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Bah- loney. Your parent is the person who parented you. Parenting is a verb. A guy who has an orgasm in the back seat of a car or in a clinic to conceive you isn’t a daddy. A woman who donated some eggs in college isn’t a mommy.

Your only parents are those who love and cherish and raise you. If the people who raised you were cruel to you, even they don’t deserve the title of parents. LONG LIVE ACTUAL PARENTS. They love, they work, they ache, they’d take a bullet for you.

Genetics is just a parlor trick. No difference between children of your genes or adopted etc. Anyone who has had at least one genetic child and one no genetic child knows this. There is no difference.

Anyone here on FR want to rip into adoptive parents????? Bring it. This girl is stupid. Adoptive parents do often have to pay significant money to adopt. DOES THST MAKE THEM LESS OF PARENTS???? People who want to have children and are good parents deserve praise. This little chick doesn’t get it yet. She is at that age where she just finds things about her past to blame on her parents. Common.

I tend to agree with you. Not to say that surrogacy, test tube babies, etc, don’t raise some ethical, moral, and social questions, but this young woman is being just plain disrespectful to her parents - the ones (or one?) who raised her. Was she well taken care of? Loved? Then I don’t know what she’s really complaining about (again, not discounting the real issues raised by modern reproductive technologies). The importance of the biological link is often overstated, IMO.

The courts seem to disagree, though, as several decisions have stated that a man who is a sperm donor (or presumably a woman who is an egg donor, if they’re being consistent and fair, if that’s not too much to expect from the law) can be held liable for support of the children created through the use of their donation. THAT should have a chilling effect on sperm donation, anyway.

I hear ya, Yaelle, but you are refuting arguments that have not been made, at least not in this article and not by me.

"Your parent is the person who parented you. Parenting is a verb. A guy who has an orgasm in the back seat of a car or in a clinic to conceive you isn’t a daddy. A woman who donated some eggs in college isn’t a mommy."

Nobody denies that the person by whom you were parented (verb) is your parent. The point is that an adoptive parent is quite different from --- quite opposite to --- a person who contracts for surrogacy.

An adoptive parent is responding to the need of a child whose parents are dead, or incapacitated, or irresponsible adolescents quite unwilling or unable to take on adult responsibilities, or in prison, or AWOL in parts unknown. The child has a need, his natural parents cannot or will not fulfill it, and therefore he is in an objectively, and widely-acknwowledged, damaged and needy situation. He needs a mom and dad.

The adoptive parents, good and compassionate, step in to fill that void as best they can, and this is defined by "what the child needs." It is centered on restoring, as far as possible, a full childhood.

(Don-o and I are adoptive parents --- our older son is home-grown genetic, our younger one adopted --- and we understand fully that we are both of our sons' mom and dad. Period. Over the years, I have come to know a surprising number of FReepers who are adoptive parents, and they are always praised and never blamed, BY ANYBODY. There is no anti-adoption caucus here.)

But in contrast, a person who makes a surrogacy plan, is not in the position of responding to the needs of a child who is sadly bereft of his mom and dad: they are MAKING him bereft of his mom and/or dad. They planned it that way. The lack of his natural parent(s) is not a glitch: it's a feature.

If the natural parents were ready, willing and able to take and raise their child, that would not be seen as a moral victory, it would be a commercial breach or contract.

Analogy: say a child gets his leg crushed in a traffic accident. It's so bad it can't be fixed, so it's amputated. At some point his parents can arrange for him to get a prosthetic leg and foot. They are responding to his need. Sure, the leg isn't his "natural" leg, but it's the best you can do, since his "natural" leg isn't there anymore. This is love! This is nurture! This is doing as well for him as you can.

BUT: say you have a different plan: you deliberately maim a boy in utero, and intentionally cause him to be born without a leg. If you then get him a prosthetic --- I mean, great, you got him a leg; maybe he'll grow up having no complaints about the prosthetic; but you shouldn't have planned on inflicting that maiming on him in the first place.

There is a difference between responding to a motherless or fatherless child; and deliberately de-motherating and de-fatherating a child.

Elton John said in an interview that his surrogate-born son wouldn't ever know his natural mother [Right, Elton, that's part of the contract!) --- but he and his sodomite "husband" are going to buy another baby--- maybe from the same woman, who knows? --- so their little lifestle accessory boy can have a little brother to play with.

Isn't it sweet?