"when mothers do make the agonizing choice to step aside because they believe it's best for their babies, as Debbie Rowe did, they're vilified. What kind of mother would do that? What kind of mother would let Michael Jackson raise her kids?"

How did "as Debbie Rowe did" get in there? Mothers are *not* routinely vilified for stepping aside "because they believe it's best for their babies". If Debbie Rowe is vilified, it's because of the specifics of the case. Bearing children for Michael Jackson's amusement is grotesquely unique and trying to associate generalities about adoption or surrogacy from the specifics of the MJ/Rowe freakshow is absurd.

If you have a point to make about the general issues, fine, but talking about them in terms of Debbie Rowe and the children she donated to what was effectively a roomier Fritzl dungeon isn't making it.

Michael Jackson had the kids created in a lab so he could molest them.

It was cheaper than having to pay off the parents millions of dollars everytime.

Next please.

but who is the man whose image is used to indicate how biracial people can have blue eyes?

Here's the link.

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1316/1436119560_8db1fc3bd7_o.jpg

We live in a society which is not "safe"(in this case safe from criticism)for women with children or for women without children (you don't want to have kids, what kind of woman are you?!)

That is why if it weren't so serious, I would be amused at the abortion/adoption debate. A woman with an unwanted pregnancy is damned if she does (has the baby and puts it up for adoption, like D. Rowe) and damned if she doesn't (evil women have abortions!)

And, women who decide to have and keep their babies are also in for heavy LOVE children, but when will we love the women who birth them? (okay, the last part is rhetorical, we don't actually LOVE children, once they are born anyway.)

I wish the fucking media would stop telling outright lies.

I caught a snippet of an interview with Debbie Rowe the other evening while I was flipping the dial and, if I caught it correctly, she was basically saying that she thought of the kids as being more Michael's than hers. I might have gotten it wrong...I didn't see the whole piece...but it didn't give me a very good impression of her motherly instincts.

Debbie Rowe may or may not be a "mother" but she's definitely -- by her own choice -- not a parent.

Michael Jackson to claim paternity of the youngest child while stating that the little boy's mother was "None", in other words non-existent. That child's identity has been trampled on by the late and not-so-great Michael Jackson and, to make matters worse, he called him "Blanket" when speaking about him. All three children were bought, one way or another, just as MJ bought animals for his private zoo. Nobody called "Halt" to any of this for the simple reason that money talks.

And removing boobs does not make a woman into a pregnant man. Men cannot bear children. No amount of reporters having fun with salacious and inaccurate headlines changes that fact.

Maybe someday they can grow a uterus - but until then - men cannot have children. There are many definitions of motherhood - but pregnancy there is only one definition for - and it does not work unless you have the physical parts available to carry a child.

What kind of mother would allow Michael Jackson to raise her kids? What kind of person would imply that such a question is out-of-line?

The real question is this: What kind of society would let Michael Jackson raise anyone's kids, including those who obstensibly are his own?

Yeah, she's a birth mother for sure, but a mother, that's a bit more complicated.

Also, it's getting rather tiresome to have discussions about the complexities of women's reproductive choices using the most extreme situations as an examples (Octo-Mom before, now Debbie Rowe). There are regular women leading regular lives and making heart-rending decisions about their reproductive lives everyday.How about using them as examples? It might make for a more productive, nuanced discussion. Unless Broadsheet has Access Hollywood aspirations, that is...

A few posts ago, you seemed to have no trouble casting aspersions on Jackson's parents as custodians because Joe Jackson gave an "icky" press conference (not because of his alleged beatings of Michael forty years ago). If his mother (who doesn't live with Joe) gets custody, then Joe may get near them in all his ickiness and the kids may get even more cooties than they got from having Michael as their father. But to indicate that a woman who hasn't had anything to do with children she relinquished custody to should not now be considered a parent for purposes of custodianship-- well that's just making a hasty and misogynistic judgment. Look, I don't know whether Joe Jackson truly is not mourning his child's death or is just an old man who is inept at speaking to press -- something that truly takes skill lest your words be twisted and taken out of context and Anderson Cooper dourly questions whether you really loved your child. Joe Jackson, himself, said he was so elated because world was showering Michael with so much love and adulation. Frankly, that makes a lot of sense to me seeing what a pariah MJ had been for the last decade-- he was icky after all.

You also write that MJ was a disturbing father figure, but all reports from people who knew him and were around him and his children indicate that he was a wonderful father. You don't have to do too much digging to learn that the molestation charges against him were pretty baseless. Is that to say that there are other things going on that we don't know about? of course not, but that's true of anyone and anything-- George Clooney may like to dine on kittens (what do we really know about him, after all) . Fact is there is no evidence he abused those two children beyond the accusations themselves--just google Janet Arvizo and Larry Feldman and draw your own conclusions or read the recent articles by Ishmael Reed and Julian Vigo for a different perspective.

Jackson was weird and the circumstances of his children's birth were weird. It's weird for a transgendered man to give birth to a baby, but would any good progressive question whether he should have custody or call it icky? I didn't think so.