Surrogacy: No Laughing Matter
by Jennifer Lahl, Public Discourse:
Surrogacy is no April Fools’ joke. It’s no laughing matter at all. It’s a big business that exploits, uses, abuses, preys on, and commodifies women. It turns children into products to be designed, selected, and purchased, while it profits handsomely. And it is willing to fight like mad to protect its moneyed interests.
On April Fools’ Day 2018, a German LGBTI website came under attack for announcing the raffle of a surrogate mother in Thailand and an egg donor for a gay couple. The ‘package’ was said to be worth over $44,000 US. Immediately this raffle draw attention on Twitter, where it was criticized for being a “tasteless,” “racist,” “sexist,” and extremely unfunny attempt at an April Fools’ joke.
Julie Bindel, an original signer of the StopSurrogacyNow Petition, took to Twitter:
Those of us aware of the human rights abuses involved in surrogacy, or rather womb trafficking, will be very well aware that this so-called April Fools’ Day joke happens in real life, & the attitude is prevalent among gay men who consider it their right 2 use the inside of those women’s bodies for their own inconvenience. There is no ‘right’ to have your own biological child, or to use a poor, desperate woman’s body to carry that child…
I’ll let her remarks trail off, as she had some pretty salty language for gay men who use women as their surrogates.
The gay news quickly took her to task for her remarks. On Twitter, she responded, “We live in times where privileged gay men refer to a feminist critique of renting poor women’s wombs as ‘hate speech’ and make an actual ‘news’ story out of such slander.”
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