Shockingly (or not) this question was taken seriously enough to get a lot of calls on radio five this morning. Apparently only women with male owners should be allowed fertility treatment.

I think there is a bloody good argument to be made against IVF treatment at all. But if het couples are allowed IVF on the NHS, why shouldn’t lesbian couples or single women?

Some of the bigots arguments run thus:

1/ THINK OF THE CHILDREN!! #1

Apparently the children of lesbian couples may possibly become depressed or get picked on for, according to one bigot, having an “unconventional family“.

This reminds me a little of an anonymous bloggers recent rant on parents who knowingly proceed with a pregnancy when the child is likely to have downs. These arguments seem to be just a step away from arguing for forced abortion or sterilisation onto some “unconventional” women or for “unconventional” children.

Who decides what is “conventional” and what is “un”? One woman phoned in to point out that not so long ago the bigots were saying the exact same thing about biracial marriages.

One of the main losers promoting this idea was a GP, who said he would not refer lesbian couples for IVF because he didn’t think it was good for the children. When someone said he was making moral judgements about their sexuality he claimed “No, I’m not, I’m stating an opinion”. The health of many is in this man’s hands, and he isnt even embarassed to be public with his bigotry.

2/ THINK OF THE CHILDREN!! #2

The kids need a dad!

This is the same old shite turfed out by the father’s rights bozos. Apparently children should have a patriarch at home. They don’t have anything to prove this with, no facts, statistics, logic, and so forth, all the stuff the men usually like to gabber on about. They just keep repeating it over and over despite all the evidence to the contrary, all the women and children raped, beaten, even murdered by men.

Radio discussion exchange:
“there’s no evidence that children from homes that have a man in them do better than those who do not”
Random Bloke “there’s anecdotal evidence!”

There are, sadly, a lot of people about who think that women should have a patriarch at home in order to qualify for certain NHS treatments.

3/ THINK OF THE MONEY!!

The government is low on cash, and the NHS is struggling. Uh huh. Whatever.

Who really believes this? The government has a heaps of cash, they just misspend it. As do the NHS. In any case, this is an argument for putting more money into the NHS and more money specifically for IVF treatment, not an argument against ‘unmanned’ women’s rights to the treatment. It isn’t an either/or.

This argument seems to put forward an idea that lesbian and single women are in fact stealing treatment from women in heterosexual pairings. As if women in het relationships should have more rights to NHS treatment than others. Maybe we should have an extra tax on all gay couples to entitle them to the same NHS treatment that their het peers are entitled to, we could call it the Tax on Unconventiality.

4/ WHAT ABOUT GAY OR SINGLE MEN??

Yes, one idiot texted in to say that he would like a child and he also wants the right to IVF treatment. You know the drill, if women have it men must have it too. Never mind that this is nothing like the same thing. It’s not rocket science.

Women opting for IVF do it with their own bodies. Whatever relationships those women are in (or not!) they all still do this with their own bodies.

A man cannot bear a child. IVF treatment is irrelevant to men unless they are partnered by a woman willing to have the treatment and bear the child. A man cannot demand his rights to IVF, so what this man is demanding is the right to access a woman to bear a child for him.

A woman demanding equal treatment as other women for her own body is not in any way the same as a man demanding the right to a woman’s body to carry and birth children for him. Are MRAs all this stupid?

So, anyway, in my own opinion there are some good arguments to be made against IVF for any woman, but as a mum i do feel like i’m speaking from a position of extreme privilege in comparison to those who want, but for whatever reasons can’t have. It’s easy for me to say Foster! Adopt! because I’m not in their position and I don’t know what it must feel like..

.. however, speaking as someone who as a kid was homeless and unwanted, if you want to give a child a home but can’t have your own for whatever reason then at least consider fostering or adopting. IVF is lengthy, stressful, expensive, and not particularly successful. Many more women come out of it unhappy, feeling abused and conned and failed, than pregnant. I won’t judge those women who do decide to use IVF, but I do want them to know the risks and the alternatives, not just think it’s as easy as the media and medical establishment likes to portray it as.

Some of the actual arguments in favour of IVF do annoy me. The idea that women ‘naturally’ want to mother and therefore must have their own babies pisses me off. Not all women want to have babies and it isn’t unnatural for them to feel that way. On the other side, I do think that arguing that the only worthwhile baby is one that is genetically connected to the parents is elitist and arrogant. It irritates me that so many children need foster homes and don’t have them because people think they are unworthy or possibly even impure because they are not “my own flesh and blood”.

