"Do you ever feel like everything in your life is going wrong? Do you feel like bad things keep happening to you and you can't figure out why?" And then I opened the card and the inside said: "Because you're a terrible person and you deserve every bad thing that's ever happened to you."
I sense a new product line opportunity for Hallmark. These would sell like crazy.
Just at the start, besides the obvious pitfalls in any version of this idea, the fact that the mother had complications in previous pregnancies and this would be her third makes it seem like an excessive request on its own.
OK, just yellow flags all over the place. Adoptive husband just going along passively, no written agreements...
Jenna and Danielle's motivations are so hard for me to understand that I may as well be reading about people from another planet. I don't mean that in a judgmental way (well, except when Danielle becomes a homicidal maniac at the end), but the events of this story are wholly mystifying to me.
I mean sure, I kind of get why they did this whole thing on a verbal agreement, in that I am also bad at paperwork, but I think anyone looking at this situation at the beginning could have guessed how that decision might go awry.
I think I need to hear from Danielle and the husbands.
Not "adoptive husband," obviously. Husband in the prospective adoptive family.
Better to adopt your husband than to have him biologically.
I mean, technically all husbands are adopted, because they're not blood relations and you have a choice about which one to get.
I think I need to hear from Danielle and the husbands.
This article is potentially libellous, because, if she exists, "Danielle" is readily identifiable from the description to anyone who knows her - there are presumably not many 36-year-old childless women in New York who adopt an orphan baby and who have a cousin who had three kids unusually young, in her early 20s - and the article accuses her of attempted murder. So, does "Danielle" exist? What do we think?
I mean, technically all husbands are adopted, because they're not blood relations and you have a choice about which one to get.
Speak for yourself.
4 jms, do you think any sort of written agreement they could have come up with would be enforceable?
I suppose a Whereas clause that made clear that Jenna was doing this because it was Danielle's only option for parenthood could be pointed to -- but I'm not thinking a court would order specific performance here.
10. No, I suppose not. But even just sitting down and putting pen to paper would have forced them to think through various contingencies, which they apparently didn't bother to do.
Yeah, like "what exactly is this arrangement, who is promising what to whom, will the biological mother get some access," etc.
I mean birth moms who agreed to an adoption changing their mind about adoption mid-pregnancy up until the very last moment isn't exactly uncommon. The surrogacy aspect is a more novel twist, but this is an utterly normal story, and of course there's no way to force the birth mom to go through with it via contract (nor should there be). Some googling suggests that this happens about a third of the time that a pregnant woman is matched with potential adoptive parents.
It looks like in at least some states the law distinguishes between surrogates who use their own eggs (who can back out) and ones who don't (who can't), but in general it looks like the whole situation is a mess and you have to sue to take away the baby if the birth mom tries to keep it. But in an adoption situation, and not a formal surrogacy, this whole scenario is totally normal.
This sounds like an extremely fucked-up family all around and I'm not at all surprised both of the husbands left. (Not surprised by the mention of childhood trauma at the end either.)
1: I was assuming this was a Hallmark card.
Don't people steal babies from hospital nurseries anymore? Is this because the little arm bands work too well.
16: My onboarding training included Code Pink (infant abduction) and warning signs therefor.
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Another absurdly familial strife tale from The Cut today. I think today, if it's that widget where it just shows the time not the date if it's today.
17: If they trained you, it must happen from time to time.
17: My dad should be picking my 40-year-old brother from his third (fourth?) psych hospital stay in the last six months, this his first by choice, which is progress. it's a little bit interesting to hear how mania or similar feels from the inside, but also I suppose unhappy families are all alike after all.
Was anyone else confused about who provided the egg?
Didn't the writer and her husband just have sex?
I assumed it was writer and turkey baster.
With a turkey baster, would you only get one push? If you let out on the bulb, it sucks back up.
Was anyone else confused about who provided the egg?
The intro to the article says "Danielle asked Jenna to use her own egg and Michael's [Jenna's husband] sperm to naturally conceive a baby, and then let Danielle adopt this child that was biologically theirs". I'd just assumed that "her own" = "Jenna's own", though now I look at it that could be read the other way.
But the use of the phrase "naturally conceive" implies, I think, "not IVF", and therefore it must have been Jenna's ovum.
It's badly written. If you don't pick up the single mention at the start that Michael is Jenna's husband, it's very easy to assume that Michael is Danielle's husband, because Jenna sometimes talks about "Michael" and sometimes about "my husband", which reads very oddly if they're the same person.
The whole story is driven by the fact the author is only trying to do someone a favour because it's their narcissistic ego trip. All else flows from the original failure.
Most of her family, including her husband, literally spent days telling her that this was a stupid idea, and she ignored them and went ahead with it anyway, and it turned out to have been a stupid idea and now she's cut off contact with all of them.
Also there are, as they say, issues around consent.
Danielle's husband seems surprisingly absent from the entire story. We don't even learn his name. He's not apparently involved in any of the discussion about this plan, and every time the adoption is mentioned it's "Danielle would adopt the baby". Er, no. Danielle and her husband would adopt the baby, that's the way it works!
I don't trust people anymore, because you could literally give someone the world and it still won't be enough at the end of the day. They'll always want more.
Yes that is certainly an accurate summary of your actions throughout this story.
31: In the news stories about stealing babies from hospital nurseries, it's the woman who steals the baby even though she usually had a male partner.
The point I raised in 16. Though I'm not sure what the point of that was either. I don't usually have a point.
The nice thing about Raising Arizona was how it reversed the usual gender roles.
the article brought back strong & v fond memories of mel eisenberg, my contracts professor & truly a lovely wonderful person in addition to being the best professor by far that i had at berkeley law. he used the baby m case out of new jersey to teach the limits of contract & a brilliant friend of mine who was a mother of three, & their conversation has always remained with me, concluding with my friend saying that while the woman having the baby had previously been pregnant & given birth so that she knew what giving birth entailed, she had never given birth to *this* baby, & mel's reply "exactly, ms. x." his article the world of contract & the world of gift may well be the only piece worth salvaging from the entire field of american legal "scholarship."
https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1115979/files/fulltext.pdf
We sit here beating our head against a rock trying to condense science into 3 or 4 thousand words and law professors get 45 pages without including a single model.
''And so we beat on, heads against a rock, borne ceaselessly past the word limit."
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But the science directorate is only rarely compelled to do what human mission planners want.|>
you can get a flavor of it by reading the discussion of a typically idiotic law & economics article by waldfogel on pp 845-46 & the first full paragraph on page 849. hopefully law school is less infested with law & economics idiocy these days but back in the early 2000s, boy howdy it was wild the nonsense that ran rampant. plus you know yoo skulking toad like around various corners 🤮.
38 Son, you got a panty on your head
dairy queen, are you still looking for online welsh speakers? there's at least one welsh server on the fediverse/mastodon, I run across them talking about wet foggy vegetables. should be findable from outside.
https://toot.wales/public/local frex
ty clew! he found one but i think is still looking for more, i'll pass along the link/idea.
My understanding was that people didn't do old-school surrogacy anymore. If it isn't the egg of the woman who plans on raising the child as a mother, it's supposed to be a third woman's egg with another person who acts as gestational carrier.
For example, the gay couple I know who hired a surrogate to carry their fraternal twins got the eggs from a different woman.
Presumably, they don't want the surrogate to have a reason to claim the baby.
The liberals don't want you to know this, but the babies in Denmark left outside stores in strollers are free.