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This is an article I came across yesterday.
The whole article can be found here:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1088730.html
[size="2"][color="#0000ff"]Two men & a baby: Israel's gay community experiencing a baby boom[/color][/size]
By Ofri Ilani, Haaretz Correspondent
Ben has been in a relationship for nine years with Yossi, 44, with whom he lives in Tel Aviv.
At first, they considered joint parenthood with a woman, but after a few dates they decided on surrogacy. [color="#0000ff"] After an Internet search, they found that they could do so in the United States, through an agency that arranges the connection in return for a fee. [/color]"When we started the process two years ago, surrogacy was a fairly radical thing to do," says Ben. "But we liked the idea, because it meant that the children would come from our sperm."
[color="#0000ff"]Biologically, the twins are the sons of one mother, and developed together in the womb of another woman. One embryo was created from Yossi's sperm and the second from Ben's sperm. Two women were involved in the surrogacy process: The egg donor, who remained anonymous, as is usually the case, and the American surrogate, with whom they were in continuous contact throughout and after the pregnancy.[/color]
Yonatan and Yuval are now 10 months old. [color="#0000ff"]For the first few weeks after the two were born, Yossi and Ben stayed in America and fed them with breast milk that the surrogate pumped[/color]. Ben took a year off from work to care for them - for one thing, because Israeli law does not offer paid parental leave in a situation like this. "Any parent of twins will tell you that the first two years are very tough," says Ben. "Our own mothers look at us with admiration for how well we're doing. When I take the twins out in the stroller, I often meet people who don't understand the situation and tell me: 'Good for you - you're letting your wife have a rest.'"
[size="2"] [color="#0000ff"]'Pro-natalist' pressures?[/color] [/size]
"[color="#0000ff"] Surrogacy opened up a new opportunity for men to have children[/color]," says Irit Rosenblum, the director general of the New Family organization. "There's a very great desire for children among homosexual male couples. It's amazing how similar it is to how women feel. [color="#0000ff"] A person's desire to reproduce is not dependent on anything. It's profound and real and cannot be quashed. I find it very moving, because it's bringing homosexuals back into the community[/color]."
Until a few years ago, gay Israeli men who decided to have a child usually did so within the framework of an agreement of shared parenthood with a woman, usually a lesbian. And so we got a new kind of family in which the father and mother were not a couple, and sometimes there was a father and two mothers, or two fathers and a mother. But [color="#0000ff"] the progress in fertility technologies and surrogacy has made other options more attractive[/color].
[color="#0000ff"] G. and D. from Tel Aviv are a couple[/color] and parents of two year-old twin girls. They were among the first in Israel to choose surrogacy as the way to fulfill their desire for children. [color="#0000ff"] They say that, for them, shared parenthood with a woman was not an option. "It's not that simple to maintain a relationship between two people, so why make it three or four? We're a family, and taking on another element like that would be asking for trouble, in my opinion[/color]," says G., 41.
Rosenblum also believes that the new "[color="#0000ff"] arrangement" of parenthood[/color] via surrogacy is preferable to a partnership agreement. "There's no avoiding it - a partnership agreement can often be very problematic, because [color="#0000ff"] it brings unnatural partners together for the purpose of parenthood[/color]. This triangular arrangement isn't very comfortable, apparently. [color="#0000ff"] People want their actual partner to be their partner in raising the child, not someone else. Today, medical technology allows [gay] men to father children who have their DNA[/color], rather than adopting or entering into a partnership agreement with a woman."
Yehonatan Alshekh, a doctoral student at Tel Aviv University, and author of the book "Ma'aseh Sdom Politi" ("Political Sodomy"), however, views the surrogacy phenomenon as an expression of the unshakable dominance of Israeli society's "pro-natalism ideology," by which he means the pressure to have children. "[color="#0000ff"] Gay men are finding that they're not exempt from the pressures of pro-natalism," he says. "It didn't take parents too long to go from a tense and embarrassed acceptance of their son's sexual orientation to pressing the demand for grandchildren.[/color] Natalism is portrayed, of course, as a natural, primal desire that wells up in the body. According to this view, [color="#0000ff"]homosexuality places technical obstacles in its way but, fortunately, science and technology are there to save the day[/color] and help the gay man overcome this 'disability' and place a screaming newborn in his arms."
Adds Alshekh: "There's been a systematic stifling of the creative potential that could have produced developments in living arrangements that are not a clone of the nuclear family, with all its familiar problems. The development of alternatives, such as the establishment of a cooperative with a lesbian couple, is rejected as being 'outside of nature.' Meanwhile, [color="#0000ff"] the surrogate mother is presented as a legitimate means and even a scientific solution to this problematic 'disability,' while ignoring the terrible moral problem inherent in the tragic commercialization of the female body[/color]."
