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By Andrea Peyser
March 27, 2015
C'mon, just excuse Dolce & Gabbana
Take it from someone whose child was conceived under the bright lights of an operating-room table — Dolce & Gabbana have a valid point.
This is political correctness gone mental.
Italian clothing designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana outraged a vast swath of their celebritwit clientele this month when they made comments critical of homosexuals adopting children and of such baby-making procedures as in-vitro fertilization.
Ouch! And not in a good way.
In an Italian-language interview in Panorama magazine, Dolce expressed an opinion that’s heresy in Hollywood.
“You’re born to a mother and a father,” he said. “Or, at least, that’s how it should be. I call children of chemistry synthetic children. Rented wombs, semen chosen from a catalog . . .”
Condemnation was swift and furious.
Rocker Elton John, who is raising two children produced through IVF with his husband, David Furnish, called for a boycott of D&G.
Then he was spotted in Los Angeles carrying a shopping bag emblazoned with the name of the fashion house. His rep insisted that Sir Elton was shlepping around personal items in an old bag and had not been shopping at a D&G store.
Pop star Madonna, who has four children, two biological and two adopted, posted a message on Instagram: “All babies contain a soul however they come to this earth and their families. There is nothing synthetic about a soul!! So how can we dismiss IVF and surrogacy?’’
Only actress Zoe Saldana risked the wrath of the celebrity industrial complex after the new mother of twins was asked if she’d join in the D&G boycott.
“No! Not at all, that would be the stupidest thing if it affected my fashion choices,’’ Saldana declared. “People are allowed to their own opinion. However, I wouldn’t have chosen to be so public about something that’s such a personal thing.’’
Both Dolce and Gabbana are gay. They broke up as a couple in 2005, but remain business partners.
Dolce failed to quell the uproar when he told CNN last week that his views were private, personal and based on his belief in the traditional Sicilian family.
Gabbana fired back on social media, urging a counterboycott of John’s music. In fractured English on CNN, he defended his and Dolce’s “freedom to speak.’’
“We love gay couple. We are gay . . . We love gay adoption. We love everything. It’s just an express of my private point of view,’’ he said.
Dolce doesn’t support a John boycott.
Do I think that the designer used a poor choice of words?
Certainly.
But I can tell you from experience that there’s nothing beautiful and natural about creating a child in metal stirrups.
Yet there I was, in my 30s, having squandered my prime childbearing years under the impression, promoted by the feminist establishment, that I could put off getting pregnant indefinitely.
When I learned that my chances of getting knocked up dwindled by the hour, my husband and I chose a fertility treatment called GIFT — gamete intrafallopian transfer. I’ll spare readers the details.
But medical insurance picked up most of the cost. GIFT worked on the first try, and my lovely daughter was born. I don’t regret it.
I believe that the designing duo’s disdain for advanced baby-making techniques is not aimed at me, nor at stable people, gay or straight.
But today, the technology has grown in popularity faster than medical ethics can catch up with the procedures. That’s something we all should fear.
TV’s former “The View’’ co-hostess Sherri Shepherd, 47, commissioned a baby with her husband, Lamar Sally, 44, born to a surrogate mother using Sally’s sperm and another woman’s egg.
Now that the couple is divorcing, a tragic court case is ongoing in Pennsylvania. Shepherd wants nothing to do with the now-7-month-old boy, Lamar Sally Jr., “LJ,’’ and is asking a judge to absolve her of financial responsibility for the boy’s care and feeding, Sally says.
New York City publicist Tracey Kahn, who is single and 51 years old, just gave birth to her second daughter through IVF, using another woman’s egg and a strange man’s sperm. In India in 2008, a 70-year-old woman became the world’s oldest recorded new mom when she gave birth to a child created with another lady’s egg and her 72-year-old husband’s sperm.
Give these guys a break.
They’re thinking of the kids.