That screengrab shaming Meghan Trainor really got up my nose. Shaming women who, for whatever reason, can't/don't become mothers "naturally" has been around since forever and its disgusting. It's just another way divide and conquer. Divide the women into those who carry and give birth and those who don't, then make it so those aren't "Real Women" and therefore are lesser and deserve being disenfranchised wholesale. Then convince the former group that they're special, and shower them with praise while also disenfranchising them under the guise of "but it's good for the baby that you don't do X", or "why do you need Y when you have everything you need because you're so special and give birth?"
You don't deserve a gold star for pushing out a baby; every lifeform on the planet does that in some shape or form. You also don't deserve a gold star for actively rearing children--however they became yours--because that's also something you should be doing. However, it seems like so few people do that anymore these days >:(
one of the anti abortion crowds favourite stories is the child born with a severe illness/condition despite being advised to abort, and miraculously surviving - i am guessing that this is what she/they/vile exploiters of a child's desperate fight to survive are hoping to turn this narrative into
Robyn I love you and thanks for covering this! One note in the third to last paragraph you wrote “ …if a surrogate refuses to abort a child with a severe birth defect. “ pretty sure you meant fetus, not child, right?
It should be noted that Jennifer Lahl, tagged in Katy Faust's X post, runs an anti-surrogacy group (the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network - they moved into anti-trans activism as well when they realized the money it brings in). Both Lahl and Faust worked for weirdo Robert Oscar Lopez's sham International Children's Rights Institute (ICRI), which was set up to harass and demean gay parents and their children. BTW, Aaron Kheriaty and Helen Alvare also were in ICRI. Kheriaty recently helped co-write the anti-trans "Wolves in White Coats" U.S. Department of Health and Human Services paper. Alvare is an anti-abortion legal professor who should be tried as a foreign agent since she works for the Vatican to try to turn the US into a conservative Catholic theocracy.
ICRI shut down after Faust broke the law in Taiwan and got banned. Lahl has tried to purge the internet of any articles that list her as a member of ICRI. Alvare and Kheriaty also omit ICRI from their bios. Faust is a bit of a creep as well - the weird church she runs with her husband hired a predator once who molested a teen. She's on record as saying she tries to talk to other people's children alone in order to get info about their parents from them. She's got this weird sugar daddy thing going on with Australian bigot Lyle Shelton where he pays her to visit him in Australia each year.
Good research, Robyn! You really worked hard pn this story to get the names of the surgeries and their costs. Might I just observe that pediatric neonatal cardiac surgeries at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston used to be cutting edge under Drs Debakey and Cooley, and then a******* like Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, Rick Perry, Ken Paxton and Rev Richard Jeffries started superceding medical science like trans surgeries and intra uterine surgeries with quackery, religion, and politics, and now UCLA is number one. FAFO. They sure screwed the pooch.
Ta, Robyn. Each os us only has one individual vote, but we can use our voices, our words, and our will. Reach out to others (friends, colleagues, neighbors, family members) and explain to them the importance of voting in every election, every year. That voting for most Americans is an every-four-years experience is a huge part of the mess we're in today. Do you drive? Offer to take others to the polls, before and after work. Postcard, canvass, phonebank. Contribute to your chosen candidates as you can. When we vote, we WIN!!
They want white Christian babies. It Gilkar and Ahmed were white and Christian, Paxton wouldn’t be interfering at all. He’s only siding with West to score points with Texas fundagelicals that he desperately needs to win his senate seat.
So, where are the rest of West's children, in all this? Did she bring them to Texas with her?
The thing about being a surrogate, and also about selling your eggs (every poor woman has looked into this) is that you can't do either unless you have already produced a healthy child of your own. That's the proof that you can do it. So did West uproot her family and take them to Texas with her? Is she currently married? How do her other children feel about this nonsense?
Guess what lady. You wanna blow up these people's lives, your life is about to get blown up too.
