The Time to Fight Surrogacy Is Now
To Fight Surrogacy, We Must Emphasise Material Reality
For this week's FD original, we're so glad to bring you an essay by Miriam Cates, Member of Parliament for Penistone and Stocksbridge.
Ms. Cates argues that surrogacy exposes the limits of rights-based politics, which overlooks the best interests of babies and children. The movement opposing surrogacy would do well to look on the gender-critical movement as a model for how to winningly connect ideas with reality.
Fairer Disputations
The Time to Fight Surrogacy Is Now
MIRIAM CATES
We must emphasise the material reality of fertility, pregnancy, and motherhood, the known facts about the harms of separating babies from their mothers, and the obvious natural requirement for a biological mother and father. Scientific knowledge about pregnancy, birth, and the in-utero relationship between mother and baby is growing. Even in an era of such moral confusion, for most people, contemplating the raw physical reality of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care still elicits an intuitive sense of the injustice and cruelty of removing a helpless newborn from her mother. We must call on this moral sense as we challenge the idea that desiring to be a parent is a sufficient justification for bringing a baby into the world with the express purpose of severing the mother-child bond.
Around the Web
At her Substack, the ever-provocative Freya India draws a link between the widespread use of SSRIs and the increase in young people identifying as "asexual."
GIRLS
Are You Asexual or on Antidepressants?
FREYA INDIA
So my fear is this: you might not be asexual. You might be suffering from PSSD. You might not be a victim of stigma against your sexual identity; you might very well be a victim of the pharmaceutical industry. Trust me that is discrimination. That is a trillion-dollar industry getting away with chemical castration for profit. And please don’t be placated by a progressive movement demanding all this be normalised or telling you that your scepticism is dangerous. There’s a growing network of people out there screaming that they’ve been shut down, unplugged, dulled, their soul vacuumed out, that they feel completely asexual, and nobody is listening. Nobody is fighting for them. Companies are staying silent to protect their profits and victims are shut down for fear of offence.
At The American Mind, Patricia Patnode draws attention to the alarming trend of young women relying on Plan B as a contraceptive.
The American Mind
Popping the Pill
PATRICIA PATNODE
There is real danger in the misconception that Plan B is a contraceptive Tic Tac—a casual, everyday solution. Like any hormonal birth control, it carries a risk of mood swings, anxiety, delayed menstruation, cramping, and a host of other possible, albeit not always common, side effects.
We’ve only just opened the door to questioning the way doctors have been encouraging women to start taking birth control as a standard practice while ignoring patient complaints and side effects. We’ve also only just started to take a critical eye to the way institutional science has studied the effects of birth control and other medications on women’s bodies.
Finally, Victoria Smith responds to the treatment of menopause as a joke. The discomfort of women's embodied experience shouldn't be reduced to a punchline.
The Critic
VICTORIA SMITH
There is no question that some women are hurt by the treatment of menopause as a joke. However, when it comes to the realities of the female body — particularly the ageing female body — there is a feeling that no one need bother with being kind. This is striking in an age where another train company, Network Rail, is too anxious about ‘offence’ to even name the people who experience menopause (unless they happen to be biological males – who do not, in fact, experience menopause). Language can be actual violence, unless you’re dealing with those leaky, bleedy vagina people, in which case, say whatever you like.
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