NOM BLOG

Founder of "Anonymous Us" Project on Gay People Seeking The Eggs of Young Women To Start Families

 

Alana Newman, founder of The Anonymous Us Project, writes at The Public Discourse: "Young women now have to defend themselves not only from stereotypical sexual predators, but also from older women and gay men who seek their eggs."

Value depends on scarcity. In the world of human reproduction, the most valuable entity is the fertile female—specifically, her eggs and her womb.

The fierce politics surrounding female fecundity and women’s reproductive rights rests not only on a woman’s ability to create new life, but also on the incredible amount of commitment and risk involved when her eggs and her womb are accessed for procreation. Since women are fertile for a shorter period than men, since gestation takes forty long weeks, and since labor and delivery pose life-threatening risks, young women always will face disproportionately high demands for access to their bodies. But those demands are rising in unexpected ways, and from unexpected people.

... Our gay friends and family members may now also be after our daughters’ bodies. These are the only men in the world we thought we could trust because they weren’t interested in our bodies. That is, until they grew older and discovered they wanted to be parents. Today, more and more often, gay men are using egg donors and surrogates to create motherless children on purpose.

... Proponents of redefining marriage call marriage equality “the civil rights struggle of our time.” TV shows such as The New Normal promote surrogacy arrangements with dialogue such as “a family is a family, and love is love.” Characters that criticize the use of surrogacy and egg donation are explicitly depicted as unsympathetic, racist, close-minded bigots.

What these shows (and other memes) do is insist that in order to be a friend to gay people, one must approve, or at least stay neutral toward, all forms of third-party reproduction.

So now, young women must do more than simply defend themselves against aggressive heterosexual males who want to use them for sex. They must also navigate a world filled with new, never-before-seen predators—people they thought they could trust—who aggressively target them for their eggs and their wombs.

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