Surrogacy is horrific and quite unsettling. I've visited several newborns who have been handed over to surrogate couples. I'll never forget the first one, the new (adoptive) mother was absolutely overjoyed with her baby, she was an older woman who had suffered many losses and she couldn't quite believe that she finally had a baby in her arms. Lovely as the scene was, she looked nothing like a new mother, she wasn't exhausted, in pain, with leaky boobs, a sore perineum, haemorrhoids, she wasn't bleeding, she wasn't tearful and overwhelmed, she looked like what she was...a woman playing at being a mother. I'm sure that her baby has had a wonderful life, the parents were fairly wealthy, they seemed happy enough together, but who knows?
The worst was a baby boy handed over to a male couple. I'll probably have the LGB penguin calling me homophobic again, but I don't think that gay men have a right to have children, they don't have uteruses or breasts (usually
![Face with rolling eyes :rolling_eyes: 🙄](https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/joypixels/emoji-assets@5.0/png/64/1f644.png)
) and they're not biologically adapted to care for children (I know that lots of single dads do an amazing job, but the vast majority of those didn't purchase their children)
The couple had a female friend staying to help to care for the baby until the nanny arrived from abroad. One of the "fathers" had returned to work a day or so after the baby came home from the birth centre, the other was at home, but when I visited, barely acknowledged me and didn't interact with the baby at all. The woman friend had been doing the feeding, changing and getting up in the night, she was clearly getting very attached to the baby, but not one of the fathers even held the baby during the two visits that I made, they couldn't have been less interested. It upset and angered me at the time, and amongst my colleagues, I'm not the only one who has a hard time dealing with babies who are purchased, like a designer pet.