Is it that mothers have to be beyond any sort of societal reproach?

Yup, this.

I ask because there seems to be, this heavy handed ‘But what if she went off her meds/ I couldn’t think of what would happen’ on the part of the surrogate, but there’s no mention of the twins’ would be father.

Is it that mothers have to be beyond any sort of societal reproach?

Even if Ms Kohoe’s mental illness had any number of fluctuations in care and management; she had a partner to help with parenting, nurturing and care.

What, her husband, the man who wanted to be the twins father, would supposedly just sit there and not help with anything should his wife feel overwhelmed?

Was Baker also getting the twins as a single parent or did she too have a partner?

If not there’s a subtext that should be as brought to light as the disability angle as it is directly related.

I am actually a friend helping Amy and Scott through this situation and I would like to request that you please correct her diagnosis. She does not actually have schizophrenia, though I realize the NYT worded it cleverly to appear like she did. Her husband misspoke in his nervousness when he said that. In fact, Amy was diagnosed with 298.9 – Psychotic Disorder NOS. I realize it does not change the nature of your article, but for accuracy, she would appreciate if you change it.

Again, thank you for seeing the injustice in Laschell’s act. Besides being a friend to Amy, I am also a surrogate and an IVF nurse. Perhaps that makes it easier for me to see how wrong it is for Laschell to discriminate against Amy for an 8-year, well-controlled mental illness, but to me it seems so obvious. I’m happy to see others recognizing it.

People deciding that someone would be an unfit parent based on a diagnosis, enrage me. And all the stuff surrounding that too, that has already been mentioned in the comments.

I think my mother was better able to parent us because she is also autistic, and so are we. I truly believe that no one not autistic would have been able to ‘get it’ so deeply as she did, recognise our issues right away because she simply lived through them. Even though we are all different, we seem to be autistic in the same ways, the way that you sometimes meet people who are very little like you with the same diagnosis, but sometimes you meet people with your diagnosis and you have SO MUCH in common in that area. I’ve met with a lot of resistance, even anger, when stating that. A lot of parents who insist that no one could have done a better job than them even if they are NT, that they really listen to their children well, they would do anything fortheir children etc. Even though I never said anything about any other parents or anything outside my own situation. They seemed to feel personally attacked, like I was saying someone else would have done a better job raising their children or that they don’t love them as much, even the ‘neurodiverse’ parents.
.-= Norah´s last blog ..Identification =-.

But of course there is also the possibility that Ms. Baker was trying to keep the child (and as the post also says, MI tends to side usually with the surrogate), and she decided to use a sensationalist reasoning to presumably give her more sympathy.

This. I brought this up briefly in the essay; it’s not clear if the roots behind the suit for custody had to do with ableism, or a desire to keep the babies and a calculated decision to use Kehoe’s mental illness as an excuse. I didn’t have the time to do the legwork and find documentation when I wrote this up, but I know that there have been a number of cases in which surrogates have been unable to surrender babies and those cases have not always been ruled in the surrogate’s favour as a result of the attitude that the contracting parents are entitled to the baby. It may be that this was seen as an easy win with mental illness in the mix. Which is very disturbing.

But of course there is also the possibility that Ms. Baker was trying to keep the child (and as the post also says, MI tends to side usually with the surrogate), and she decided to use a sensationalist reasoning to presumably give her more sympathy. As it turns out, she succeeded, and that is a very bad thing on the part of the media. Assume that she’d refused to give up the twins because Ms. Tehoe belonged to a racial minority. I bet the media would’ve portrayed a totally different picture of her then. But for some strange reason, disability is different.