If it were actually about the babies, that suffering infant wouldn't have been brought into the world after the dx at what, 23 weeks. I'm sorry if this is offensive to anyone but we don't put our pets through this kind of useless suffering. It's all based on mythology and fear.
And nope, it never has been about the babies, and it sure as shit isn't about the women.
At the risk of assuming if only temporarily the mantle of the Suicidally Fact/Fairness-Intoxicated Liberal (against which type I have been known to rail a li'l bit in my day), I feel obliged to note that Jibril figures prominently in Islamic angelology, so the name, form notwithstanding, isn't per se "explicitly Christian". The renaming by the surrogate is offensively high-handed no matter what, and I'm under no illusion that the choice was predicated on her hewing to some woolly notion of ecumenical accommodation -- it's just some weird accident and/or a function of ignorance in the comparative-religion dept. on either her part or that of the too-clever-by-half anti-choicers gathering about her -- but the moniker itself, strictly speaking, is pan-Abrahamic.
But evangelical fundamentalist christians don't see it that way. They do not consider Muslims as people who worship the same gawd as they do. They always bring up that Muslims worship the Prophet or Allah which they are too stupid or ignorant to realize is gawd in Arabic. These people want to deport all Muslims because they think Islam is going to take over the country because they are hateful, bigoted people who don't really follow the teachings of Jesus.
So wait. She ran to Texas because she thought it would go better for her in terms of awarding custody ... but then wants the biological parents to pay for everything?
Gabriel, or Jibril in Arabic, is purportedly the angel who put Muhammad into contact with God to receive the Qur'an.
That screengrab shaming Meghan Trainor really got up my nose. Shaming women who, for whatever reason, can't/don't become mothers "naturally" has been around since forever and its disgusting. It's just another way divide and conquer. Divide the women into those who carry and give birth and those who don't, then make it so those aren't "Real Women" and therefore are lesser and deserve being disenfranchised wholesale. Then convince the former group that they're special, and shower them with praise while also disenfranchising them under the guise of "but it's good for the baby that you don't do X", or "why do you need Y when you have everything you need because you're so special and give birth?"
You don't deserve a gold star for pushing out a baby; every lifeform on the planet does that in some shape or form. You also don't deserve a gold star for actively rearing children--however they became yours--because that's also something you should be doing. However, it seems like so few people do that anymore these days >:(
one of the anti abortion crowds favourite stories is the child born with a severe illness/condition despite being advised to abort, and miraculously surviving - i am guessing that this is what she/they/vile exploiters of a child's desperate fight to survive are hoping to turn this narrative into
Robyn I love you and thanks for covering this! One note in the third to last paragraph you wrote “ …if a surrogate refuses to abort a child with a severe birth defect. “ pretty sure you meant fetus, not child, right?
It should be noted that Jennifer Lahl, tagged in Katy Faust's X post, runs an anti-surrogacy group (the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network - they moved into anti-trans activism as well when they realized the money it brings in). Both Lahl and Faust worked for weirdo Robert Oscar Lopez's sham International Children's Rights Institute (ICRI), which was set up to harass and demean gay parents and their children. BTW, Aaron Kheriaty and Helen Alvare also were in ICRI. Kheriaty recently helped co-write the anti-trans "Wolves in White Coats" U.S. Department of Health and Human Services paper. Alvare is an anti-abortion legal professor who should be tried as a foreign agent since she works for the Vatican to try to turn the US into a conservative Catholic theocracy.
ICRI shut down after Faust broke the law in Taiwan and got banned. Lahl has tried to purge the internet of any articles that list her as a member of ICRI. Alvare and Kheriaty also omit ICRI from their bios. Faust is a bit of a creep as well - the weird church she runs with her husband hired a predator once who molested a teen. She's on record as saying she tries to talk to other people's children alone in order to get info about their parents from them. She's got this weird sugar daddy thing going on with Australian bigot Lyle Shelton where he pays her to visit him in Australia each year.
