Sophie Beresiner - The Times - Baby Born from Surrogate Mother

She is unbearable.

I don’t know anyone who has had a baby through a surrogate but I know lots who have had IVF and every one of them feels that level of guilt over feeling that some bits are difficult because it was something so desperately wanted. So I can understand her feeling like that - she’s a normal mum feeling normal mum stuff.

But the whole “she has a special place in our heart” because of the surrogacy is just bizarre. As if the rest of us conceiving naturally are just like “yeah he’s not special because I just shagged and ta da”. It’s a regular thing with difficult conceptions and I do understand why (even my close friend felt like this and said it when her SIL got pregnant while she was pregnant “she couldn’t let me have this time for ME even though I’ve been through so much to get here”), but it’s basically wrong.

I guess she’s got to write about something and now she’s just a mum of two, there’s not much more to say! Although I would prefer to hear about her relationship with the surrogates, whether her daughters have been told who they are etc.

This one is at it again. I cannot bear her bleating.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12671913/It-took-decade-two-miracle-children-surrogacy-feel-guilty-moaning-motherhood-theyre-here.html

Recommendations also include lifting the current ban on advertising services in relation to surrogacy and a minimum age of 18 to be a surrogate mother.

My own 18 year old DD attended a consultation event with me. She commented that although she was legally an adult she felt she was still vulnerable and deserving of protection from exploitation.
With payments of up to £60k many gap year students being targeted by advertisements on Facebook and other SM could well feel tempted to fund university by having a surrogate baby.
Is that the amazing career trajectory we want for our daughters?
To be a breeder?

Remember the recommendations include erasing the rights of birth mothers by making commissioning parents he legal parents of the baby at birth. This is in direct contravention of the recommendations of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children.

www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Children/Pages/Surrogacy.aspx

Here is a copy of an email I received from the Law Commission in March for you Dozer.

An ongoing consultation with plans to formulate final policy to recommend to government.
I sincerely hope government will not uncritically accept the recommendations.

We are getting in touch because you responded to the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission consultation on Building Families Through Surrogacy: A New Law. We are writing to give you an update on the project.

We had a large response to our consultation and are very grateful for the extent to which a wide range of stakeholders have engaged with us on these important issues. We are analysing those responses carefully and continuing to engage with stakeholders about the views they have expressed. We are also carefully monitoring the evolving case law around parenthood and birth registration.

After we have completed our analysis we will move to formulating final policy and finalising the detail of the scheme that we will recommend to Government. We will also be working with Parliamentary drafters to produce a bill. In light of the extent of stakeholder interest and the evolving case law, we anticipate that the project will run longer than previously planned, until early 2022.

Thank you for your interest in the project. Please refer to the project websites for the latest information and updates:
https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/surrogacy//_
https://www.scotlawcom.gov.uk/law-reform/law-reform-projects/joint-projects/surrogacy//_

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch.

Law Commission - Comisiwn y Gyfraith
Property, Family and Trusts Law Team
Tîm Cyfraith Eiddo, Teulu ac Ymddiriedolaethau
1st Floor, Tower, Post Point 1.53, 52 Queen Anne’s Gate, London SW1H 9AG
(access via 102 Petty France)
Web: www.lawcom.gov.ukk_

Don’t think legal changes are “in full swing”? There’s been some consultation, but has govt announced any intent to change the current regulations?

Sure, there are some women willing to donate eggs and/or gestate and give birth to a baby for a friend or family member.

Personally I would never do either, for anyone, due to the health risks, and associated risks for me and my family, and (with egg donation or “traditional” surrogacy) the potential future feelings of the DC.

To give an opposite view, I have never been a surrogate and before I had my own children I could never have imagined it. However, my closest friend of 20 years went through a heartbreaking journey of miscarriages, ivf etc and I did offer that if she couldn’t have her own child then I would carry one for her because I just knew the total love I had for my children, and wanted her to have that too.

I also knew we would always be close, I would be “part of the story”, I knew she would be an amazing mum.

