failing) to recall something along the lines of １０じ３０ぷんにコートをよやくしてあるら、テニスをしよう。And I did intentionally use the transitive rather than intransitive form, at least.
As I learned it (and the last time I got to speak Japanese with anyone was years ago) the verb+すまう construction has a particular connotation that I was attempting to avoid. As in あ、こわれちゃった！ or 悪いけど、其れを食べてしまいました。If your wife thinks that something along the lines of デザートを食べてしまった doesn’t carry that quasi-unfortunate connotation, then I certainly won’t argue.
And finally, since there’s a native speaker on hand: I’m curious what she thinks about using anything aside from the imperfective (i.e., -る form) with 権利. As in 食べる権利 vs. 食べた権利. Not so much whether she thinks it sounds normal, but whether she could imagine a Japanese philosopher using the construction in an academic context. You know, given how philosophers have a predilection for employing language in unorthodox ways. (e.g., “this this-ness this this possesses” is an actual phrase I saw in an article once.)
@guest #18
Once upon a time, when I was a teenager, a local newspaper story (about my mother) was headlined:
No, they never would have printed the headline with “Man” instead of “Woman.” Instead it would have said something else, like “Dartmouth PhD Put in Charge of Computer.”
And yes, I wish I’d saved a copy for posterity.
Well at least it wasn’t ‘mother put in charge of computer’!
Dear Nullius,
Briefly!
Well, I have lived in Japan for nearly 50 years, have translated Japanese poetry and short stories, and shall die here, and so I do know a little Japanese…. Yes, しまう can have the sense of having something done bad, depending on the context, or of taking pride that at last you have managed to complete some task, or simply that you have done it, or that something happened without your being able to prevent it. So it really does depend on the situation. ようやくしてあったら (not してあるら, though したら is possible but pretty unusual, I should have thought) would be very odd; the ordinary way of saying this would be ようやくが出来たら （if we succeed in making a reservation). The -ru form is present or future or, in a way, infinitive, not imperfective. ‘The right to do something’ is naturally 何々する権利. If you are saying someone had the right to do something in the past, but doesn’t now, it would be 何々するがあった。You wouldn’t put the verbal clause 何々する in the past before 権利 (right). I’m not very au fait with Japanese philosophy, though, I’m afraid!
何々する権利があった！
Whoops. The -tearura was another typo. I wasn’t attempting to use the conditional. It was supposed to read -tearu kara.
Les sigh. It’s hard enough to notice one’s own typos in one’s native tongue-with spaces!
As for “imperfective” vs. present/future or infinitive, that’s how wiki describes it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_verb_conjugation
guest @ 18 – yes to all that, and also I’ve been thinking about the “our gardener” type of thing and I think people do generally shy away from saying it that way. It has a kind of feudal feel, and/or a dismissive feel, and/or an impersonal feel.
It occurs to me that for high-status jobs the definite article is fine, while for low-status ones it’s not so much. The lawyer, fine, the cleaner, ick. Our lawyer fine, our cleaner ick.
I’m sure sociolinguists have explained all this in useful detail.
I actually just thought of another nuance to this, thinking about the fact (well, it’s an assumed fact, since I haven’t actually looked it up) that there were probably a lot of tabloid headlines a while back about ‘Meghan Markle’s father’. And that would make some sense, since the stories were actually about Meghan Markle, and no one would care about her father except as an element of a story about her. So, a headline like ‘Johnny Depp’s ex-wife accuses him of assault’ makes some journalistic sense, while ‘some dude’s wife wins Olympic medal’ decidedly does not.