Also, two of the children were born by surrogates. Thid makes me think that they truly are an accessory to them, and a way for Musk to boost his ego through his weird ideas abouy eugenics. He doesn’t seem to care much for his children once they are born.
I feel bad for these kids.
Could be that Grimes had a very rough pregnancy the first go around. Pregnancy at the best of times, when it all goes smoothly is incredibly difficult and hard on a woman’s body. It’s not just about vanity, like people like to pretend. Sometimes, it’s about not fucking dying. Because without great medical care, it can FUCKING KILL YOU… Women die EVERY FUCKING DAY giving birth around the world.
Yes. Pregnancy is hard. It is difficult. It is absolutely not free from risks even in countries with advanced health care and in large parts of the world it is dangerous. That is the very point.
Why should other women go through pregnancy just to have the child taken away from them?
The fact is that the surrogacy industry is about exploiting poor women.
Apparently, it’s not. Apparently, it’s about making assumptions about others…
Absolutely true. But that doesn’t change the REASON why she might have decided on a surrogate that has nothing to do with vanity.
Choosing surrogacy is choosing to exploit other people. I can understand that for instance infertility can create desperation. But they already have children so their is not even that excuse.
Or she may just not want to deal with it. Surrogacy can be extremely exploitative and so I guess and it is much more available to the privileged than the rest of us which can also make it seem selfish. Hence the shaming and anger most likely… but at the same time I’d say really even that it shouldn’t be a requirement to be pregnant to be a mother and that imminent death shouldn’t be the only reason a woman might choose surrogacy over trying to give live birth.
I don’t disagree that surrogacy can be exploitative… I disagree that we know Grimes’ reasons here… and frankly, it’s not anyone’s business. 
Oh I agree with that too. I guess I just want people to stop using the death of the mother as the only justification for not undergoing a highly respected form of ritualized torture around the goddamned biological clusterfuck that we know and love as pregnancy which has quite literally been elevated to religious status many times over because… well “pregnancy” is one of those things that almost feels universally understood maybe when it isn’t? I dunno. I’ll probably never understand that very well, myself, but it seems so to me. But really I think it does come down to that kind of primal feeling about what a mother has to be to be a mother doesn’t it?
I mean, maybe? I feel like Grimes would have had a say in this and it’s not all Musk. And maybe she too had a similar attitude.
But I don’t think speculating on that is very helpful. Surrogacy is already stigmatized, when a majority of times it is just two people who really want a child, but have some physical limitation, and this is their best option.
Like I said, 101 reasons to criticize Musk, but I wouldn’t use this as one of them.
I suppose there is AN element of that. But it is also people who have physical limitations. Again, we are speculating on the reason, and I don’t think we should really be doing that. It is clear to me surrogacy already has a stigma in your mind, when it really shouldn’t. I probably don’t agree with every use of it, but also, it is none of my fucking business. 
Sure, they already had one child, but if she wanted more children but it was deemed to risky to carry another child, then surrogacy is a viable option.
Not always. With commercial surrogacy, I would agree. Altruistic surrogacy exists, and is most common with siblings. In other words, a woman’s sister may choose to carry her sister’s baby. This is not usually exploitative. I have no idea if that’s what happened here, but neither do you. This isn’t a black and white issue.
Some counties have better rules about surrogacy than others, but the billionaire class doesn’t have to worry about that.
Almost all labor is exploitative on some level though. Some of it with just as much chance of bodily injury as pregnancy, actually. With enough legal infrastructure and enough people working to improve the rights of women though in theory it could be navigated without reducing women to livestock.
But it also could reduce women to livestock.
So to me it’s difficult in the way that polyamory is difficult.
How bad it is kind of depends on whether "child brides or “breeding stock” are part of the picture or whether this is all consenting adults with some method for defending their rights should they be mistreated.
And I definitely doubt our laws are there yet really. So I’m sure in a lot, maybe most cases, it currently is inherently unfavorable to the pregnant person. The US, for instance, doesn’t do a good job at all of taking care of pregnant people.
You should keep explaining reproduction to the women here, trust me, they fucking love it.
Really? Where have I done that?
Literally most of our understanding of what “women” are in this country comes from an understanding of them as a “vessel.” We all have to deal with that as women whether we have children or not actually. All of our rights, and especially the rights of all pregnant people suffer from this terribly. To the point where many lives are lost needlessly. Like totally seriously to me surrogacy is just where it becomes decoupled from the justifications for the way we treat women due to cultural issues around pregnancy.
FWIW I actually agree with you that privileged billionaires and alt-pop stars are probably exploiting the shit out of some one realistically though.
Y’all remember when Die Antwood was popular here? Did anyone read the allegations from that poor kid in South Africa they “adopted” for their music video? This is the world Musk and Grimes operate in so I don’t have high hopes for anyone entangled in it who isn’t as rich and famous as either of them.
WTAF, dude; that’s one hell of a judgmental assumption.
The topic is about Grimes suing musk for access to her own kids, not how they were conceived.
What ususally blows my lid during discussions about surrogacy is when the feelings of the sperm and egg donors are is very important, while the impact of the surrogacy industry is forgotten.
Adoption is another can of worms. There has been a huge (and really mind blowingly horrible) scandal that has more or less erupted slowly here in Sweden. It has turned out that a lot of adoptions from from Chile and South Korea (and probably other countries as well) that supposedly were orphans or abandoned by their parents were not.
The supply of orphans were smaller than the demand for children to be adopted and now a lot of people in their 40’s are finding out that they were stolen.
The surrogacy industry is exploitative. The statistics last time I read up on it a couple of years ago is that most commercial surrogacy is based upon economically vulnerable women. Often in another country than the parents. Altruistic surrogacy is rare compared to commercial.
If, when and how people choose to procreate is none of anyone else’s business.
It’s not your business if someone else uses IVF to conceive. It’s not your business if someone else uses sperm or egg donors. It’s not your business if they use a willing surrogate. It’s not your business if they adopt. As long as the reproductive process is left to consenting adults then you should keep your damn mouth shut about it.
These factors are all entirely unrelated to whether a person is fit to be a parent and irrelevant to this discussion.