It didn’t come to this as she successfully carried her own twin girls but I would have done this for her, in the knowledge that that baby would have been so loved by her family.

What's the point in even having laws if they'll sign off £60K?
That would be a massive inducement for a lot of people.
I can't find it now as I'm on my phone but within the consultation research they quote they mention that whilst some people carefully enumerated every expense to present to the judge others just gave the total figure labelled "expenses".
Just like our politicians used to do.
Shocking arrogance at knowing the law doesn't apply to them and not even making an effort to enter into the spirit of it.

Article on Uni of Kent survey of 177 couples in 2018

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/07/01/couples-paying-60000-surrogates-despite-uk-system-reasonable/amp/

Wasn’t there a survey about UK surrogate women and costs, think that even here where the law has thus far sought to avoid commercial egg sale and surrogacy the average “costs” were something like £18k. Will check that.

My main thought when reading the latest column was that I hope that Rebecca makes a fast and full recovery from the pregnancy and birth and has no lasting problems.

I dislike these columns too. Sophie’s strong bias, while perhaps understandable, was dominant. As far as I’m aware there have been no “balancing” stories on surrogacy in The Times.

Sad but unsurprising that there has been so little research, particularly on the women donating eggs or going through pregnancy and birth.

This is an extract from a blog from a US surrogacy site, “Donor Concierge” about the couple.

“Their roadblocks were everything from unsucessful donor egg cycles in Russia and having to find a new donor in the US, to being matched with a surrogate candidate who already had 6 children (a candidate who would never have been presented to a Donor Concierge client). These were just some of the issues Sophie and ‘Mr. B’ experienced, leaving them with a huge financial deficit, and a general distaste for the fertility industry here in the US”

Reminded me that the negative content in the columns was solely about Sophie and her H, eg costs, poor service from the private companies, failures etc. Nothing showed much consideration for others, or the ethics of what they chose to do.

I am actually shocked at how the baby and her right to be with the one person she needs more than any other in the world is ignored, air brushed away.

This.

The child is a 'thing'. Mindless, emotionless, a blank slate, the prize, the purchased item, only requiring competent care that can be provided by any adult, doesn't matter which. Because if you start down the line of the child is a person, being removed instantly without consent or necessity from the one person they are bonded to in order that the commissioning parents get their joy and delight of parenting experience, or acknowledge that babies are born with attachments programmed in and that rupturing that attachment has a price, it starts to look very grim very fast.

I just don't understand how adoption can be going in one direction (increased recognition that there's inevitably going to be trauma for the child, contact allowed later on if the child wants it, a general sense that this is not a problem free option) and surrogacy in entirely the opposite direction (wonderful for those who commissioned the child, no discussion at all about what the impact on the child might be, birth mother either disappeared or framed as delighted with the whole thing). How can anyone believe both types of framing at once?

I stopped reading this awful column a long time ago. Selfish, whiny and boring, to say nothing of the many ethical issues around surrogacy. I hope very much that now she has finally obtained a baby, the column will be replaced with something more interesting.

Sorry for typos

Gay not hay

No idea about despoiling

Thank you for this thread, it is fascinating and helping me to unlock why I feel so uncomfortable about the idea of surrogacy. I have an acquaintance who is hay and he and his husband used an American surrogate. He says they are just like any other couple despoiling with a newborn. But like a pp said, how can that be? He has no idea of the experiences mothers and newborns have. For me so much of that experience was bound up in the physical side of it, it was a very visceral, physical thing. I felt like I had become an animal. I made animal noises during labour. As well as breastfeeding my kids I used to nuzzle them like a cat would, it was involuntary, I couldn’t control it. I had some perceptual disturbances like hearing crying etc and I even hallucinated a few times. I’d also wake up in the middle of the night and think I’d lost the baby and be looking for him under the duvet. When he was in the cot next to the bed. And that was my experience of becoming a parent. I don't know how anyone becoming a parent through surrogacy can compare it.

Just getting on a work call Joe will dig out the link posted by someone else in another thread a bit later.

Thanks 👍