This one really struck a nerve. Not in a good way.
Sands is here for you, but not so here that it will call you a mother instead of a “birthing parent” (or a father instead of a “non-birthing parent”).
The replies are genuinely painful to read.
This one really struck a nerve. Not in a good way.
Sands is here for you, but not so here that it will call you a mother instead of a “birthing parent” (or a father instead of a “non-birthing parent”).
The replies are genuinely painful to read.
Comments
10 responses to “Here for you”
I always felt sad for my mom. What do you put down on forms that ask, “how many children do you have?”
4, for the ones who survived?
Or 5, for all the children she had? He had a name and everything. The rest of us never knew him. Later, I knew OF him and it hurt to think that my mom suffered from that loss for the rest of her life.
I can thing of few things less supportive and comforting than co-opting grieving mothers into the cult. The callousness breaks my heart.
It was bad enough losing babies in early pregnancy; I can’t begin to understand the grief of losing one through stillbirth or neonatal death. My aunt lost the boy who would have been my elder cousin; and had to carry him for the last week or so, knowing he had died, until she went into labour naturally. I, of course, only found out about that when I was in my teens. But I could see the profound effect it had on the way she treated my younger, cousins, especially the last one who was also a boy and had fragile health.
A charity that wants to support mothers that have had a stillbirth is now saying “nope, you’re not mothers.” Real nice.
I can’t think of a more stark example of the erasure of sex than this. As if any parent can be the “birthing” one.
It is at times like this that I am reminded how improbable our individual lives are against the backdrop of human history and evolutionary biology.
My maternal great-grandmother Mary-Ann Connor was a refugee from the Irish potato ‘famine’ of the 1840s, when social arrangements in Ireland somehow resulted in the export of a large part of its agricultural produce. She went as a refugee to New Zealand, where by chance she met my great grandfather, who was a sailor.
Mary-Ann had eleven children in all, ten of whom died in infancy: probably of TB, which was raging at the time. My grandmother was the only survivor of those eleven children. The grief must have been paralysing.
Added to that, to produce any one of us blogging here today, at every generation the right sperm cell has to meet the right ovum, with infinitesimal chance of that happening, to produce this, the only reality we will ever have, and arguably, despite Trump etc,, the best of all possible worlds.
I know, being British – born and raised in England – that the Brits have always strived to erase their hand in the deliberate starvation of the Irish people, but even the best white-washer of history would take their hats off to that bit of excellent writing. Well done!
Another possible translation:
“How dare that bitch, that Karen, take all the attention away from the Real People: the lovely Gay Couple who paid a large amount for a surrogate child and are now out of pocket and disappointed?”
[…] a comment by Omar on Here for […]
Sands has since apologized for its tweet:
“We are so sorry that this tweet has upset some people. Our tweet should have included the word mothers. It was an error and we apologise from the bottom of our hearts. Sands is here for everyone.”
I did think that their tweet wasn’t deliberately malicious, but rather a deferential obfuscation to appease trans activists.
Oh yes, I think that’s generally the case in these things.