(Untitled)

[goobermunch]

This: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/max-mutchnick/where-did-you-get-them_b_168012.html

Tickled my funny bone immensely. Progress comes in strange shapes, folks.

--G

Comments

[drdeleto]

Unfortunate that in order to affirm his family's validity he had to reduce a vital human participant to an oven. It's not "progress" if every step forward entails one step back.

[goobermunch]

I think you may be overly sensitive to what he was saying. Even as my son was approaching his birth, I joked that he wasn't quite "cooked yet" until his mother's bellybutton popped out (like on a butterball turkey). We also joked that he was a bit rare, because she was induced a week before his due date. Culturally, we have referred to pregnancy has having "a bun in the oven" for a long time. The pregnancy and cooking metaphor where woman::oven is one with a long cultural vitality.

I did not read his comment as intended to reduce a vital human participant to the status of a kitchen appliance.

--G

[drdeleto]

Perhaps I'm oversensitive, but what I was objecting to wasn't the metaphor itself. It seemed to me that his argument hinged on her being just a surrogate, just an oven. Perhaps he didn't use the word "just," but the meaning of "She's the oven" in the context of his argument is explicitly to say that the woman that bore their two girls was not a mother, but a tool. He even goes out of his way to divest her of any hereditary contribution to the girls, against all fact: "One of them was biologically his. One of them was biologically mine." He doesn't care to mention that they're both half-oven.

I admit, I think there are fundamental problems with surrogacy. If they can be surmounted, it's through a very careful and nuanced understanding of the relationships involved in such a situation. Mr. Mutchnick's utilitarian approach ("Poof! There is no mom!") does not answer these problems.

[goobermunch]

I don't think the focus of Mr. Mutchnick's article was meant to deal with the nuances of surrogate parenthood. Instead, it was meant to deal with the difficulties gay families have when traveling. A nuanced analysis of surrogacy might be beyond the scope of the piece.

--G

[drdeleto]

Well, if this conversation really happened this way and if this is typically how he talks about the circumstances of their children's birth ( a big if), then it appears the only reason they "respect" the mother is because she did her job and got out of their way. Just going off this article, I think there are multiple signs of this: "I made them." "She is not the 'mom.'" "They went inside the surrogate." Sure, maybe I'm reading too much into these several phrases. But it sounds like the shallowest of gratitude to me.

[drdeleto]

Yeah, you're right, the piece wasn't really about that, and maybe I'm reading into the penumbras and emanations, and perhaps unfairly.