Monday, March 22, 2004
Maybe I will venture into film talk as I'm already at the computer and hardly ever in a position to blog at the moment, what with no internet at home. Today I went by myself to see Man Made, actually, going by myself puts a weird emphasis on it but when I bought the ticket I guess I figured someone else would end up coming, and they never did. Anyway, I ended up finding it pretty upsetting so I was kind of glad I was there by myself. It was a documentry about a Melbourne gay couple and how, after finding it was their only option, they had a son through (or by) a surrogate mother. The thing that really got to me, at least early on, was the strength of their desire to have this child. When they were getting ready to fly over to America for the birth, and when they were waiting in the hotel room in Iowa for the surrogate mother to go into labour, they were so happy and so full of hope. And even though I knew it was going to turn out well, (they were in the cinema with their son) I was so scared for them in a way because they were made so vulnerable by their hope you were kind of waiting for fate or something to smash them down.
After the film was shown they had a sort of question time with the filmmaker and the couple and one thing that was never brought up, and I thought was conspicious in it's absence, were the issues surrounding the use of a surrogate mother. They had to go to America to do it cos it's illegal here and I think there are a lot of issues about paying a woman for the use of her body. I wouldn't go so far as to compare it to prostitution but there are definately parallels. In the film they interviewed the birth mother and she seemed genuinely motivated by a wish to help people who couldn't have children of their own. She herself was married with two youngish children, so it wasn't like she was starving on the street or anything, and she will be involved on some level with the son's life (biologically he's not hers at all, they used a donor egg). She flew over for his first birthday, and it seemed important for the couple that she was comfortable with everything. There was so much obvious love in the film that it is hard to criticise the process which led to such happiness but on another level there is a lot of room for exploitation of the resource that is women's bodies.
The image that has stayed with me though is when they have just brought their son home from the hospital and one of fathers is lying in bed on his back, and the baby is sprawled asleep on his stomach, skin to skin.
After the film was shown they had a sort of question time with the filmmaker and the couple and one thing that was never brought up, and I thought was conspicious in it's absence, were the issues surrounding the use of a surrogate mother. They had to go to America to do it cos it's illegal here and I think there are a lot of issues about paying a woman for the use of her body. I wouldn't go so far as to compare it to prostitution but there are definately parallels. In the film they interviewed the birth mother and she seemed genuinely motivated by a wish to help people who couldn't have children of their own. She herself was married with two youngish children, so it wasn't like she was starving on the street or anything, and she will be involved on some level with the son's life (biologically he's not hers at all, they used a donor egg). She flew over for his first birthday, and it seemed important for the couple that she was comfortable with everything. There was so much obvious love in the film that it is hard to criticise the process which led to such happiness but on another level there is a lot of room for exploitation of the resource that is women's bodies.
The image that has stayed with me though is when they have just brought their son home from the hospital and one of fathers is lying in bed on his back, and the baby is sprawled asleep on his stomach, skin to skin.
