Sunday 24 May 2015

The Mummy Returns

Jemma Buckley writes:

Germaine Greer has criticised gay parents Elton John and David Furnish for listing a man as the mother on the birth certificates of their two sons.

She said the move was an example of how the concept of motherhood has 'been deconstructed' - before going on to criticise the process of IVF.

Sir Elton is listed as the father and Furnish as the mother on the documents for their sons Zachary, four, and Elijah, two.

Both children were born to the same California-based surrogate mother – who the couple said they love 'like a sister' – and both share the same anonymous egg donor.

She is the latest celebrity to voice disapproval of Sir Elton, 68, and Furnish, 52.

Sir Elton was recently embroiled in a high-profile row with Italian fashion designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana who called their IVF children 'synthetic'.

The singer hit back at the comments made by Dolce to an Italian magazine and called for a boycott of the fashion house.

Sir Elton said: 'How dare you refer to my beautiful children as 'synthetic'. And shame on you for wagging your judgemental little fingers at IVF - a miracle that has allowed legions of loving people, both straight and gay, to fulfil their dream of having children.'

Speaking at the Hay Festival, 76-year-old Miss Greer said: 'Sometimes I think that really the problem is the concept of motherhood, which we can't give any real structure to.

'Sir Elton John and his "wife" David Furnish have entered on the birth certificate of their two sons that David Furnish is the mother. I'm sorry. That will give you an idea of how the concept of motherhood has emptied out. It's gone. It's been deconstructed.'

Miss Greer, who penned best-selling book The Female Eunuch in 1970, went on to criticise the process of IVF, by which the couples' children were born.

'We now have a "genetic" mother, who supplies eggs. It depends entirely on where she is if she is going to be allowed to know what happens to the eggs. And women tend to care.

'An egg is not a sperm, we do not produce 400million of them in one go. One miserable little egg pops every month.

'Then they give you follicle stimulating hormones and you have seventeen or something [eggs] and they give you cut price IVF and distribute the rest of your eggs where they see fit.

'In some places you are allowed to know what happens to them, in other places you are not. What you get is a reduced bill for IVF because a child is being born by the people involved using your eggs.

'I'm sorry. Did we talk about this? Did we sit down and talk about what eggs mean to women?'

The Australian-born activist went on to make the bold claim that she suspects the 1967 Abortion Act was only introduced because of lobbying from the fertility industry.

'The whole discourse has been distorted from the beginning by the fertility industry. I've been thinking about this lately, and I've got a suspicion, which I need to investigate properly, that we got legalised abortion precisely because the fertility industry needed it.

'It wasn't us. It certainly wasn't us. We could have marched until our feet fell off and they wouldn't have bothered to give us access to abortion. They were the ones who wanted to be able to terminate pregnancies and manipulate the products of conception at will.'

Speaking about Liberal Democrat politician David Steel, who was responsible for introducing the Abortion Act to parliament, she added:

'He is a politician. He could only make an act after the fertility barons told him what they needed. They are very powerful, the medico-legal establishment.'

No comments:

Post a Comment