welcome to the fest

I'm really fed up with women being erased and referred to in dehumanizing terms like this.

https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out ... e-n1251394

I read the article. And yes, they try very hard to make the whole thing very clinical.
So, what confounds me is how convoluted the whole endeavor of this surrogacy is.

It seems that there must be an egg donor (woman number one). Then there must be a surrogate (woman number two). With this set up there has to be in vitro fertilization (petri dish) and then the embryo has to be implanted into the surrogate.

Even though there are two women involved they just have token parts. One is given drugs so she will lay them an egg. One is artificially implanted so her uterus can be used to house the baby until they can take it away. The role of the women is diminished to ovary and uterus.

This gay male couple is upset because the insurance company won't cover this entirely unnatural way of creating a child. There is quite a lot of doctoring involved in each step. All the parts are so divided up. I can see why the doctors are in favor of all this doctoring ($$$$$$$)

Something else the article mentioned is that they have a friend from high school who was willing to donate an egg. Not apparently willing to be a rent-a-womb. Or maybe the gay couple want it this clinical and woman detached as possible.

I guess adoption isn't as fun as having your own with the women involved being as distant from the process as possible.

Just one short step to having artificial uteruses and creation of eggs from other human cells. Then we won't need any women at all...

What a world...

me too. they could just adopt a kid that's already living and in need of a loving parents. I'm sure it's more affordable. why this *narcissistic* need to have your own genetically descendent??? I mean, you're gay, you're already not gonna have it with a woman, why still explore one???? I also hate how they ALWAYS avoid mentioning there's a human being that's gonna gestate and give birth to that kid, and this mother will probably be attached to her son or daughter. It's so traumatic for the woman involved, only entitled pricks like men would do this. It's outrageous. It's just explotation, surrogacy shouldn't be covered. It shouldn't be allowed in the first place. Those dudes should either adopt a kid or stop trying to use women.

I agree. Adoption isn't easy, either, but at least the child is already there and waiting for a loving family.

The objectification of women seems to know few bounds. With this new way of looking at genders/sexes, the actual female is being boxed in as a mere necessity for reproduction rather than a living, feeling, thinking person. Otherwise smart people seem to love to share memes and opinions that women aren't the only people who need to deal with menstruation, and I've even seen some postings that swear that women aren't the only ones who can have babies, that men can, too.

Well, those two men can't, despite their gender preferences. Not that it would make much of an argument, as there are enough stories of barren women and married couples who couldn't have babies for some reason or other throughout history, many of us having such in our own families.

When the insurance companies ever get it straight about covering the "donor" and/or the "womb" then we'll have the objectification of women pretty much carved in stone and sprinkled with diamond dust. When science figures out a way to foolproof turn a man's cell into an egg cell, women won't be needed for donation purposes. When science figures out a way to grow the baby without the woman, then the female will be worthless altogether, like an obsolete machine. I say "when" instead of "if" because I'm pretty sure someone's working on all that and it's just a matter of time before it happens, and a matter of less time if it's encouraged to happen. Misogyny is strong among the elite, and the elite are who push for the progress they want.

I don't think women will ever get "obsolete". I mean, misogynists - men - have tryied to make us obsolete for what, thousands of years? Or at least they have succeded in making most of us submissive until the last 50 years or so. But they haven't succeded in making us "obsolete". As a scientist, I'm pretty sure it's very hard to make up an egg out of a male stem cell, because you probably need both XX chromossomes to coordinate it, an egg is 20 times bigger than a spermatozoid and has so much more "ingredients" than simply half of the DNA that'll make up a new human (thought we have seen somewhat success the other way around, making a primitive spermatozoid out of a female stem cell). And gestating a human baby outside of a human body - a woman's body - is impossible nowadays. Thought I agree we have enough rich ass misogynists willing to invest in ways to "make women obsolete", especially within the guise of "progress" or making the whole pregnancy process "less of a hurdle for women", I'm not sure we'll see it in our lifetime.

Maybe not in our lifetime.

Granted, we're not there yet, but as I see it, it's just a matter of time. Short time? Long time? Probably long time.

That we've made what progress we have in mucking around with DNA and studying reproduction, just in the last 50 years, seems miraculous as the previous millennia we were pretty much stuck with what we had and the natural way of doing things.

But starting with the first "test tube baby" the brave new world made a brave new breakthrough. It wasn't perfected, but there was one success. Over the last decades, there have been a number of such "test tube baby" births for women who wanted sperm donations but not to have to have sex with the right man (assuming she couldn't find him but could afford a medical service).

I know science isn't quite there yet, but someone's working on it, I'm sure. I hope you're right about women never being "obsolete". In the meantime, women may well run the risk of becoming nothing more than 9-month incubation machines to bring forth the desired humans those in charge want to be born. That's been done before (the Aryan children Hitler wanted for the next generation of Germans, for example - women with the right looks and the right age were used as recipients of the sperm of the right men and treated well while they incubated the children Hitler wanted to populate Germany - that bit of history comes to mind, and it was less than 100 years ago that this happened). Not a pleasant thought, by any stretch of the imagination.