Hot potato rant - feel free to ignore
I'm in the mood for ranting about something controversial and just the thing caught my eye. It's this story and it really bothers me. No, I don't have a problem with a same-sex couple having children - imo there is absolutely no reason for treating same sex families any differently from the "traditional" families and I think discrimination on basis of sexuality is disgraceful.
But it makes me sick that a couple of guys from a privileged first world country, who are obviously quite comfortably off in the financial sense can exploit women in a poor third world country and that this exploitation is celebrated as a triumph for human rights. What right do we have to make the bodies of women commodities for our consumption, to take advantage of the hardships that force them to sell their eggs and wombs to a commercial fertility "clinic" in Mumbai? Is it not grotesque that two privileged Australian people can purchase the luxury of having children by "collecting" the eggs of one third-world woman and "renting a womb" from another third-world woman and in doing so maintain the market that reduces these women to the sum of their reproductive organs .
We should not be taking advantage of their poverty to colonise them, economically, racially and reproductively. It is wrong that same-sex couples do not have the same access to adoption and other means of having children that are open to heterosexual couples. But it turns my stomach that treating underprivileged women as incubators for hire can be seen as a legitimate way of overcoming that injustice.
Rant over. For now.
But it makes me sick that a couple of guys from a privileged first world country, who are obviously quite comfortably off in the financial sense can exploit women in a poor third world country and that this exploitation is celebrated as a triumph for human rights. What right do we have to make the bodies of women commodities for our consumption, to take advantage of the hardships that force them to sell their eggs and wombs to a commercial fertility "clinic" in Mumbai? Is it not grotesque that two privileged Australian people can purchase the luxury of having children by "collecting" the eggs of one third-world woman and "renting a womb" from another third-world woman and in doing so maintain the market that reduces these women to the sum of their reproductive organs .
We should not be taking advantage of their poverty to colonise them, economically, racially and reproductively. It is wrong that same-sex couples do not have the same access to adoption and other means of having children that are open to heterosexual couples. But it turns my stomach that treating underprivileged women as incubators for hire can be seen as a legitimate way of overcoming that injustice.
Rant over. For now.