Surrogacy: Who is it really benefiting?

As I sat in my last lecture for my Legal Studies class: Sex and Reproduction, I was thinking of all the new material I had learned regarding surrogacy. So why not talk a little bit about it. There three different types of surrogate mothers:

• Genetic surrogacy or partial surrogacy: This is the most common type of surrogacy. Here the egg of the surrogate mother is fertilized by the commissioning male's sperm. In this way the surrogate mother is the biological mother of the child she carries.


• Total surrogacy: Here the surrogate mother's egg is fertilized with the sperm of a donor - not the male part of the c partum ommissioning couple.

• Gestatory surrogacy or full surrogacy: Here the commissioning couple's egg and sperm have gone through in vitro fertilization and the surrogate mother is not genetically linked to the child.

To begin, who really benefits from surrogacy? In my opinion, it is the intended parents. This can either be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how one looks at it. Although there is always debate on this issue, i will discuss one of the many debates: taking advantage of the poor to obtain a baby. Many times women who seek for surrogate mothers are wealthy women. And although hiring surrogate mothers to carry babies is illegal, most of the times, if not all of the times, women who are hired to carry the babies are women who are poor and do it for the money. The rich are exploiting the poor!

I find this really interesting because although this is meant to help both parties, the wealthy get a baby and the poor receive money for their services, this is a big issue, because there are times when poor women have to do this because they really do need money and not because they are 100% sure they want to carry someone else's baby. there have been cases where surrogate mothers get attached to the baby, that eventually they do not want to give it up and if they do they suffer from serious effects after giving birth.

Also, because it is more expensive to hire surrogate mothers in the United States there is this argument that third world women are being exploited as well and treated like baby Machines. Paid surrogacy in India, for example is legal and more women are willing to get hired, and their services are used more often because it is cheaper.

Finally, another issues with surrogacy is that children are becoming more of a commodity, parents are designing their child, choosing from a list to see what traits they want their child to have, ect. One problem with this is that because surrogacy is becoming more popular, children in foster care are not being adopted, and their stay period is becoming longer. There are so many children who need a home, so instead of looking for a surrogate mother to carry a baby, adoption should be a primary option for having a child. If all fails surrogacy should be their last resource. 

http://www.positive-parenting-ally.com/ethics-of-surrogacy.html

Save the Children #FirstWorldProblems

After leaving our discussion spurred on by the readings on visual documentation I become interested if there has been any shifts in the documentation of Ethiopia and poverty, as well as whether it has coincided with any actual economic or policy changes within the country. Growing up in southern California, many people were less than knowledgable about Ethiopia in any capacity, with the exception of the Feed the Children commercials that launched at the onset of the drought and famine of 1983-1985. I believe a majority of our class is not old enough to remember this actual timeframe in history, however many of the commercials launched in response to this natural disaster were heavily in rotation for a number of years after an extent of the disaster had been contained and in still play to this day to some extent.

Just for background development, in the case some people did not run into such commercials growing up I decided to try to search one of the archaic commercials. Personally, I still remember the extremely underweight children almost too frail to move being paraded on late night television all too well, as well as their distended bellies that are still the bud of many jokes once people do find out I am from there.

 I stumbled across across a few videos reminiscent of the many videos I had seen. All of the following videos in my opinion manipulate images to a great degree. In fact, one of the images that was included in one of the videos was the Kevin Carter's iconic images from his trip to Northern Sudan depicting the vulture preying over a famine stricken Sudanese toddler from the village of Ayod, Sudan.

In efforts to capture the perfect image whether it is for the purpose to represent the raw moment or to serve as call to action for the viewing public there is to an extent a degree of staging that occurs, which ultimately also equates manipulating the subject. In this instance the subject is the marginalized, the have-nots, the hungry, the sickly, and youth this leads to the question whether this equates to exploitation. When this images are captured we need to also weight out what we are able to live with in terms of at what cost does the image warrant the exploitation. Is the after affect or the desired call to attention worth it?

Another interesting aspect of the videos posted below is the lack of a call to action. We mentioned this in class earlier. The stirring up of all these emotions and sense of accomplishment felt by some for just engaging with the images and feeling like a better person for seeing the depths of poverty that exist. Yes, many of us need to be more grateful for what we have and it does become quiet simpler when you see the less fortunate shoved in your face on your big screen television. However, displaying such images whether they are staged, manipulated, and utter examples of exploitation are even WORSE to me when there is no option or suggestion to viewers to help fix the problem they are feeling sorry for and emotional over.  When we joke about things like #FirstWorldProblems I think we become cognizant of a problem, which is the goal, but are missing the latter half of the goal: the change we are hoping for.

Not too surprisingly, the images today asking for donations for Ethiopia are quite similar. The only representation of poverty that I felt was a stray away from these all too paralleling videos was a film shaped to feel like a documentary. The title, Zewdi The Street Kid, in my opinion does much more justice to the target group(marginalized street children in Ethiopia). http://vimeo.com/27882235

Are We Really Helping the Poor?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/12/anti-poverty-programmes?zid=301&ah=e8eb01e57f7c9b43a3c864613973b57f

There has constantly been debates on whether or not anti-poverty programmes are actually helping the poor. The article, “Are We Helping the Poor?” published in 2013 goes into detail on the main debates people have over assistance programmes which prove how poverty statistics have been wrong for several years. It is shared that “[S]tatistics using the official poverty measure do not provide an accurate picture of poverty or the role of government policies in combating poverty,” by Columbia University researchers Christopher Wimer and Liana Fox. There is proof that these government assistance programmes reduce poverty by about 40% since 2010 based on the US Census Bureau. However, this is solely based on studies conducted but where is this information coming from? And how come there hasn’t been visible improvement on the poverty struggles of millions of the poor living in the United States?

Based on the Columbia University Research there has been a decline in child poverty and amongst those in deep poverty but where is the proof of this and how was this study/research conducted? The reason I chose this article was because it made me question the reliability of the research published. Mr. Drum (an impressive figure) stands within my same thoughts. He states that ‘While poverty among the elderly has fallen impressively since 1967 (around the time Medicare was introduced), the percentage of poor Americans aged 18-64 hasn't budged much. The figure dipped from 1967 to 1979, but today is right back where it was 35 years ago, at 15%.” The poverty problem hasn’t improved. Government assisted programs, in my opinion, do help families support but these families are stereotyped for it and these programmes do not get these families out of poverty, its only a way of helping maintain the home under certain circumstances.

Mr. Alhert also believes that this study is flawed and argues that “Welfare benefits will dampen some recipients' drive to seek employment, whether they are technically impoverished or not,” because welfare programs can give more financial help than actually having a job. The anti-poverty problem is a continuous cycle. There are those that believe that these programs do help, and I believe this too. However, certain programs can only help a family so much and do not allow them to get out of poverty without having more resources of getting a proper job in order to maintain a household. Some of those impoverished cannot get a job because they do receive more financial help by not having one which allows them to take care of their children and do much more during the day. However, this is going to be the same routine for them. They have no other opportunities for a brighter and more secure future. So this leads me back to the question of whether or not we are helping the poor with government anti- poverty programs which include social welfare and others. The research conducted by Columbia University states that it has but in all honesty, I feel that it has only left the poor in a deeper poverty trap than they were before. The research does not take into consideration other factors that affect poverty rates in the United States. There should be a system that deliberately tries to increase the amount of those impoverished seeking employment in order to live above the poverty line in the United States.