Gay dads take surrogate to court after she bans them from seeing twin baby girls

I wonder if two eggs were put back?

I agree with the PP who pointed out that in this one-sided woe is us poor dads vs evil greedy bitch story, I come away feeling disgusted with the men's attitude and the "journalist's" integrity.

This is a write up of a go fund me begging story which seems to have twisted the legal situation in the UK to pull at our purse strings.

1. The UK has commercial surrogacy. Agencies get paid. Lawyers get paid. Councellors get paid. Clinics get paid. The mother gets paid. Babies are commissioned and paid for.

Don't be fooled by the altruistic label.

1. No surrogacy contract is enforceable. The people commissioning a child know this risk from the outset. The mother can legally keep all the money as UK law only allows her to receive money for costs incurred which is not conditional on the baby being handed over.

1. All parental orders currently require going to court. This costs money.

1. No UK court can force a mother (and yes, the woman giving birth to a child is legally its mother under UK law, regardless of whether another woman provided the egg) in a surrogacy agreement to sign the parental order. This is entirely voluntary on her part, gives her the right to change her mind and is also supposed to prevent exploitation in cases where things go wrong.

1. As is the automatic rule that the birth mother's husband is the registered father on the birth certificate. This prevents men from offering their wives up for surrogacy without this having any consequences for them.

1. This is a nightmare scenario for surrogates - being left with an unwell baby intended for someone else. And being stuck with two unwell babies when you needed money to carry them in the first place, is even worse. So this whole story suggests to me that there was a lot more going on than the article tells us.

As for regulating surrogacy. It is regulated in the UK. We have a whole entire law regulating it already. It works exactly as intended.

This story is not an example of an unregulated system, it's an example of people either not understanding the law, raging against the law because they don't like it and/or breaking the law. We don't have enough information to know which of these applies here.

Furthermore, the current system is an attempt to minimise the inherently exploitative nature of surrogacy agreements. The new proposals diminish the rights of mother and child and remove the constraints which attempt to minimise the inherently exploitative exploitative nature of surrogacy agreements. That's what the calls for more/better regulation are supporting - a system that removes even more rights from mothers and children.

Other countries have banned it outright. We should do the same.

Surrogacy treats a woman as a commodity to be rented. Surrogacy treats a child as a commodity to be commissioned and bought. A similar institution that treated human beings as commodities to be bought and sold is slavery. Is slavery alright as long as we regulate it?

create them a baby

The question of "demanding" doesn't arise in this case or, so far as I am aware, virtually any other surrogate case. The arrangement just doesn't happen if the surrogate doesn't agree.

Another one here for feeling surrogacy should be banned. Agree with many comments here.

Nobody, male or female, has the right to demand that another person them a baby.

Can somebody please explain what this human right to have a child is, where it is enshrined in law, and how it manifests itself in everyday reality?

Two tiny newborns here who have been fucked over for life. How horrible.

A man does not have a right to use a woman uterus to create offspring for him

Does a woman have that right then?

Steven wrote: "Having our girls in NICU was only the very beginning of our long, excruciating nightmare."

That does sound very entitled.

How does it sound entitled?

If this were a straight a couple that had separated it would not be considered ok for the man to just take the newborns away from the mother

The it would not have been surrogacy would it? The LGBT is irrelevant.
What costs? Their poorly newborns were being cared for free of charge by the NHS.

I've read on here often enough about the expenses involved in having a newborn in NICU. Travel, accommodation, not working...

they didn’t go through any miscarriages

Do you say that to any man whose partner has miscarried their child? They still have to go through the loss of the child even if they don't have to go through the physical process.

Some of the things said here are just horrible.

I'm on the fence about surrogacy. It can be a wonderful thing to do for people. The problem arises when there is a financial transaction rather than "altruistic" surrogacy.

I hesitate to post this, but I will. It's nothing to do with surrogacy, but I note that the paedophile in the Australian/Thailand case called his daughter Pipah. I had a work colleague year ago called Pippa, whose favourite anecdote was that she went to Thailand on holiday, and locals would laugh when she introduced herself, because her name sounded like the colloquial local name for "blowjob". I don't know if this is true, and I hope it isn't, but seeing that poor little girl's name just then reminded me and make me feel a bit sick.

Surrogacy should be banned. You shouldn't be allowed to buy humans, no matter how small they are.

It's illegal to buy a kidney or a bit of a liver and that would save a person's life, there's no reason that a whole human should be legal.

Surrogacy should be banned.

Babies aren't products. Nobody has a "human right" to "own" one.

This
I think surrogacy should be banned. I don't think there is any ethical argument to support it.

It’s very difficult. As your biological child you’ll want to fight for that. Being pregnant and growing the baby is no small thing. Handing over a baby isn’t either.

