Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What career?

Right? Never heard of this person. But I am bored and procrastinating so I clicked through and see that she also spoke about postpartum depression. You can't have postpartum depression if you haven't given birth. What a weirdo. Why does she have a career as a celebrity at all?

Really? So gay couples and adoptive couples listening to crying babies at 3AM for 8 weeks straight can't have PPD?

You can have situational depression brought on by lack of sleep or feeling overwhelmed by your new life, but PPD is about the documented hormone crash that post-partum women experience. It's one of the biggest hormonal shifts that ever happens to a human being, like condensing all of puberty into three weeks. Gay adoptive couples don't have that. Neither do women who used surrogates.

But since nobody GAF about PPD until people started coopting it to mean "a thing that can happen to men," maybe it's best to just let them appropriate the term.

When I said adoptive couples - I meant straight ones. So your friend Kelly and her husband Mark adopt newborn twins. They are going through all the craziness of being new parents and Kelly displays symptoms of anxiety, lack of sleep, mood swings, isn't showering, has been talking about how dark she feels.

Are you saying she doesn't have PPD and you wouldn't refer her to a specialist who supports therapy/prevention techniques for that specific problem?

Yes I'm saying she doesn't have PPD. You seem to think your using this term is an act of generosity, or me not using it is denying that these people are truly parents or something (although I admit I cannot follow the distinction you're now making between gay and straight adoptive parents). I'm just telling you factually: PPD/PPA/PPP is not just situational depression, feeling anxiety, lack of sleep, or all of the above. It's not just feeling overwhelmed by parenthood. It's chemical in nature and brought on by a hormone crash, and that hormone crash is not present in the bodies of people who have not given birth.

Anonymous wrote:It's really between her and her wallet. If she can afford it, is it any different than Kim Kardashian using a surrogate? Whatever.

I believe KK had placental abruption with her final pregnancy.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Please explain how she has postpartum depression having used a surrogate.

This is how I feel when men talk about their postpartum depression.

Men who've recently become fathers absolutely can become depressed. Becoming a parent is a major life event, which drastically changes your life and comes with an overwhelming amount of responsibility and financial cost. Not to mention the huge commitment and duty to keep the child alive and healthy.

I'll say it to you like I said it to DH: you can cut your arm in the recovery room, but it wouldn't be a postpartum hemorrhage. Nobody is denying that new fathers can be depressed. The point is that those fathers are not postpartum.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What career?

Right? Never heard of this person. But I am bored and procrastinating so I clicked through and see that she also spoke about postpartum depression. You can't have postpartum depression if you haven't given birth. What a weirdo. Why does she have a career as a celebrity at all?

Really? So gay couples and adoptive couples listening to crying babies at 3AM for 8 weeks straight can't have PPD?

You can have situational depression brought on by lack of sleep or feeling overwhelmed by your new life, but PPD is about the documented hormone crash that post-partum women experience. It's one of the biggest hormonal shifts that ever happens to a human being, like condensing all of puberty into three weeks. Gay adoptive couples don't have that. Neither do women who used surrogates.

But since nobody GAF about PPD until people started coopting it to mean "a thing that can happen to men," maybe it's best to just let them appropriate the term.

When I said adoptive couples - I meant straight ones. So your friend Kelly and her husband Mark adopt newborn twins. They are going through all the craziness of being new parents and Kelly displays symptoms of anxiety, lack of sleep, mood swings, isn't showering, has been talking about how dark she feels.

Are you saying she doesn't have PPD and you wouldn't refer her to a specialist who supports therapy/prevention techniques for that specific problem?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Please explain how she has postpartum depression having used a surrogate.

This is how I feel when men talk about their postpartum depression.

Men who've recently become fathers absolutely can become depressed. Becoming a parent is a major life event, which drastically changes your life and comes with an overwhelming amount of responsibility and financial cost. Not to mention the huge commitment and duty to keep the child alive and healthy.

It's really between her and her wallet. If she can afford it, is it any different than Kim Kardashian using a surrogate? Whatever.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Please explain how she has postpartum depression having used a surrogate.

I'll try. Any major life event, bad or good, can trigger depression. Maybe "postpartum" was a bad word choice, but that doesn't mean that the life changing event she experienced (becoming a parent) didn't trigger depression.