Gabriel is in quran. But anyway ...
Good research, Robyn! You really worked hard pn this story to get the names of the surgeries and their costs. Might I just observe that pediatric neonatal cardiac surgeries at the Texas Heart Institute in Houston used to be cutting edge under Drs Debakey and Cooley, and then a******* like Greg Abbott, Dan Patrick, Rick Perry, Ken Paxton and Rev Richard Jeffries started superceding medical science like trans surgeries and intra uterine surgeries with quackery, religion, and politics, and now UCLA is number one. FAFO. They sure screwed the pooch.
Ta, Robyn. Each os us only has one individual vote, but we can use our voices, our words, and our will. Reach out to others (friends, colleagues, neighbors, family members) and explain to them the importance of voting in every election, every year. That voting for most Americans is an every-four-years experience is a huge part of the mess we're in today. Do you drive? Offer to take others to the polls, before and after work. Postcard, canvass, phonebank. Contribute to your chosen candidates as you can. When we vote, we WIN!!
They want white Christian babies. It Gilkar and Ahmed were white and Christian, Paxton wouldn’t be interfering at all. He’s only siding with West to score points with Texas fundagelicals that he desperately needs to win his senate seat.
Yeah, that is Paxton’s political career summed up in a nutshell!
So, where are the rest of West's children, in all this? Did she bring them to Texas with her?
The thing about being a surrogate, and also about selling your eggs (every poor woman has looked into this) is that you can't do either unless you have already produced a healthy child of your own. That's the proof that you can do it. So did West uproot her family and take them to Texas with her? Is she currently married? How do her other children feel about this nonsense?
Guess what lady. You wanna blow up these people's lives, your life is about to get blown up too.
Where does this stop? Seriously, I am not being rhetorical, what is the end game here? What do these people actually want?
Control of women. Complete and total control.
What does that mean though, subservience, slavery? Do they even know?
And for LGBTQ to stop existing.
🙄 They can pry my faggotry from my cold, dead, hands.
That is a fucking horrific situation, and I pity so many of these people (but not fucking all of them).
If it were actually about the babies, that suffering infant wouldn't have been brought into the world after the dx at what, 23 weeks. I'm sorry if this is offensive to anyone but we don't put our pets through this kind of useless suffering. It's all based on mythology and fear.
And nope, it never has been about the babies, and it sure as shit isn't about the women.
They would also be ensuring that the baby got the very best medical care, instead of whatever is available in Texas.
Exactly ☝️
At the risk of assuming if only temporarily the mantle of the Suicidally Fact/Fairness-Intoxicated Liberal (against which type I have been known to rail a li'l bit in my day), I feel obliged to note that Jibril figures prominently in Islamic angelology, so the name, form notwithstanding, isn't per se "explicitly Christian". The renaming by the surrogate is offensively high-handed no matter what, and I'm under no illusion that the choice was predicated on her hewing to some woolly notion of ecumenical accommodation -- it's just some weird accident and/or a function of ignorance in the comparative-religion dept. on either her part or that of the too-clever-by-half anti-choicers gathering about her -- but the moniker itself, strictly speaking, is pan-Abrahamic.
But evangelical fundamentalist christians don't see it that way. They do not consider Muslims as people who worship the same gawd as they do. They always bring up that Muslims worship the Prophet or Allah which they are too stupid or ignorant to realize is gawd in Arabic. These people want to deport all Muslims because they think Islam is going to take over the country because they are hateful, bigoted people who don't really follow the teachings of Jesus.
Yes. According to Islam, archangel Gabriel is the one who spoke to Mohammed.
We were all so dewy, young and innocent back then.
I'm not convinced that I was ever all three of those things at the same time.
So wait. She ran to Texas because she thought it would go better for her in terms of awarding custody ... but then wants the biological parents to pay for everything?
That's some fucked up grifting there.
Maybe she doesn't want to give the fee back?