Relentless Secrecy and Stigma

It is one thing to have anti-IVF laws, anti-gay laws, anti-intersex laws but to use them to split innocent IVF brother and sister and place them in legal limbo is a heinous crime against the children. Every human including IVF children deserves basic respect as a human, if not equal. If a person is raped, what are the circumspect effects? As a human being one has to continue to live and how does one go about. Any person can be raped while majority of the rapes are against women. Men or intersex people may get raped but have no laws to protect them or get them justice. While the physical pain is intolerable, there is more to it than just that. Rape also involves secrecy, stigma, taking away a person’s self-worth, mental torture, dehumanizing and so many other things. Due to the secrecy and stigma, a rape survivor may not report the facts for days, weeks, months, even years. There are child sexual abuse cases which go unreported for decades. Does that mean the person who has experienced this horrible situation is hallucinating? And the crimes did not occur? Then there is the long road for justice. The predator is let go because the “statute of limitations” expired, does that mean the crimes did not occur? Does that mean a person will stop fighting for the truth? When a person who has been raped first is a victim, if they do not die or commit suicide, they are a survivor and when a survivor is awakened to be free of secrecy and stigma, they are truly awakened. Whether they are awakened in a week, a month, a year, it may be too “late” for the statute of limitations but if they speak up, just maybe one person, just one person may be inspired to speak up sooner if in the horrid situation they are raped. Secrecy and stigma are the real culprits and they can only be disbanded with truth, inspiration, empowerment.

Now that western culture is catching up to realities and passing laws to legally recognize the “third gender”, hopefully in the near future they will also have laws for marriages of “third gender” and the issues and concerns “third gender” families face including children and immigration. As per intersex organizations, “same-sex” marriage excludes intersex marriage. Why? If intersex are women, then why are there laws for a “third gender”? Are the governments wrong? If the angst of having a child, loving a child, raising a child, the roller coaster rides of infertility, the international trips and related immigration issues and separation from child are only a “woman’s issue”, then how do we explain single dads, gay fathers, intersex families? The right answer is to accept the realities around us and have equal laws so that people can start living and stop being abused, tortured and stranded. Every person has right to feel male, female or otherwise, are the laws in sync with what the person wants? When there is a lack of laws for intersex families, are there inadvertent victims like spouses and children of an intersex family? The answer is change the laws not break the laws.

IVF Children of a Woman and Intersex Person

What if a woman was in a relationship with an intersex person (can they legally marry?), had an IVF child through her egg, sperm donor and a compassionate surrogate, the woman raised the IVF child as the primary care provider, living in secrecy and lies through the abuse, torture from a person undergoing medical treatment and then when asked to split, the intersex person decides to both SPLIT with the woman and SPLIT two innocent IVF siblings. Would there be an uproar and would the laws have allowed the IVF child to be separated from the “biological mother” and the primary care provider? More importantly, what crimes have the innocent children committed to be separated and to be in legal limbo? What about the abuse against the woman and the children? Abuse is abuse regardless in what name it occurs and how one justifies it. What if the woman was silenced one from the abuse, now that she has awakened, should she remain silent or report the abuse? Is the woman’s only fault that she is fertile and showed compassion? And so she and her children must be punished by splitting them? There are several things that LGBTI people still cannot do in 2013 including the fact that LGBTI immigrant families cannot legally bring their IVF children born outside the US and placing innocent IVF children in legal limbo.

You can rape me, you can silence me, you can abuse me, you can torture me but when you do that to my innocent kids, you have given me the courage to stand up and speak the truth. My weakness has become my strength, the lies conquered with truth, you can lie to the court and the rest of society but you cannot lie to the children. Seeking justice for innocent IVF children is a lifelong commitment requiring lot of persistence and patience – virtues that any IVF parent inherently has. Never again another IVF child should have to suffer like this, if its not a crime to abandon IVF children, it should be a crime. We need solutions, we need legal breakouts so that innocent IVF children are not placed in legal limbo. Because a rape is a rape no matter what and an abandoned or an abused child is just that, no matter what.