für deine traurige lage haste nen bombenhumor

[…]

In October 2015, Sophie Jeaneau, a French friend and producer, showed me an article on the website of the Le Figaro newspaper entitled “A Polish village saved from the Nazis by a false epidemic.” It sparked my curiosity. One read that two Polish doctors had protected no less than “8,000 men, women and children of the Jewish faith” during the Second World War in the village of Rozwadow, near Stalowa Wola, an industrial town in the southeast of the country. The two doctors were named Eugeniusz “Eugene” Lazowski and Stanislaw Matulewicz.

Their method was ingenious: by inoculating healthy patients with a benign bacterium, they obtained false positives in typhus tests in use at the time. The Germans were scared to death of typhus, so they used to quarantine infected areas and avoided going there to confiscate food or deport its inhabitants. This is how, according to the sources I had consulted, 8,000 people in the Rozwadow area had been able to stay alive. Most of them were Jews. […]

It is currently absolutely legal for both homosexual and heterosexual couples to do ivf with a willing woman, to have the biological father (or in many cases not just him) recognize paternity after the child is born and then have HIS partner adopt the child as part of a stepchild adoption (which is massively simplified). This covers pretty much all cases where people insist that altruistic surrogacy is needed. it also very conveniently assures that it is actually altruistic and voluntary because if any party changes their mind at any times, it just does not happen.

it allows us sidestep most of the horrible moral issues of commercial surrogacy: how do we make sure women do not just do it out of financial duress? (Because everyone knows that any contractual connection between her relinquishing parental rights and her receiving money for it would be unenforceable. This does not stop the ability of the adopting parents to support her financially). how do we handle it if the surrogate mother or the adopting parents realize she wants an abortion (exactly the way as with any other pregnancy. Unfortunately it is not quite her body, her choice due to Germany’s archaic laws, but she has no disadvantage over a conventional pregnancy). what if there is a change of plans/custody battle etc? (The child is treated like any other child. The courts decide in the best interest of the child).

the ONLY thing that is different from surrogacy is that there is no way to take the child from the mother once it is born without her consent, because she is the mother. This is imo entirely warranted by the fact that a) the woman who carries the child has at the time of birth the closest bond to it by virtue of having had it inside of her for 9 months b) the woman who carries the child had the highest personal risk and c) the woman who just gave birth is by far the most vulnerable party. In cases where it actually is completely voluntary and everyone is okay with it, that is a non issue. In the cases where it IS a problem, it becomes a regular custody battle.

on the other hand, commercial surrogacy is in practice exploitative. also, I live in a country where surrogacy is legal and have worked on quite a few cases of people who have done it (I’d say around 20-25) and despite the fact that it is legal here, I have yet to see a single case where the couple actually opted for domestic surrogacy. That’s because Israel actually has relatively strict requirements for surrogacy. So people STILL go abroad to do it there for cheaper and with less oversight. The idea that people will stop going abroad if it is legalized is completely delusional. There just aren’t enough willing surrogate mothers to match demand (this is the case for the US also).