LUCY LEADER
JUN 17, 2023
I am grateful for many things in my life and one of these is that I am not a taxpayer who lives in California. Because it would really rip my shorts to know that my insurance premiums cost me more since January 1, 2023, when a new, shiny bit of legislation came into force. Touted as a bill that will “will protect trans kids and their families” from the reality-based laws of other states that recognize the futility of drugs and surgeries in a pointless quest to change sex, California is now a “refuge”, not from delusional thinking, but from science-based care for distressed children who have been lied to in their states of residence. I don’t see anything in this bill that will support these kids once they realize that a trans identity did not help their mental health, in fact they are now worse off, but hey, you can’t win them all.
Not content with promoting pointless medical experimentation on children, Californian legislators have come up with a doozy of a new bill that would have left George Orwell so green with envy that he could be mistaken for the Hulk or the Jolly Green Giant.
Did you know that gay male couples suffer from “infertility”? Um, no neither did I. I did know that as long as you are only having same sex intercourse no one will ever get pregnant (this is true for lesbians as well), but it had never occurred to me to think of it like this. I mean that’s why you don’t need contraception in prisons because unless you have an opposite sex guard involved, whether sex is consensual or rape, no conception is going to be taking place. Well until recently anyway when males claiming to have lady dicks have been housed with vulnerable women; that’s been a game changer for prison health care.
This bill redefines infertility from a medical condition to a status like “gay” or “single” and will raise annual employer-based insurance premiums more than US$330 million a year from what they are now.
Most insurance plans would require IVF to be paid for on the basis of someone’s relationship status or sexual orientation, meaning that not only women would have access to this. This rather overlooks the fact that most women using IVF are utilizing their own eggs and their own uterus to produce their baby.
For those who have not been paying attention, men, whether gay or straight, do not have automatic access to either of these assets.
But clearly this is not considered a problem by those behind this bill, because you just get a “surrogate” to do that messy pregnancy bit. (It will be so much easier when humans can just be grown in giant beakers in a lab somewhere.)
“Fertility equality” is not about infertility at all, it is about biology.
One of the sponsors of this bill is a group called Men Having Babies (MHB). On its homepage there are numerous references to “men”, “parents” and “surrogacy”, but nary a “woman” (or God forbid, a “mother”) in sight. Except for their name, not even babies rate a mention. This is an example of the sort of dehumanizing that needs to happen for surrogacy to exist.
When “pregnancy treatments” are part of legislation, where does this leave women?
Probably in the same place as those who promote prostitution as “sex work”, subject to the same global market that already traffics girls and women globally to meet the fetishes, desires and demands of men who are happy to rent a female body for their use. What’s the difference between renting a vagina for 40 minutes and renting a uterus for 40 weeks? For some, clearly this is acceptable. Commodifying women’s bodies has always been done in every era and most cultures, but this wins first prize for overt misogyny.
How do Californian legislators and groups like MHB plan to move those cells in a petri dish into the necessary home of a woman’s uterus to develop into their family creating purchase (AKA a baby)? Will women be given a choice if picked up for some minor crime to do jail time or grow a baby for some gay guys? Will they scour the hospital system for women in comas and persistent vegetative states? Why not impregnate them since they are just lying there doing nothing anyway?
Why are the physical and emotional harms of surrogacy for women able to be ignored? Why is regarding women as disposable baby oven units considered humane?
“Surrogates”, “gestational carriers”, “birth mothers”: these are all terms that can be summed up in one succinct word: women. Using euphemisms is a classic method of whitewashing uncomfortable truths that don’t look so pretty in the bright light of reality. Women are so much more than “non-men”.
Hey dude, babies have human rights too
All the harm caused to women pales into insignificance when compared to the fate of babies born via surrogacy. I have already written about surrogacy here and touched on this in other posts as well. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, my main concern is not women, but babies.
Contrary to the claims of some members of the LGBTQ+ community (how much community can there really be when the T faction is busily erasing the LGB portion, I really don’t know), no members of this group are as vulnerable as babies. Adults have access to resources that no baby has. We can speak and let others know what our needs are and what is causing us harm. We are recognized as having human rights that in many countries are recognized and upheld by governments and legislation.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is an international treaty, which entered into force in September 1990, aims to protect the rights of children worldwide. It calls on States Parties to take all appropriate measures to ensure that children’s rights are protected, including freedom from exploitation and abuse. The CRC is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in the world. Only two countries have not ratified the Convention. Yes, shamefully, the United States is one. Somalia is the other.
Unfortunately, in the USA it is not considered necessary to safeguard the rights of babies against being created on the whims of adults who can pay for them.
This man created an entire industry around surrogacy to support his pedophilia, but other men keep it closer to home and restrict their sexual abuse of babies and children to relatives and their own children.
Am I in any way implying that gay men are pedophiles? Of course not and research has not indicated any link between being gay and operating as a pedophile. But, as 80-90% of all convicted sex offenders are male, sexual orientation is clearly not as important as a person’s sex.
“Parenting options” as outlined on the MHB website should not be including the deliberate creation of trauma in the brains and bodies of innocent babies. The “anguish and yearning” that grown men feel because they can’t produce their own babies should not be prioritized over the production and sale of the most vulnerable human beings.
I have written at length about what babies expect to find and what they need for optimal, healthy development. Here, here, and here are only three of the many places I have discussed in detail about what babies expect to find once they emerge from the body of a woman who they regard as their mother. What they are never born to expect is to be handed over to physiological strangers and removed entirely from the only body they know.
Adults born out of surrogacy are now speaking up and they are not OK. This man and this woman know that they were bought and sold commodities and they are not (as proponents of surrogacy would have us believe), grateful to be alive. They feel disconnected and adrift and live with the feeling of permanent loss. Surrogacy has created a chasm for them that can never be filled.
Surrogacy always breaches the best interests of babies. Surrogacy is not like adoption because adoption occurs as the result of a mistake, a failure of contraception or unfortunate circumstances and the best interests of the child is paramount. Surrogacy is a deliberate, conscious choice to cause harm to both women and babies. Why is it considered tragic if a newborn’s mother dies, but acceptable when the same conditions are planned for to cater to the desires of adults who bought their baby?
Legalizing surrogacy as the new law in California would have it only serves adults while ignoring the needs of babies. To compound the harm in this instance, two men parenting denies babies the foundational rights inherent in the mother/baby dyad by dispensing with any sort of mother at all.
Women’s bodies are not a “pregnancy treatment” for men. There is no “human right” to have a baby. Women have had to live with unequal treatment compared with men for well, forever actually. Gay men need to live with the outcomes that their sexual orientation offers them. Even if this means they won’t have anyone calling them Dad. Because the price for this is too high and it’s women and babies paying.
