It’s hardly surprising that dippy modern feminists have gone so ga-ga for the batty nonsense that’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Dippy, literary cat-lady Margaret Atwood clutches her pearls over an imagined future where a shortage of fertile females sees women turned into slave broodmares. In reality, a catastrophic decline in fertility and a shortage of breeding-age women in China has had the opposite effect. In what was traditionally a hyper-patriarchal society, wealthier-than-ever young women are able to pick and choose men as they please – or not at all.
But, while batty feminists have played silly public Handmaid dress-ups, a something much closer to the Republic of Gilead has been festering right under their noses. Perhaps if they weren’t so addled by the stench of cat’s piss and hormonal dementia, they might have taken notice.
The latest and most notorious is, of course, the loopy excesses of transgenderism. Finally, even the dimmest bulbs of the feminist left are waking up that there’s something deeply odious about consigning women to the status of “bonus holes”, “menstruating people”, “uterus-havers” and “egg-producers”.
But those are, at least, mere (if insulting) words from the cocks-in-frocks lobby. The literal status of mere “egg-producers” and “uterus-havers” has long been foisted upon women, mostly poor women from developing countries, for years, by the commercial surrogacy industry.
The Greek government appears to be cracking down on this biological imperialism.
Desperate Australian parents are unable to take their babies home or even hold them after Greek police raided a world-renowned surrogacy clinic in Crete and took the newborns into detention.
The Australian understands about eight newborns – including several Australian babies – are being held by the Greek government in a high-security section of a Crete hospital.
Note how this is being pitched entirely sympathetically for those exploiting human incubators. Meanwhile, the Greeks allege that it’s not all sunshine and light and altruism in the human brood-mare industry.
The surrogacy clinic, the Mediterranean Fertility Institute, which the Australian understands has been used by hundreds of parents internationally to successfully deliver healthy babies, was raided by federal police over accusations of human trafficking and fraud […]
Greek police allege the clinic, founded more than 30 years ago by obstetrician Ioannis Giakoumakis, is a criminal organisation that exploited 169 foreign vulnerable women, forcing them to be egg donors or surrogates, and defrauded patients through sham embryo transfers and engaging in illegal adoptions.
Members of the clinic’s medical team have been arrested and imprisoned, accused of child trafficking, while police continue their investigation.
If true, the accusations are a deep indictment of an industry that exploits women from almost entirely poor, developing countries. Countries like India, Thailand and Ukraine (until the Russian invasion) are the most common sources of surrogates. These are women who essentially rent out their bodies to couples – not just women unable to normally bear children, but gay men and the ‘too posh to push’ rich – from wealthy Western countries.
The dark side of the industry was previously thrown into the spotlight by the case of baby Gammy. In 2016, Gammy was born with Down syndrome, while his twin sister Pipah was not. The commissioning parents, from Australia, left the ‘dud’ baby to be raised by his Thai mother, and took the healthy one home. The ensuing court case revealed that the commissioning father had previous convictions for child sex offences.
But there’s precious little sympathy for the women being used, in reporting of this latest case.
Australian couples to whom the Australian spoke said when they arrived in Crete, happily awaiting the arrival of their baby, all seemed normal at the fertility institute. It was bustling with doctors, pregnant women and excited parents anticipating their babies.
Within days, all the employees had been imprisoned and the clinic had been shut down […]
The parents need to undergo a DNA test to prove their link to their baby, but the results are slow; in the meantime, they’re missing irreplaceable time with their newborn babies.
Even if the DNA results are positive, the district attorney’s office needs to grant the parents permission to take their babies home and out of the country.
Immigration lawyer Roman Deauna said there were issues of DNA confirmation and then citizenship to be worked through.
“I refuse to call it a Greek tragedy … but it is,” he told the Australian. “To be denied access to your baby – can you imagine the cruelty of it?”
The Australian
Nothing about the cruelty of exploiting the bodies of poor women from developing countries, though.
Call it what it too often is: biological imperialism.
We close down puppy mills, but human mills are just fine, apparently.
