It’s not a morally odd thing for a woman to use a surrogate to gestate a child. Though the laudability wane when the purpose is to save stretch marks and the trouble of weight gan upon your half-naked selfie professional endeavors.
There is little difference in the veracity level of what comes out of a politician’s office versus the facts as distributed by The Kardashian family commercial machine and their ilk. They live carefully promoted and publicized lives for profit, spun by the fiction of reality production, distributed to the minds of women who have no desire to discern fact from fiction. Fair enough. Men have professional wrestling that offers the same primitive endorphin rush from playing pretend. But it’s real. Yes, wrestlers really do hurt themselves in performance of their drama. And Lamar Odom did come within inches of dying during his brothel excessive substance abuse in the Nevada desert. Those things really happened. That doesn’t diminish the fact it’s almost entirely staged.
A storyline was established wherein Kim Kardashian was informed by medical professionals, or, more specifically, her doctor who agrees to appear on television, that having a third child may literally kill her. You know how many multi-millionaire celebrities die each year during birth at Cedars-Sinai hospital? Hint: it’s less than the indigenous Kanembu women of Chad. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that Kim Kardashian has defective or dangerous reproductive organs. Despite the infantilism inherent in her brand image, she’s 37 years of age and has undergone multiple superficial surgeries, injections, and radical shape-shifting cinches through the years. She’s not a spring chicken uterus. Yet, the truth probably sits fairly far across the room from impending demise by standard pregnancy.
Surrogacy is not a big a trend among wealthy white women in Hollywood as adoption. In the case of single women in the industry, adoption of a baby from Southeastern Asia or the Saharan Africa not only provides a colorful offspring to tote in the Graco stroller, but a virtue signal that you’re a citizen of the world who cares for the tired and poor and hungry. Not necessarily the tired and poor and hungry troubled and often drug addicted births of your own nation’s cities, but certainly Madonna and Angelina Jolie have set the stage for adopting the adorable United Babies of Benetton. Not all black babies score the same points in Brentwood and the Upper West Side. Sad social customs fact of the locals there.
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West chose surrogacy because adoption flies in the face of rampant narcissism. Whereas reproduction for the sake of a People magazine well paid exclusive First Baby Photos spread fits like a glove. These E! productions don’t invent themselves from week to week. Somebody needs to be thinking full season of episodes and teaser moments.
Kardashian opted to hire out a uterus for her third child, for the sum of $60,000 with some kickers for good performance through the three trimesters. The process has remained entirely anonymous, not for the sake of the baby, or the surrogate, but such that the grand ruse that Kardashian and West are having a baby can occur uninterrupted with discussions of who’s really having the baby. That could affect the bottomline. Both ego and dollars.
The procedure of surrogacy is relatively new relative to the span of time over which humans have been knocking out children the old-fashioned way. Watch the Blue Lagoon for an example, both of squatting out a child as an active teen and having a stage mom off camera urging her underaged daughter to get naked for art’s sake.
There’s most definitely a level of judgement over couples, specifically women, who choose surrogacy to produce a baby. An underlying sentiment for some naturalists and Fundamentalists alike that when a higher power says you’re done, you’re done. And for others the notion that with so many unwanted babies available for adoption, albeit mostly more troubled background babies, why use science, cash, and energy to produce even more kids. The criticism, such that is exists, largely is woman on woman rhetoric, as men inherently know to remove themselves from all discussions involving pregnancies and childbirth. Also, they simply don’t care that much.
However, more important than the cliche bit of mommies criticizing mommies is the media established PC lens through which to cover surrogacy births. That being, anything that provides a woman more choices regarding pregnancies is the position you must tilt your bias, or else. Surrogacy is not the same as abortion. In fact, it’s nearly the opposite. But the zeitgeist song remains the same. Believe Her. Or whatever that means in reproductive options. Even if that her is a shallow, cynical, former adult film star who fakes family drama for an amazingly profitable living.
The unwillingness of the press to deride, or even mention the “surrogacy” portion of the Kardashian-West gestational events, plays right into the television producers, marketing analytics team, and publicists for the Kardashians. The ability to produce a “Baby Number 3 for Kim and Kanye” clickbait fantasy headline without the encumbrances of the process is inestimable in dollars. The baby show for Kim Kardashian lacking any baby was proof of the power of their promotional team combined with a lack of ability of the media to raise any questions whatsoever out of fear of appearing to be rule journalists. Let alone be cutoff by the Kardashians for future insider stories. All entirely fictional, but amazingly popular at grocery store checkout stands.
On a scale of importance far grander than the Kardashians remains the issue of how children are conceived in the era of advanced reproductive sciences. From 10,000 B.C until a couple decades ago, the matter was largely moot. Now it’s a wide open Amazon search result of baby procurement. With Prime they may even come in eight months. There needs to be a discussion as to how we will proceed as a culture in a time of increasing options heretofore never discussed. There may be a decision that if you can afford it, everything’s on the table. The framework should not be, nobody is allowed to comment on or questions various options. A decision by journalists who cower in fear of anything that might blacklist them on a women’s rights hashtag isn’t particularly helpful.
There probably isn’t a solid reason why Kim Kardashian and Kanye West can’t gin up a Craigslist ad to hire a warm body for their baby. But shouldn’t we be able to discuss this in the media? The laws will never catch up to the moral discussion, thus the even greater need for the latter.
Photo credit: Instagram
