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Comment and Painting by Lehan Winifred Ramsay
News of Elton John and his partner having a baby has meandered its way over to Unleashed for commentary. As usual the real grist of the discussion is on reproductive rights for gay people, usually described as equal rights versus discrimination, and as usual I’m disturbed by it. Disturbed enough to comment, my comment disturbing enough to receive critical responses. Those critical responses have me rocking back on my seat once again. Is there real cause for my comments, or are they coming from my own biases?
There is something good about these situations, I have to say. They give us cause to reconsider. I remember the case of a woman in her 60’s giving birth a few years ago through reproductive technologies. But I doubt I’d be quite as against it as I am against this. It may not have been a natural thing, but at least the baby developed in the body of the woman who would be it’s mother. But it’s a murky murky thing. What is a right body, and is every body that gives birth going to be accompanied by a woman capable of being a mother? And does it matter, that someone doesn’t have a mother?
What I find myself thinking is this. It doesn’t seem right to me, this situation. And I think I have reason to feel uncomfortable, so I am happy enough with my gut feeling and happy enough to speak out. I think it’s necessary to highlight the ways in which heterosexual people have been pushing the boundaries of reproductive and birth rights for so long. I think we need to take a good long hard look at the laws and loopholes and clean them up – from long ago. Straight people have always done what they wanted if they had the means, and people have always turned a blind eye. So why shouldn’t gay people – isn’t that the way a lot of the the arguments go? And they have a point. We need to clean up the discrepancies now that we can see them.
How does a society define what’s best for people? I really have no idea. All I know is that having a mother seems to matter to animals. A lot. So why doesn’t it matter to us?
Window Dresser's Arms, Pig & Whistle 
Won’t buy into the discussion, because I see some dreadful mothers every week, at work, but, I love the painting!
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There are good and bad people in this world, some are women, others are men.
You have nice heterosexuals, gays and lesbians, and there are also mean and hurtful people in all these categories.
What we got to do, is to have a niceness, or shall we call it a goodness test. If you score 100%, then you can have babies, you can adopt children, you can be a mum or a dad. Your partner can be of the opposite sex,of the same sex as you, or they can be middle sex or sexless….all the naughty people will be castrated, neutered…no more bad parenting, no more wars, and the therapists will have no one to blame…
We will live happily ever after.
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“….all the naughty people will be castrated, neutered…”
Too late! Had my tapence worth of kids!
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ato, you would pass The Goodness Test with flying colours, the test checker would say; we’ll give this bloke 110%… just see how he is entertaining and educating those poor Piglets… and for free 🙂
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Oh, shucks, H! Now I’m embarrassed!
But thank you.
(Flutters eyelids coyly!)
🙂
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As Maxwell Smart used to say, Helvi, “The forces of niceness will always triumph over the forces of rottenness!”
😉
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asty, that was smart of Maxwell 🙂
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I agree with you Helvi. I see some lovely straight, gay, rich, poor, drug addicted, non-addicted, couples all of the time. Whilst the concept of any well to do person simply buying a baby through technology or adoption is abhorrent, the only redeeming feature is that the poor kid may have nannies/caretakers who love them.
What has been proven to be most damaging is the child’s first name. Jaxon, not Jackson, Cyehnna, not Sienna, etc are more likely to present at an Emergency Department in the first five years of life!
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Deliberately raising a child with no mother is a serious ethical issue. The buying and selling of babies is another major issue here. As is the age of the parents. Running simultaneously with this story in the press, is the story of the woman who killed two of her IVF babies in the womb because they were the wrong sex.
The current flexibility of ethics in the context of Western civilisation is a huge social experiment about which any thinking person would have misgivings. Until relatively recently, the extended natural family was the basis of our society. That’s been steadily eroded by a number of changes that have certainly had some beneficial consequences, but such a fundamental change carries serious risks.
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Do you think perhaps that ethics in civilisation (western or not) has see-sawed a lot over the centuries and that since being a homosexual was no longer a criminal act the idea that gay couples could aspire to all things has led to what Elton and his spouse have done. It is not that long ago when a woman found that the reason for not having children was not her problem but her husband’s, she quietly got pregnant ‘elsewhere’ and they had a happy family.
When the idea of an IVF baby was first on the horizon I was against it but it proceeded as an okay thing to do. I’m less happy about the various manipulations going on there than I am with gay blokes arranging to have a baby. What Elton did somehow seems more natural.
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There are a number of ways by which homosexuals have traditionally been able to have children. How else do you think the British House of Lords has been able to perpetuate itself? 🙂
It isn’t clear to me what the past criminality of homosexual sex has to do with the ethics of a couple buying a baby. Particularly not when the purchasers are late forties (I think) and sixties. And when they intend to raise it without a mother.
Your suggestion that this old persecution is what led to the purchase doesn’t seem to me to bode well for the child. Still, they can buy it a lot, including friends, and they might become genuinely fond of it.
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Michael Jackson chose a more traditional way of buying his babies. No more ethical though. Their mother was quite happy to sell them to him and they fetched a very high price. Apparently the birth of the second left her unable to have any more children, but she says she’s not interested in children and wouldn’t be a good mother., and really that’s hard to argue with.
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The decriminalisation of homosexuality is relevant to this particular couple buying/getting a baby because it is in the open now and it is news and we read about.
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Don’t necessarily disagree with you Voice. I was saying that ‘the current flexibility…’ is really no different from what has been the case in the past. Big difference of course is that we all get to read about it. I just don’t think that the basis of our society has been eroded when I look at it historically. The past was also very gory from a family point of view depending on how many centuries one goes back. I certainly would never wish to be born at any other time in history – the films make them look so clean when in fact they were filthy and often disease ridden people. But we still go on, don’t we? People like Elton and Jackson are not the norm. Let’s ignore their little expeditions, for now anyway.
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Maybe it is just the rhetoric that has changed.
I don’t have any illusions about living in the far past. Even the elite lived a pretty awful life a lot of the time. For some reason I am reminded of a castle I toured in Ireland. One of the coveted jobs hundreds of years ago was stirring the cesspool below the castle, into which the chamber pots were emptied. The job was coveted because it got the wretch inside the castle, into relative safety from marauders. The fumes were cleverly directed into the closets of the gentry in the upper rooms, in order to kill the lice in their clothing.
Perfumes were much valued in those days.
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Talking about mothers. I’m right now listening to the ABC 774 (local radio) wherein some Irish writer -don’t know who because I didn’t turn the radio on when he started speaking- said words to the effect, “imagine a terrible crime. What’s a terrible crime… a mother who kills her children. Infanticide is a horrible crime. Lady McBeth, when she kills her children she shouts out, ‘unsex me here!'”
Oh, dearrrrrrr!
Lady McBeth has certainly uttered these words but she did not kill her children. Medea did!
He’s been lecturing for the last half hour and still going strong. I don’t think he accepts the phenomenon of taking a breather, putting the occasional full stop! Mouth runs like a torrent!
Wonder who it is.
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Having a good mother is important. Not all mothers are good mothers or good people in the first place. But what Elton and his mate have done/arranged doesn’t bother me much. Probably not the most sensible thing to do though.
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