I can see how you would rack up £17k if you are self employed or on contact work in a fairly well paid job. Good quality maternity work clothes, good quality food, exercise/massages etc to keep your body healthy, travel to medical appointments, then having to cover your costs for enforced maternity leave both before and after birth and a potential period of unemployment. Contingency expenses for possible post birth expenses also should be factored in (e.g., medical repair treatment, counselling, PND meaning you cannot work). As somebody said above, where are all the rich women giving birth for poor people? As a person with an earning capacity of multiples of 6 figures, what would my reasonable expenses be for a year or more of disruption to my career? The only reason they get away with complaining that £17K is a lot is because, as everyone knows, the only women who engage in surrogacy (outside of a sibling or similar arrangement) are poorer ones; and so she should be grateful for whatever nuggets are passed her way for the use of her body.

The cost must have been for the egg harvesting (gross phrase), insemination, lawyers

Those wouldn’t have been her costs though so any money paid for these things can’t be attributed to her expenses. If they are including all these things in the total of what they’ve paid then the figure they gave her is less than £17k.

If they go ahead and remove the surrogate's rights, we'll soon be living in a real life Handmaid's Tale.

'It's complicated by the fact that one of the men is the twins' biological father, and that they gave thousands of pounds to the mother. I don't think they were entitled to take the babies, but the money should have been paid back.'

IS that a joke? Sod the fact one of the men is actually the biological father just give him his money back??

She's called the 'surrogate' because she agreed to be a surrogate and signed a contract as such. If this had been a heterosexual couple using a surrogate in the same way then the outcome would have been the same.
That's why there are laws in place.

The cost must have been for the egg harvesting (gross phrase), insemination, lawyers and some minor expenses like travelling to appointments, maternity clothes etc. Surrogacy UK have been in the media saying average 'costs' are £15k I think, and of course there are additional costs of having newborn twins, if they hadn't factored that into the sums I'm not sure they should be doing this. They both work, why do they need financial assistance with caring for these song-longed for children?

For every miscarriage they had I would count it as two women being involved, if they had an egg donor and a surrogate each time, maybe a different one each time. If that's day 3 miscarriages that's 6 women, with the mental and physical impact on each of them. There must have been a cost involved there too, and not just financial.

The more I think about it the sicker I feel that the Law Commission are aiming to make this sort of thing more likely by removing a surrogate mothers rights. It's frightening.

17k for 24/7 work for 40 weeks, plus the year it takes for a womans body to recover postnatally is far from the minimum wage.

Surrogacy is disgusting. It's far too close to slavery for comfort.

There are many fantastic gay adoptive parents. However adoption is a different ballgame entirely as it is about making a lifetime commitment to a child who will inevitably have challenges and traumatic experience, probable attachments broken to their biological family as very few babies are adopted and mostly it will be older children, and parenting an adopted child is a highly committed thing to do that may come to involve extreme end challenges.

The adoption process works hard to screen out couples who are wanting a blank slate child to fit into the hole where they wanted their biological child to be as opposed to wanting to parent a person with a history and challenges. The fitness for parenting is also very strongly assessed as the person of importance in all this is the child. You can see why many would prefer surrogacy, and why adoption really couldn't be an automatic pathway to the exact same experience of parenting that most hetero couples are able to have.

It is going to have to be faced at some point in society that not everybody can have everything, and that disappointment and hurt feelings about your situation does not trump other people's rights, or entitle the trampling of them. I share PP's worries that the child in all this barely exists more than the wanted commodity: this is about the creation and parenting of a person, who will 'belong' to the parents only for a short part of their lives. That shouldn't get lost behind value placed on the experience surrogate people would like and feel entitled to.

I haven’t read the article. IMO any woman who gives birth at 28 weeks has had a very traumatic time and an emotional rollercoaster and it should be understood that all bets are off with regard to prior agreements. However heartbreaking that may be for the dads.

We cannot expect contract law rules to govern in these situations.

I watched a documentary on US surrogacy a few weeks ago, and found it horribly disturbing.

I don't agree with surrogacy at all. It's so morally wrong on every level.

And yes I had issues having children, I lost one son at birth but I have never once felt that I had a "right" to be a parent.

For all those offering the extremely unpleasant complications surrounding this awful story as a reason why surrogacy should be 'regulated' - your argument only serves to prove that surrogacy should be banned, and it can never be effectively 'regulated', because every complication you smooth out by regulation, you create another ripple that complicates.

If you have an horrendous situation, made even more potentially horrendous by modern technological advances, which is totally bloody avoidable because it never happens by accident, then there is no need to attempt regulation.

Ban it. Women are not for sale. Babies are not commodities.