Ov9, I understand why you’re sticking up for your friends. And yes, sometimes surrogate mothers are content with their role and feel fine about handing the baby over.
But some do change their minds during the process, because they may have bonded with the baby, or grown to dislike the commissioning parents, or both. If you read the article by Jennifer Lahl I linked earlier in the thread, you might understand why some people, including me, are horrified by the proposal to relax surrogacy laws in the UK.
Here is a UK case of a surrogate mother changing her mind. It was supposedly “altruistic surrogacy”, but in reality it was anything but.
The surrogate mother (known as V in the judgement) had learning difficulties and limited financial means. She didn’t understand the arrangement she had agreed to, and had doubts early on in the process, but was afraid to tell the commissioning parents.
www.familylawweek.co.uk/site.aspx?i=ed161502
The applicants, A and B, were the commissioning parents. They already had twins, who had been born to a surrogate mother, V. Russell J was extremely critical of the couple's behaviour towards V. She described them as being "dismissive" of V, "wholly uninterested in her" and as seeing "her primarily as a service provider to whom they had paid £12,500" [35]. A, said Russell J, had "no understanding…that he was dealing with another human being whose own expectations and feelings needed to be taken into account".