Reproductive Prostitutes: Industrialized Surrogate Motherhood

Conservative Feminist: Power Corrupts Absolutely

The farming out of reproduction by rich women to poor surrogate mothers is the latest thing. With it, women may have achieved the power to alienate themselves from their own bodies. Red State Gal discusses the dehumanization of it all and where this “industrialized motherhood” logically ends. It doesn’t sound like such a Brave new World after all.

Red State Feminists

FAITH * FAMILY * WOMANPOWER

From the Red State Feminist Blog:
Power Corrupts Absolutely: Industrial Motherhood and Reproductive Prostitutes

Red State Feminists have decried the purchase of babies by male homosexuals, erasing all vestige of the mother that gave that child life, and the mother that gave that child birth. But, truth be told, such power to artificially reproduce has corrupted women as well. A recent article by the liberal news outlet Alternet is called, “Is Motherhood As We Know It Over? Wealthy Women Farming Out Birth and Childrearing to the Poor,” and addresses this very issue.

Highlighting a recent book by two academics on the globalization of reproduction, the article asks how we got to the point where privileged Western women now exploit the eggs, wombs, and laps of poor brown-skinned women in less developed countries. “Privileged” women often have to delay childbearing because in their societies men eschew commitment, and women must build their careers in order to have an income to fall back on when the man they have chosen decides to walk. By the time these women have what they need in place to be a mother, they often cannot–and some choose not–to do the messy reproductive labor themselves. Pregnancy, childbirth, recuperation therefrom, lactation, 24/7 with babies and toddlers . . . it may all seem like a nightmare that a privileged woman could avoid.

The obverse of this coin is the poor women, some in the West, who feel the only way they can financially survive is to be a reproductive prostitute–to be paid for the use of their body parts by those who want no commitment to them and no relationship with them. What is horrifying, however, is that the “johns” and “janes” in this type of prostitution also do not want the child produced to have any commitment to or relationship with the woman who is arguably their mother.

This erasure of the mother, whether done by male homosexuals or by privileged women, is simply inhumane. We know it is inhumane because if the child produced is born with a defect, the purchasers can refuse it. It is but trash to them. It is only because we are used to thinking of children as people and not women as people that we do not see how inhumane it is to ask a women to be erased from her child’s life, or worse, to be told she is not the child’s mother at all. As with prostitutes, we say, “well, she was paid.” But the johns have stolen much more from a prostitute than money can buy. And the same can be said of reproductive johns and janes.

Some of the completely amoral logic involved is apparently on display in this book. Here’s an excerpt highlighted by Alternet:

Some of the most memorable stories emerge in a chapter about couples who travel to and through Dubai as “reproductive tourists.” In one example, a Syrian woman who had come from Lebanon for fertility treatment worries about having a Hindu, as opposed to a Muslim, doctor, even as she has a child in the care of a Filipina (non-Muslim) nanny. In another, a Sunni Muslim couple goes to Beirut (where there is a Shia majority) for egg donation, since that practice – along with sperm donation, embryo donation and gestational surrogacy, has been banned by a fatwa in Sunni-dominated Muslim countries. The couple then seeks the eggs of a mid-Western, white American because, as the father-to-be explains it, “I want a white baby to look like me.”

One day, we will create a world where there are no human mothers at all. Childbearing will be farmed out to animals. Eggs and sperm will be harvested asexually. Men and women will not need each other for reproduction, and the words “father” and “mother” will have only symbolic value, divorced from what was once a genuine biological reality. Women have already “progressed” to the stage where they are insensate for birth; they have substituted cow’s milk formula for their own human breastmilk; they have nannies to do the real caretaking. It is but a small step more for women to be completely alienated from the power of their own bodies.

Red State Feminists cannot help but think that there is laughter in Hell over the choices women are starting to make. Used to be, most of the laughter there in that “hot spot” was because of the choices of men. Guess gender equity has now hit Hades itself. When motherhood ceases to be, Hell has won the final battle for the soul of humankind. What is tragic is that there are women who choose to hasten that future–power does corrupt absolutely, doesn’t it?

by Red State Gal
images: DBKP file; reason for liberty
source: Power Corrupts Absolutely: Industrial Motherhood and Reproductive Prostitutes

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