Surrogacy on the NHS

The NHS is not a baby factory. Surrogacy doesn’t save your life.

“Surrogacy IVF will only be provided where no other fertility treatment options are available” and only for “medical reasons”.

Which means gay men and transgender people who have lost their previous fertility can now expect to be provided with a baby on the NHS via the reproductive farming of women who are expected to provide the babies.

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'commissioning parents' that's right up there with 'friendly fire' and 'enhanced interrogation techniques'. Babies as product.

As you have friends who did this Ov9 would they not be happy to stay in the same room as the SM and baby and simply go home to sleep when the midwives say? My husband couldn't stay in a delegate room to me whilst I was in a private room, he was told to go home at 10pm after I gave birth at 7.30pm. He came back the next morning. The midwives cared for me and the baby overnight but we mostly slept.

A hospital is not a hotel, surely you do not expect for a number of rooms to be found to accommodates CMs or birthing partners for that matter.

The birth mother is legally responsible for the child’s needs until a parental order is granted. And that’s how it ought to be. The child was part of her body until the birth, and the baby has already bonded with her.

Hers was the first voice the baby will have heard, because of the way the sound travels through her body. Later in pregnancy, the baby will be able to hear other voices, but not as well as the mother’s. Tests using cotton wool pads have shown that newborn babies recognise their birth mother’s smell and prefer it. Newborn babies have a very strong urge to snuggle up to their mothers and try to feed.

A surrogate from Cambridge was hired

If it were up to me, only altruistic surrogacy would be allowed, in certain circumstances. And altruistic would mean - no payments to the surrogate mother at all. No “expenses”. If that means only wealthy women act as surrogates for family and friends, so much the better.

I confused at the funding also Lord, at a time like this?

Surely the NHS will be on its knees after C19 is all but gone.

I see this couple considered adoption but decided against it. I wonder why?

The NHS surely needs its £ to save lives not make them, or is it to be held together with glue and stick backed plastic?

Ultimately it is the child who would suffer if commissioning parents were singled out as not deserving of standard treatment. Going by our friends experience, surrogates are generally delighted to hand over baby on arrival and the suggestion they should look after baby while in hospital would be greeted with horror and a flat refusal. As nursing staff are not nannies and early bonding with future caregivers is important, it is not difficult to see why hospitals might also want the commissioning parents on scene, especially for medical checks etc. Otherwise you have confusion over who is actually responsible for the child's needs.

A baby is not a human right. Parents who can’t naturally conceive - a bit of help. Parents who have absolutely zero chance of conceiving even with a magic wand - come off it.

The ultimate consumerism. Why is the NHS spending money on this?

No Al1 it's not surprising. Ross and Chris pay into the NHS so they want their money's worth (I don't think they understand what the NHS is there for...)

www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/05/04/scotland-gay-couple-surrogacy-nhs-ross-chris-muller-edinburgh/

Text to save the click traffic - my bolding (how can you be hired if you're not paid?)

Ross and Chris Muller, who live in Edinburgh, met in 2009 and married in 2017. They always wanted to start a family together and initially looked at adoption before settling on surrogacy.

The couple were shocked when they discovered the enormous cost of private surrogacy — so, they asked the NHS to help make their wish come true, the Daily Record reports. Ross and Chris said they were originally denied funded surrogacy by the NHS Scotland because they are a male same-sex couple.

“We had to keep pushing on that door and it was new to the hospital so they hadn’t done this before,” Ross said.

“That’s when they told us that we would be the first in Scotland to go through this.”

A surrogate from Cambridge was hired and eight embryos were created from Ross’s friends eggs and his sperm. Finally, an embryo was transferred into the surrogate in November of last year.

Just 10 days later, she took a pregnancy test and Facetimed the couple to show them the positive result. Ross and Chris were “over the moon”.

“I think a lot of same-sex couples, male and female, don’t know that this exists, like we didn’t until we found out about it,” Ross said.

“Adoption, as amazing as it is, shouldn’t always be the way that same-sex couples go and the NHS does have an open door because we’ve gone through it.”

Ross added: “A lot has changed since what we went through – the forms don’t say mother and father, they say parent A and B – it’s little things like that. I think it will be a lot easier for people to go down this path if they want to.”

Because the process was funded by the NHS, the couple did not have to pay a penny. They are now expecting a baby boy in August.

They believe they would have paid £45,000 or more if they had opted for private surrogacy.

“The NHS has done everything from start to finish pretty much. We were prepared (to go private) but then we thought, ‘Actually we pay in like everyone else, why wouldn’t we get something out?'” Ross said.
Rules on same-sex NHS surrogacy vary across UK.
NHS Scotland previously had a “blanket ban” on funding any treatment that involved the use of a surrogate.

That changed more than two years ago when the Scottish government voted in favour of allowing anybody — regardless of sexuality or gender — to access fertility treatment.

A spokesperson for the Holyrood confirmed last year that surrogacy for male same-sex couples would be funded following the rule change.

Publicly funded surrogacy is significantly more complicated in England, where 200 clinical commissioning groups set their own rules for eligibility.

