Menzies House

Wombs for rent, ten bucks a day

Knee-jerk reaction laws intended to placate minorities usually incurs collateral damage. But unintended consequences cannot and should not be excused when it comes to fulfilling irresponsible dreams for parenthood. Children are not puppies to be returned to the pet shop when they become inconvenient. Their minds and bodies are a lifetime commitment. GC.Ed.

One aspect of proposed same-sex marriage legislation is slowly percolating into the room like the smell that nobody admits to.
The fact is that homosexual males who want to be fathers need a young woman to be a surrogate mother.
Where will these women come from?
There is another kind of legislation or law at work here – the Law of Supply and Demand – a law that applied before the Egyptians, and which has never been repealed. And the answer to the question is – wherever the wombs are cheapest.
Of course, there are other aspects – there has to be good medical attention, state-of-the-art gynecological services.
Of course, of course.
And there is a place where the wombs are cheapest, where doctors are
available, where laws are elastic.
India.
They may have a s’house cricket team, but they have doctors experienced in IVF – and millions and millions of impoverished young women.
The surrogate motherhood industry in India is worth well over $2 billion
a year, and growing.

Two lies distort our childcare funding debate

The headline sounded too good to be true: "Australian mums paid $900 a week to help with housework".

On closer inspection, however, the media release last month was about a new insurance policy for stay-at-home mothers. Suncorp's new Million Dollar Woman policy offered "Australia's 2.1 million mums up to $900 a week to pay someone to do their cleaning, cooking, laundry, shopping and child-care if they are injured or fall ill".

Much of the online response to the story was so positive, Suncorp could have written it. "When Suncorp rang us to do a quote for my husband, I asked them how much it would cost to insure me!" posted At home mum of 4. "The operator laughed, and I told her I was serious. It's wonderful we can insure against loss of income, but have a really good think about what would happen if the main caregiver was unable to give care for a while!!! It made sense to her, so I asked her to discuss it with her supervisor. Well, maybe she did!! What a brilliant idea, finally!" she said.

Rollseyes of Brisbane was having none of it. He wrote off the scheme as "another way lazy people get an easy ride while the hard workers get [exploited]". Another blogger, Vanessa, gave the politically correct line on the scheme's beneficiaries, stay-at-home mothers, saying, "The lazy get richer!"

Won’t Somebody Please Think Of The Children?

Tim Andrews argues we should stop over-protecting our children and let them live life.

Every morning I wake up, check my news feed, and read stories of extreme doom and gloom about the “next generation”. Oh the kids these days! Of course, I usually ignore most of these doomsayer ramblings, yet one story from last week struck a chord with me.

It was a Newsweek piece reporting on a recent study that found that the creativity of American under-18’s, steadily rising throughout history until 1990, has since then “consistently inched downward”, with the decline most prevalent amongst children of primary school age. The commentariat have been quick to blame “video games” and the educational curriculum for this decline, but I am not so sure. Instead, I propose a different thesis. I suspect that it is our modern culture of isolating and protecting our children from every conceivable risk, any possible danger, anything that might possibly cause them any form of momentary unhappiness, that is to blame. That by “protecting” our children, we have inadvertently killed their souls, and are creating a society not of men, but of zombie drones.

Allow me to explain. We now live in a country that is based upon risk-minimisation to the extreme. It is now viewed as legitimate for our government to do everything to minimise any potential negative effects on our lives, even if we enter them of our free volition (just think of the war on obesity, on smoking, on alcohol and so on). The nanny state rules supreme, and it is only natural that such a protective mindset is applied to the youngest of our society – to an even greater degree in fact. Yet I ask – at what cost?