It was a wrong word choice. Just say depression! I've had depression and I've had PPD and they are different.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Please explain how she has postpartum depression having used a surrogate.

This is how I feel when men talk about their postpartum depression.

I think we need another word for it. I believe people who don't give birth but deal with the emotional and physical ringer of new parenthood can experience something like PPD. But to me PPD is so intensely tied to the hormone shifts of being postpartum that I struggle with people who didn't give birth saying they have PPD because I know they are not experiencing what I experienced.

I had a PPD relapse when my kid was a year old because he weaned suddenly and even with trying to taper via pumping, my hormones took another crash with the cessation of breastfeeding. Again, it is so, so tied to hormonal issues. I am sure non-birthing parents have some hormone ups and downs but there is just no way that it is the same as what I went through. My PPD was not simply caused by sleeplessness and stress.

We just need another word to describe it. It's not PPD if you aren't personally postpartum.

Anonymous wrote:Please explain how she has postpartum depression having used a surrogate.

I'll try. Any major life event, bad or good, can trigger depression. Maybe "postpartum" was a bad word choice, but that doesn't mean that the life changing event she experienced (becoming a parent) didn't trigger depression.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What career?

Right? Never heard of this person. But I am bored and procrastinating so I clicked through and see that she also spoke about postpartum depression. You can't have postpartum depression if you haven't given birth. What a weirdo. Why does she have a career as a celebrity at all?

Really? So gay couples and adoptive couples listening to crying babies at 3AM for 8 weeks straight can't have PPD?

You can have situational depression brought on by lack of sleep or feeling overwhelmed by your new life, but PPD is about the documented hormone crash that post-partum women experience. It's one of the biggest hormonal shifts that ever happens to a human being, like condensing all of puberty into three weeks. Gay adoptive couples don't have that. Neither do women who used surrogates.

But since nobody GAF about PPD until people started coopting it to mean "a thing that can happen to men," maybe it's best to just let them appropriate the term.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What career?

Right? Never heard of this person. But I am bored and procrastinating so I clicked through and see that she also spoke about postpartum depression. You can't have postpartum depression if you haven't given birth. What a weirdo. Why does she have a career as a celebrity at all?

Really? So gay couples and adoptive couples listening to crying babies at 3AM for 8 weeks straight can't have PPD?

I think the point is she isn’t postpartum. She may very well be having anxiety and depression because of how difficult the newborn period is. That is valid and can occur with men. But neither are postpartum.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:It is absolutely wrong and vulgar to rent the womb of a poor woman to carry a baby for you. The fact that so many women are ok with women being treated like livestock by rich women and gay men is astounding.

Talk to a surrogate. The ones I've known were not poor. They were middle class, like being pregnant (most surrogates have already had children of their own), like the idea of helping other people create a family, and use the compensation from surrogacy to send their own kids to college, buy a house, or prepare for retirement.

I'm sure there are surrogates who get exploited but my impression of the surrogacy practice in the US right now is that the surrogates are generally very willing participants who have an asset (fertility, relative comfort with pregnancy, usually a history of uncomplicated and easy pregnancies) and want to leverage it for financial gain. All the surrogates I've met (three) were married and had young kids and I can't say any of them were exploited. One had done it twice, for the same couple.

If you're renting your body out for 9 months with the possibility of severe health complications from the process - you're poor.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What career?

Right? Never heard of this person. But I am bored and procrastinating so I clicked through and see that she also spoke about postpartum depression. You can't have postpartum depression if you haven't given birth. What a weirdo. Why does she have a career as a celebrity at all?

Really? So gay couples and adoptive couples listening to crying babies at 3AM for 8 weeks straight can't have PPD?

Anonymous wrote:Please explain how she has postpartum depression having used a surrogate.

This is how I feel when men talk about their postpartum depression.

Anonymous wrote:There are thousands of unwanted babies right now. I would love to see test tube, IVF, and surrogacy outlawed in this country. Some people were not meant to be parents. Just because you can doesn’t at all mean you should. Flame me all you want, but this is how I feel.

Here's the fun thing: nobody cares how you feel. Nobody's forcing you to be a surrogate or undergo IVF. You're the one trying to get the government to impose your bizarre beliefs on other people by force. You want to be able to decide who is meant to be a parent - that not your place. End of story.