[size="2"][color="#0000ff"] Bureaucratic runaround [/color][/size]
Not every surrogacy proceeds smoothly. Ushik and Joey, 38 and 32 respectively, are now the parents of two-month-old twins Yahel and Re'em, [color="#0000ff"] after two previous unsuccessful tries that were very difficult for them and the surrogate[/color]. "We were sure that the chance of something going wrong was very low. But that's not how it happened," says Ushik. Altogether, [color="#0000ff"] the process cost more than $200,000. But the complications didn't end there. Because the mother is not Jewish, the babies were not considered Jewish by law. ([color="#ff0000"]![/color]) Therefore, Ushik and Joey hastened to have them undergo a Reform conversion in the United States, and afterward the babies had their brit mila (circumcision ceremony).[/color] "The next stage was the [color="#0000ff"] runaround in Israel, getting the children to be recognized as citizens[/color]. The Interior Ministry isn't quite ready to believe that these are our children. We're also [color="#0000ff"] fighting for our rights with the National Insurance Institute, because it's impossible for both of us to be working with twins who are so young[/color]."
According to Ushik, many of the these difficulties could be avoided if single-sex couples had the option of pursuing surrogacy in Israel: "[color="#0000ff"] I don't understand why they won't allow us to do it. Everyone has the right to be a parent. They make us spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for the same right that could be had in Israel for much less[/color]."
Still, they don't regret their choice for a minute, and are ready to do it all again. "It's a tremendous joy," says Ushik. "[color="#0000ff"] Because there's no mother around, suddenly you get this maternal feeling coming from somewhere within you. In straight couples that I know, the father takes a pretty marginal role in the beginning. In our case, both of us are completely involved[/color]." Between feedings and diaper changes, Ushik and Joey are already talking about expanding the family. " [color="#0000ff"]We have several frozen embryos[/color]," says Ushik. "I don't know when it will happen, but we plan to do another round."
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So you disagree.That's ok,because it won't change my opinion about what I know from experience.
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I donââ¬â¢t want to change your opinion.
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Sorry.I didn't see the question somehow.
My answer-unnatural conception of children.Children born like this,are in some sort of state of confusion in their lives.
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;) Thanks. IMHO, it's all about DNA...(Jacob's ladder is an excellent analogy for referring to DNA in cryptic language).
The caduceus, (two snakes around the staff of healing) too, is representative of the two strands of DNA.
http://thm-a01.yimg.com/image/4c1dedad2f7528bc (pictoral representation)
[color="#0000ff"] DNA is the key to the cosmos, the universe.[/color]
The information included in the whole code is so big it wouldn't fit on a computer.
And when it becomes 'vulgarised' (as in the previous example) it creates a distortion of the creative process = creation in the purest sense of the word.
Mind you I don't think it's nearly as horrible as the genetically manipulated creatures 'conceived' underground. Don't know to what degree this guy is bona fide, but he goes by the pseudo of Branton. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Alan_Walton
I came across his info at the beginning of 2000 - he feels genuine.
http://think-aboutit.com/branton.htm
[size="2"][color="#0055aa"] Short excerpt:[/color][/size]
[size="2"]Branton states that he is a "sleeper" agent for the CIA who was (possibly after stumbling on some information that he wasn't supposed to know) electronically induced with an alternative personality which was "programmed" [/size][size="2"][color="#0055aa"]to serve the CIA Black Projects and the Bavarian-Gray collective. In this alternate or "double life" he had access to several underground bases, and has apparently encountered several alien groups as well. [/color][/size] [size="2"][color="#0055aa"]Branton himself has a strong feeling that he was also involved with this project in some fashion. In 1985 when the Montauk Project was sabotaged and had ceased for a time, he was 25 years of age. This project is once again in full swing at Montauk, but everything has now been taken underground down into the 8-leveled subterranean facility there, which is being operated jointly by the CIA, the (Nazi) Thule Scoeity, and the alien Grays and is to be a key operational base for the implementation of their "New World Order".[/color][/size][size="2"] This base has some connection with another base under the Archuleta mesa near Dulce, New Mexico where the Grays themselves have their underground headquarters.[/size] [size="3"] [color="#0055aa"]The Dulce Files[/color][/size][size="3"][color="#0055aa"] [/color][/size][size="3"][color="#0055aa"]
[/color][/size][color="#0000ff"] [size="2"][color="#0055aa"]Excerpt[/color][color="#0055aa"]:[/color][/size][/color]
[size="2"] More than any other area in the U.S., if not the world... [color="#0055aa"]this small town has been the epicenter for nearly ever form of paranormal activity one can imagine, including: UFO sightings, UFO landings, Abductions, Implantation's, Human & Animal mutilations, PSI Warfare studies, Secret Government-Alien interaction, U.S. 'Constitutional' Government vs. Alien Agenda conflicts, 'Reptilian' sightings, Cryptozoological or Bioengineering phenomena [this was the general area where the famous 'Cabbit', the half cat / half rabbit was captured], Underground bases, Conspiracy scenarios, Alien Infiltration, Deep-Cavern phenomena, Super High-Tech activity, & MIB encounters.[/color] In fact a higher CONCENTRATION of such activities has been evident in the vicinity of Dulce than any other area in the world, to the point that the inhabitants of this town have for the most part resigned themselves into acknowledging -- although not necessarily accepting -- the reality of such activity, whether they like it or not. [/size]
http://think-aboutit.com/dulce/L-DEPDRK.html
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