March 19, 2024

‘The Golden Age of status surrogacy is here’

Now that we’re broached the topic of commodification, let’s turn to Town & Country, America’s lifestyle magazine for the seriously wealthy. One of its articles this month is “In Vitro Veritas: The Truth About the Instagram Baby Boom. The golden age of status surrogacy is here, and the new parents are healthy, thriving, and all over social—get used to it.”

If you can’t find it quickly, just flip to the “Money and Power” section.

The gist of the article is the high net-worth individuals have the power to get the babies they want, especially gay couples. “Surrogacy is something that gay men developed before the culture at large caught up,” writes pop culture journalist Brian Moylan. The mothers are barely mentioned – they are just “carriers”.

The focus of the article is fashion designer Joseph Altuzarra and his husband, the real estate investor Seth Weissman. Their daughter Emma, born of a surrogate mother, came in handy as a prop for Altuzarra’s 2020 fall collection, as advertised in Vogue.

As long as you have money … “As with so much in life, the rich are paying for convenience and how they want to exercise it. The process itself can cost prospective parents anywhere between US$145,000 and $250,000,” Moylan writes.

Money even buys good health and vitality for the ageing commissioning parents: “none of these high-profile mommies and daddies are over the hill. In fact, they’re healthy, they’re thriving, and they’re everywhere. Get used to it.”

What F. Scott Fitzgerald said so well in the Jazz Age rings true today, but this time the prize acquistiions are not fast cars, big houses, and beautiful mistresses, but beautiful babies:

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft, where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.

Status surrogacy means that children are just trinkets, tokens of conspicuous consumption, and their mothers are chattels, mere anonymous “carriers”. It’s the golden age of commodification of human life.

3 thoughts on “‘The Golden Age of status surrogacy is here’

  1. A child is born of a woman, yet for the rest of his/her life, she will be completely excluded. How can this action ever equate to fairness or equality?

  2. This is what capitalist commodification of all forms of life has brought us to. Oligarchic plutocracy goes hand-in-hand with this. Surrogacy is the reproductive objectification of women just as prostitution is the sexual objectification of women. Surrogacy creates a breeder class of marginalized women for the wealthy. We live in a complete dystopia of dehumanization which Big Tech & its transhumanism is hurtling us toward. The totalitarian tyranny is now global with the World Economic Forum’s 4th Industrial Revolution, the Great Reset & the social credit system in which the global ruling class has total control over humanity.

  3. Deliberate deprivation of motherhood should never be an activity to be celebrated. What hope has a child born under these circumstances have of attaining a balanced upbringing?

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