The Rumplestiltskin Law

Kapeka. You say. No. If my mother told me today that I was not her genetic child, but was a surrogate baby that she decided to keep, I would be fucking angry because she took me away from my real mum and family.

I think you will find a surprisingly high proportion of surrogate babies are only partially linked, genetically, to the surrogate parents. Surrogate parents can choose to shop for donor eggs and or donor sperm. In these contexts you are attributing family status to those who sell/and or donate their human eggs and sperm...

Who gets to decide who is really Mum in this situations? I would say its the owner of the body who gestated and birthed the child..otherwise you are giving rights and ownership over women's bodies to others.. a bit like the Republication party is gleefully doing in the USA right now..

I doubt that prospective adoptive parents change their mind that often, but even once is one too many human lives ruined.

The other way round is so much more likely, after nine (usually interfering) months of contact with the people involved, you might be thinking again about their suitability to be parents. It's one thing saying yes in the abstract and another handing your infant who you've bonded with to two people who you've since discovered something you dislike/hate/fear about them.

No one would force a mum who changed her mind about adoption to go through with it, despite two people being promised a baby. The principles here might seem different ("It's not her egg! She said we could have it!") but biologically it's not that different at all.

It's also noticeable that the language does focus on the rhetoric of parents who can't have their own children, but this isn't true of all people using surrogates. Some women just don't want to do it themselves, and this is just more outsourced labour.

I think it's bizarre. If the potential parents do change their mind, does this law force them to take the baby anyway? So you'd be leaving a tiny newborn in the arms of complete strangers who don't actually want him? D'you know, I can't imagine what could possibly go wrong

I'm still getting my head round this and I think I've avoided thinking too deeply about it because I feel tremendously lucky to be a mother and enormous sympathy for women who want to be and who can't. But it still seems clear to me that any legislation must be weighted in favour of the surrogate mother. She's the one doing all the work, growing and giving birth to the baby, thereby putting her own health - and even potentially her life - on the line. I think all other risks must be born by the commissioning parents, and yes, that includes the risk that the surrogate might change her mind. And if that's not workable then what that tells me is that legal commercial surrogacy isn't workable.

Well I agree with everything Barracker says (but so much more eloquently than me).

Also Joan this is spot on

What type of anti logic has to be applied to even start to justify the trauma to a baby of separating them from their mother and severing the vital attachment process that every human being has been evolved to need.

The idea about the woman having bodily autonomy is an interesting one too - if the woman isn't free to change her mind, keep the pregnancy go abroad and start a new life during the pregnancy then actually it's slavery isn't it?

Article in the Mail today about the effect on the NHS of private IVF clinics.

Issues seem to be specifically about the more complex methods of creating then implanting embryos rather than artificial insemination. I would guess as most surrogacy arrangements use donor eggs they fall into the more complex group.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7121593/NHS-spends-120m-year-dealing-problems-linked-private-IVF-clinics.html

The Rumplestiltskin law is the perfect name.
In what civilised society can it be defended to force a mother to hand over her baby to strangers? All over the works Surrogacy is being seen for what it is, a human rights violation. Why is the UK racing towards the inhumane, regressive US model?

What type of anti logic has to be applied to even start to justify the trauma to a baby of separating them from their mother and severing the vital attachment process that every human being has been evolved to need.

Why does money change any of that?

Great post Barracker. I don't really honestly see the difference between surrogacy (selling a baby) and selling children who are older. What's the difference between selling a baby and selling a 5 year old? Really? It is buying and selling human beings who can't consent.

I've been thinking about this and so went to look for information on what children of sperm donors feel and found this: slate.com/human-interest/2010/06/new-study-shows-sperm-donor-kids-suffer.html

How much more will children born of surrogacy suffer? After all they will have been grown by, and be intimately connected with a mother.
Our species is hardwired to expect certain things after birth, for this connection to continue, for a baby to be taken away from the mother who carried and grew them right after birth is of course going to be a trauma.

Time will tell what this little girl will think of her commissioning parents/buyers as she grows up and finds out how they treated her mother with such contempt. How terrible for a little girl to be raised by men with so little respect for women.

www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/06/her-name-is-monroe-christine

Very well put @Barracker

It's not about the people who want to be parents, and it shouldn't be.

Women die giving birth. There are increased risks to the woman’s health through pregnancy and also through IVF and particularly, it seems, with donated eggs.
There does not seem to be much research on the psychological effects on children born into such arrangements.

Of course it’s horrendous. Buying a baby to order is horrendous. Renting a woman’s body for nine months is a horrendous thing.

Yes, its horrendous. Buyer beware, eh? Perhaps they should consider that unpleasant consequences await those who buy human beings and women to grow them in, rather than attempting to delete rights from those people that they buy?

Without this other woman carrying the baby, there would be no baby.

I'm really confused. I thought the whole point of surrogacy is that the woman is carrying a child for other parents.
Surely a law giving the intended parents full rights from the off stops any back tracking last minute which causes hurt and massive issues for all lives involved?
I mean can you imagine the hurt of having another woman carry your child and last minute she says actually no I'm keeping baby and you have no rights?
I think it's horrendous.

I think we've lost the checks and measures of ethical process over the last 20 years. And where once we might create tightly controlled exceptions that were understood to be watertight, we've mutated into a consumer-led, clickbaity society where ethics takes a back seat to popular zeitgeist.

I no longer believe we as a society should use medical procedures to create children in any woman that are not from her own eggs.

We have proved incapable of keeping a finger in the dam. We need to plug the hole permanently.

This exactly summarises my feelings on this and so many other issues as well. I used to be so liberal minded and "progressive" about these things, but now I think that humans just don't have the capability to do certain things responsibly. We're such an "all or nothing" species, either it's forbidden completely, or we'll take it to it's most terrible extreme just because we can. There's no sense of moderation at all.

bollocks to the 'taking away a woman's choice, much feminism!' crowd. Same lot who yell about choice and such when it comes to sex work rather than looking at the bigger picture.

Also this. It's not just about individuals and their needs. No one lives in a vacuum. A society that allows (and worse, advertises!) surrogacy is a society that harms all women. I don't want my daughter growing up seeing billboards selling women's bodies.

I heard someone (a female lawyer) give a paper on this and it made me very uncomfortable.

Partly because she very much minimised the ethical issues of exploitation and commodification which clearly became apparent in countries like India as something which could not happen here. Her rather rose-tinted view was that women here would enter surrogacy fully informed, fully consenting and not coerced in any way, because that is how it is in Britain... (much the same as no women are ever coerced into prostitution...)

Partly she gave no consideration of the rights of the child to stay with the person who carried him/her. None at all. Her discussion of child welfare was around the lack of clarity about legal parentage from birth (because a baby is going to know this )

She talked about the need for and right to have a child. I realise this is difficult territory but no-one has the right to have a child, do they? No-one needs to have their own child to the extent of putting another woman in a life-threatening situation.

Partly because my experience of family law is so jaded that I think this is simply another opportunity for lawyers to make money.

It was all too much ‘move along folks, nothing to see here’.

Someone really should carry out a study.

Are there surveys of the people who were born from surrogacy, I wonder? They weren’t surveyed as part of putting together these proposals, from what I can see.

It may stop women who are not yet surrogates from going down that path. I guess all we can do is hope.