by Lauren Hamstead Self-interested businesses and charities want surrogacy made easier. But why has no one listened to women? Note: ‘Surrogacy commissioners’ are people seeking to obtain a baby via surrogacy, not to be confused with Law Commissions ie statutory independent government-funded bodies. OBJECT campaigns against surrogacy as one of its five key issues relating …
by Dr E.M Sandra Lee Bartky has outlined how ‘sexual objectification occurs whenever a woman’s body, body parts, or sexual functions are separated out from her person, reduced to the status of mere instruments, or regarded as if they were capable of representing her’.1 This is clear in surrogacy where a woman’s reproductive function is …
WEBINAR – SURROGACY – OBJECT UK – 9 AUGUST 2020 Summary of a panel presentation given on 9 August 2020 at the Object UK webinar on surrogacy. SUMMARY OF GARY POWELL’S PRESENTATION I’ve been a gay rights activist for the past 40 years or so. I don’t buy into the Credo of the appalling homophobic, …
The winner of the Object! Essay Prize 2020 is Lauren Hamstead How do ‘altruistic’ and commercial surrogacy affect the rights of women and children? Introduction In its most basic form, surrogacy requires that a woman gestate a child for a third party and relinquish her child at birth. In popular consciousness the narrative surrounding surrogacy …
OBJECT ESSAY COMPETITION EXTENSION The date for submission has been extended to 15th June 2020. First Prize £400.00. Second Prize £200.00 This competition is open to young women aged 17 – 30. We hope to inspire and encourage young women to develop an interest in feminist theory and activism. Our topic this year is surrogacy …
Surrogacy is the practice in which a woman’s womb is ‘rented’ – she is paid to become pregnant (via artificial insemination of sperm, or implantation of a ‘donated’ egg), to follow rules during the pregnancy (such as aborting foetuses which do not meet the buyers’ wishes) and to then give up her baby to the …
Please respond to the UK surrogacy consultation – 5 minute response here! The UK government is holding a consultation on surrogacy, one of our 5 key issues. The consultation is biased and does not call into question the ethics of surrogacy. The proposed aim of the law ‘reform’ is simply to make it easier for ‘intended parents’ to attain children, at great cost to the rights of mother and child. Please respond to voice your OBJECTion to surrogacy. Here are OBJECT’s suggested answers to key questions that you may copy and paste.
Do the cows in the field know they are shut in? As they shuffle painfully into the milking parlour, do they know there is another way to live their lives? No. Cows are farmed but do not know it. What about us women? Surely it is different, we are human, we have choices. But do we? Are we, surreptitiously and without realising it, subject to the same techniques as the cows, the sheep, the goats? While of course being ‘fed’ the line that we are human and equal to men? History, archaeology, language, sexual politics and the arts all tell the same story: Women are farmed!
If you OBJECT to the exploitation of women as sexual slaves in the prostitution industry, you should also OBJECT to the renting of women’s bodies in reproductive slavery (‘surrogacy’). Here are ten ways ‘surrogacy’ is like prostitution.