Sex Robots and Vegan Meat by Jenny Kleeman

Author:Jenny Kleeman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2020-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

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Some women want children but don’t want to be pregnant. It’s a rarely spoken but undeniable fact. It’s considered unnatural – heretical, even – to want babies without pregnancy, but that doesn’t stop some women from thinking about it, and even expressing it, under the veil of anonymity. An ‘Am I Being Unreasonable’ thread on the parenting site Mumsnet, entitled ‘If you had money to burn, would you use a surrogate?’, asked users if they would ‘pay for an American surrogate if you simply didn’t want to wait/go through the pregnancy’. At least seven women said they would. ‘Oh god yes. I had horrible HG [hyperemesis gravidum] with both my pregnancies but even putting that aside it’s not an experience I savoured,’ said one. ‘Yes I would. Pregnancy is horrible!’ said another. ‘In a heartbeat,’ said a third.

But most of the responses in the thread were negative and outraged. There’s a tacit acceptance that a woman who wants to raise a child but doesn’t want to give birth to it isn’t fit to be a mother, because if she isn’t willing to undergo the initial sacrifice of giving up her body to a baby, she won’t ever be able to put the child first. This makes superficial sense, until you remember that fathers find a way to put their children first without giving up their bodies to them; they have to do this, by default. The physical sacrifice of bearing a child doesn’t necessarily make you an attentive parent, and to assume it does is to claim that men can never be as devoted to their children as mothers are. And there are plenty of mothers who are more than happy to go through pregnancy and birth, but are unwilling to put the baby first when it arrives.

There are serious reasons why women might not want to go through pregnancy. As much as some of Sahakian’s clients might buy prosthetic bumps and pretend to be pregnant while using a surrogate, a much larger number of women do the opposite: they conceal their pregnancies for as long as they possibly can, in the knowledge that being pregnant is going to cost them dearly. Despite widespread legislation to prevent it, pregnancy discrimination is a reality for women today across the globe. A study by the UK’s Equality and Human Rights Commission found that one in five British mothers have experienced harassment or negative comments after revealing their pregnancy at work, and 54,000 women a year are pushed out of their jobs due to pregnancy or maternity leave. In the US, the National Partnership for Women and Families says nearly 31,000 pregnancy discrimination charges were filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 2010 and 2015. Women in all industries, in every US state and from every ethnicity, experienced pregnancy discrimination in the workplace.

Only a tiny minority of women worldwide can afford to hire a surrogate, but many more might have valid reasons for thinking twice about carrying their own children.

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