I was joking about gender reveal photos, FWIW. That was a throwback to the classic dirty knife sketch from Monty Python.
And as an aside, is banning commercial surrogacy bigoted to everyone here? Because it’s illegal in Australia and I would guess there is fairly broad support for that ban and I would consider Australia by and large to be (slightly, and less and less every day) less conservative than The Land of the Free.
When my first kid was born I paid extra for a private room with an extra bed and stayed with my wife and newborn, primarily sitting in the bed because it was a lot more comfortable than anything else in the room. I don’t see what’s weird about it at all. Why would a person not want to maximize their time with the new addition to the family? I’m sure I have several pictures sitting in the bed holding the baby.
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Not bigoted but I can’t actually imagine not wanting nice photos of your babies. The process of making staged photos often sucks but having nice photos from that period of time isn’t lame at all.
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I mean, I personally think the whole home/natural birth thing with a photographer taking pictures of the entire process (and I mean the ENTIRE process) to be weird, but it’s definitely a thing.
I am also able to recognize my own internal bias against women who enjoy being pregnant and giving birth in this manner. I try really hard not to look down on those women (because personally i find the thought of all that going on in my body to be repulsive), and I often have to check my own thoughts about them.
We all have deeply-buried biases, and of course we don’t want to admit we have them, but internal reflection can do wonders to reveal them. Will they ever change? I don’t know, but at least knowing about them can lead to better behavior.
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Yeah. I mean I should say I have no kids and have zero interest in having any so that certainly has contributed to my undoubted joyless cynicism.
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Sorry man, if you think they are weird for any reason then you are bigoted against gay people. And if you say that you would find identical photos from a straight couple in the exact same situation just as weird, then you are lying (if to no one else but yourself).
That’s the way it is. Sorry for the bad news.
The 24 hours thing makes it seem like it is adoption, not surrogacy. That’s how it is with adopting newborns instead of kids in the system: you get a call when someone is about to give birth to a baby they plan to give to adoption.
The mother can then back out, after that call, which happens all the time and happened to Pete and Chasten.
Which would point towards using a surrogacy because they were fed up with the long process. The probability of twins also is something that leans surrogate.
But other articles say we don’t know if it was adoption or surrogacy. Those were published before this one though afaict
The real scandal is naming a human being Chasten.
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I find the idea of making your own baby weird given the number of kids in the system. But I recognize that there is something missing or psychologically muted inside of me, that most people have, demanding they reproduce. So I don’t go around railing against people who create their own baby.
But none of that has anything to do with Pete being a weird ghoul, sorry.
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I just assume that any personal photo or video shared by a prominent person via social media is staged, manipulated, cherry-picked, or taken out of context in a way intended to massage public reaction.
You’re homophobic because many gay men change their name to something weird like Dark, or River, or Seventh. Chasten could have chosen Chasten.
I was once roommates with a dude who legally changed his name to all of those in succession. Not Chasten though
Having now googled the meaning of “chasten” it’s less weird. I just assumed it was some redneck verb form of “chaste.”
It’s hard and competitive to get one of the babies in the system unless you are willing to take an older child likely to have behavioral issues and probably a connection with previous parents/guardians that might also take them back. Obviously that is the morally correct thing to do but it becomes closer to an act of pure selflessness at that point.
If you have a normal amount of selfishness and want an infant to go through all the steps with then it’s pretty awkward to enter into a competition with other couples, many of whom have fertility issues, when you are able to just make your own.
I find staged photos a bit cheesy but its not like unstaged photos are amazing or anything. My sister in-law had a difficult childbirth where she was utterly exhausted afterward and couldn’t move. So the first photo I saw of her and my niece together the baby was basically just pressed up against her half-dead face.
After your post, I did that too just to make sure it was what I thought it was, and it made it worse. Below was definition #1 on merrriam-webster
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i apologize, i didn’t realize it was adoption, not surrogacy. still thinking it would be crazy to push the mother into the spotlight like that. pete did everything fine. we just suck as a society
Believe me I’m well aware. No healthy white USA newborn goes unadopted, due to supply and demand
While system kids generally stay system kids
Also it is not a question of selfishness. There simply is nothing inside of me that differentiates between a child with my genes and a child without. Therefore there’s no sacrifice being made, no passing up something I want.
It would be like saying people with a normal selfishness eat octopus. But I don’t like octopus. I don’t abstain from eating octopus due to lacking selfishness.
I recognize that for most people, they love octopus. Something deep inside of them demands they eat octopus. Sorry, I couldn’t think of a food most people love that I don’t like. Would work better if I could have.
I do recognize that maybe I do have it, but it’s covered up by trauma, or low self-esteem, or anything else psychological like that. Or that I’m like that substantial proportion of men who don’t really connect until the baby is actually born.
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