In Northern Ireland, IVF is only offered to women with demonstrated fertility problems.

Meanwhile, the NHS in Wales offers fertility treatment to gay male couples, but has a policy that says: “Surrogacy IVF will only be provided where no other fertility treatment options are available” and only for “medical reasons”.

Aside from funding, would-be parents are also affected by laws which mean the surrogate remains the child’s legal guardian until a parental or adoption order is signed.

While hopeful parents can sign a surrogacy agreement, these are not enforceable by law. Campaigners say that commercial surrogacy combine with enforceable surrogacy agreements would solve this issue, however it is currently against the law in the UK to pay a surrogate anything more than reasonable expenses.

Ok Ov9. I guess you're saying the horse has bolted. I get it, and maybe like you say, it is it to late, but it's a bit like the GRA for me.

Once you become aware of certain 'injustices', if that's the right word, you can always overturn them. Look at the CPS and the 14 year old.

As the laws are being review with the proposals seeking to relax existing laws it seems like the right time review the entire industry.

A documentary I saw yesterday (I was rather overloading on this subject yesterday!) an American lawyer was pro-surrogacy but was calling for a regulatory body. It's insane to me that there are no checks and balances in place, like with adoption, after all we are talking about children here. And that's only one element but clearly central to surrogacy. Or at least it should be, about the child I mean, and not the CPs or the SM.

If you wanted to have a child and provide a safe and loving home, I think you should welcome those checks and balances for surrogacy.

This thread is about NHS funding it though, so I won't take it off topic...that's why I asked about the home births, although that would have even fewer checks in place obviously.

Side wards are allocated on clinical need. Commissioning parents are not a clinical need.

Why am I not amazed that a campaign that would in effect prioritise commissioning parents over women who have given birth is led by two men?

Another discussion of health risks.

www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2019/05/52239/

Gestational surrogacy puts two women at significant risk of harm - the egg "donor" and the surrogate mother. Donor oocyte pregnancies are three times more likely to be affected by preeclampsia, raised blood pressure, gestational diabetes, premature birth and other complications.
The NHS should NOT be funding harm to healthy women.
Post CV the NHS and public finances are going to be stretched thin as never before.
Paying for surrogacy is a luxury it cannot afford.

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26627731/

It's a hot issue, yes, but it's very late in the day to decide it's not on. People have spent the last decade growing accustomed to it. I remember a very similar Mumsnet thread years ago and it seemed out of date then. You're not doing anything nearly as significant as people who have a different view... Meanwhile lots of surrogates are having babies. I'm not sure you could turn the tide now. Was my point.

Link to full consultation paper. Screen grab from page 43

s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/lawcom-prod-storage-11jsxou24uy7q/uploads/2019/06/Surrogacy-consultation-paper.pdf

The Law Commission Consultation paper noted that Scotland and Wales will pay for the IVF impregnation of a surrogate mother.

A well kept secret I think.

Not really Ov9 did you see the date on the Daily Record article?

Also the Two Dads are campaigning for this, why bother if this is no longer an issue?

7 years ago you knew of a couple/CMs who were accommodated in the hospital at the SM's request. It might have been a one off, maybe it's an every day thing...at that NHS Trust, but if it was nationally par for the course why are Two Dads working on it as part of their 'mission'?

Maybe you could email them and let them know the party is over, the war is won and they can go back to the campaign for Dads having a space to change nappies too?

Most disabled public loos I come across double up as baby changing rooms. So whilst I don't think that's fair for disabled people who need the facilities maybe you could tell them that party is over too?

oh

Not the kind of thing I'd know really, is it. What I find strange is this discussion as if it's cutting edge stuff. You're late to this party.

The NHS is a state funded medical service. Providing facilities for people who have bought a child is not part of their remit.

I mean if it was a quiet day and no one else was using a side room (hospitals aren't exactly built to have spare space are they?) I don't mind who uses it to bond with a newborn but to demand it as a right or as and as part of the surrogacy 'package' the NHS provides? That's taking the piss.

I saw a you tube clip today where a repeat surrogate mother mentioned how she shared a private room with the newborn and the CMs overnight and how she preferred to give birth at home.

I don't know what I think of that, I don't know how safe that is - I suppose the burden of care is not on the NHS?

What a waste of NHS funding.

And before anyone yells bigot or homophobe I do not think this should be funded for lesbian or straight couples either.

When I had DD two years ago, she lost too much weight and I was put on a three hour cycle of waking DD up, breastfeeding, giving top-ups with a syringe, expressing, and sterilising. I had to set an alarm every 2 hours 45 minutes day and night. This was on a ward with about 20 other mums, who must have wanted to kill me. DD herself had to put up with a very noisy baby, three inches away in the next bay.

If there had been a free side room and it became known that the midwives gave it to NON-PATIENTS WITH NO MEDICAL NEED, there would have been a riot.

*Her choice.
*
Not the choice of the Midwives who have to work around that then?

This was perhaps seven years ago...

You are behind the times. We were at uni with a couple who were accommodated in a hospital room over night as commissioning parents and were welcome at the birth. The surrogate had her own room and didn't have the baby with her. Her choice.