Ultimately I can’t help thinking that it all ties into this one simple and warped idea, that a woman must have both a man and a baby to have achieved her role as Woman - anything else marks her as failure. And the IVF industry makes really good money from that idea and it doesn’t matter how many women are hurt on the way.

amananta has asked whether anyone knows of a feminist depression support group. i think it would be great but i’ve never seen one. there are single issue feminist support groups specifically for issues such as ptsd, rape survivors, domestic violence survivors, post natal depression and others. i haven’t yet come across a feminist woman centred depression and mental illness support group, in fact i’ve found it difficult even to find much analysis of mental illnesses from a woman centred perspective. that’s not to say that it doesn’t exist, just that i haven’t found it yet, and i’ld definitely be interested if anyone has recommendations.

recently a few people have asked me about whether i have access to a feminist counsellor or doctor and the answer is simply that i’ve never even HEARD of one. I’m sure they do exist, probably in the US and probably they would cost quite a bit too, but I’ve never (yet) come across one, just like ive never yet come across a gp that publicly identifies as feminist (or that i’ve noticed seems at all feminist in their dealings with me). IMO identifying publicly as feminist wouldnt do a woman’s career as a psychologist any favours, not in the UK anyway.

i imagine the nhs is probably not too comfortable for feminists tbh, in the same way that woman centred midwives have quit the nhs because the whole system is anti-woman, i imagine woman centred psychologists would struggle to operate in our patriarchal medical establishment.

i saw a site of amazing artwork, one woman’s creative reaction to her forced second cesarean.

my own obstetrician insisted i would not be able to give birth vaginally after my previous caesarean. without even looking at my notes he told me that the mere fact i had had a c section previously means that my body was obviously unable to cope with childbirth. when i refused to comply he asked my partner if he was prepared to raise our first child on his own if i and my baby died through my “stubbornness”.

just one small part of the story, but an indication of how appalling maternity “care” is in the UK.

i birthed my second baby at home, vaginally, completely drug free. people can say what they want, for me this was a huge achievement. i don’t expect all women to give birth this way, what i want is for women to have and understand their own choices and to understand what childbirth is and what it entails.

for other women who also suffered forced caesareans, as i have, those pictures may be triggering, or perhaps maybe they will be a step towards healing, seeing our feelings expressed so well. either way, please be aware that these pictures are extremely powerful.

cesarean-art.com

i’ve been thinking over this whole fight, and here are my thoughts.

I am hurt because all of this has come from ‘one of us’ but without wanting to sound like the fem police, i just dont think she’s into the sort of feminism that I am.

this is what i believe radical feminism to be. my feminism is pro woman, including mother women and poor women and disabled women and prostituted women - in short all women, and my feminism is anti capitalism, because i believe that capitalism is not healthy for women or men, as long as it exists people will be divided into classes, and under capitalism women are and will always be less than human, because they can be bought and sold and because they are seen as “not contributing to the economy” when they bear and raise children.

soopermouse is more into a sort of individual feminism, possibly even a libertarian (right) feminism. we may superficially agree on some things, but i imagine we probably have quite different reasons for any similar conclusions we appear to make.

in any case, soopermouse has helped me really. I had become so wrapped up in the whole radfem v sexpos argument that I was neglecting all the other things that really matter to me, such as the issues around motherhood and childbirth, of the medical establishment and women’s treatment inside it, of poverty and class, of violence and fear. i havent been writing and now i want to start again. soopermouse has made me remember how much women like me are hated, i have been like a little cotton wool wrapped hermit here at home, trying to ignore it. but thats not healthy and it isnt useful either.

no i dont want to ally myself with the fundamentalist right of any specifics, not even against the porn industry, because those fundamentalists are no fucking better for women than porn or prostitution is. i dont want to be on their side, i fundamentally disagree with them about women, about everything in fact. they declare war on women and their fight against porn is just another expression of that war and their hate. thats not what im about, its not what i want, its not what im going to do.

oh, and bill gates SUCKS. how come paris is just another rich whore to condemn but bill gates is worship-worthy? yeh i’ll bet that his little company never exploits women workers. why all the double standards?