Surrogacy summed up in one photo

Her body, her choice.

I strongly disagree with this. How is it in the baby's best interests? Surrogacy should be illegal. Poor baby.

God almighty 🙄😢

For reference, here is the Tik-Tok video of two men holding two babies while a caption comes up saying “do they have a mum?” Followed by a definitive “Nope!” as part of the song. I’m posting it because I was trying to remember which two awful men it was and it took me a while to find it again. I’ll leave it to others to decide which is worse.

https://www.tiktok.com/@themorgantroddens/video/6962492556424809734

I know three couples who've used a surrogate. To me they encompass the entire range - from utterly lovely people whose relative offered altruistic surrogacy and remains totally included in the child's life, through to a very entitled, privileged couple who moaned at the cost of the poor foreign woman whose body they used.

There is a world of difference between the first couple and the last couple, and the situations they have created.

All the couples are gay men but the only relevance that has in my mind is that it's probability easier to be a wealthy couple if both of you are male.

Regardless of my deeply positive feelings about the first couple, I still oppose surrogacy. I simply do not believe there should be a market for human bodies. Especially not humans of oppressed classes such as women & those of low socio-economic status. I also recognise the huge difference between adoption, which seeks to heal a rupture already happened, and knowingly creating a loss by planning to remove a child from its mother at birth. We know so much about infants in utero now and about the concept of the 4th trimester. I suspect there are professionals who would like to be speaking out on this but have had their hands tied by the fact surrogacy has been attached to the new "progressive" men's rights movement that nobody dare oppose.

I do wonder if there should be access to a legal framework for alternative mutually consenting families to raise children. This could benefit lesbians, single straight females and gay men.

I think the point that you're missing is that men sidelining women is always disgusting, especially when the point of the "thing" is something as inherently womanly as pregnancy and birth and even when the woman allows it.

So is it OK to have surrogacy if the baby is going to be raised by a woman?

Women should not be having babies for men to raise.

What that picture illustrates perfectly, is an identity being denied. I’m not talking just about the woman, I’m talking about when the child is born. A child’s identity is that of who their mother is and that they have a mother.

Every child has a right to their identity UNCRC

The consequences of children born through surrogacy are at particular risk. https://www.unicef.org/media/115331/file

During a surrogacy arrangement, the rights of children are at risk in the following ways:
Establishing and preserving identity can be difficult or impossible for children born through surrogacy. The child’s rights under Articles 7 and 8 of the CRC – which protect the child’s rights to be registered at birth, to preserve their identity, and to re-establish their identity if they have been illegally deprived of some or all of its elements – can be negatively impacted by decisions made about the child in surrogacy situations. Decisions about whether to preserve information relevant to a child’s identity can have a lifetime impact on the child, and future generations, in several ways. Knowing one’s origins is fundamental to the child’s physical, psychological, cultural and spiritual development. Having one’s own identity is also a gateway to the enjoyment of the child’s other fundamental rights, such as those related to protection, health, education, and the maintenance of family ties.
Persons and organisations facilitating and/or undertaking surrogacy are not always aware of the importance of collecting, storing, and preserving identity information of children born through surrogacy, so the child can know their origins. In the absence of systems to preserve the child’s identity rights, restoration of the child’s identity may be impossible; particularly in circumstances where there is donor and/or surrogate anonymity. This also leads to challenges in birth registration and certification, as only a few civil registration systems are set up to record identity information related to family relations in surrogacy and other forms of assisted reproductive technology.

It’s awful. Not quite as bad as that TikTok video where the men are singing “Does he have a mother? No!” but that’s not a benchmark anyone needs to get close to 😡

This!

@Artichokeleaves Yes we agree that this isn't straightforward. I envy the certainty that some people have, they know it is right or they know it is wrong. Certainty is a nice place to be.

To be honest I don't think any type of conception is guaranteed to have nice outcomes.

Grim, very grim.

Your posts on this thread are excellent @Artichokeleaves

Thank you

FINA's summary from their decision last week really sums it up for me: it is sometimes necessary and proportionate to say no to a few people, which may indeed be a tragedy for them personally, in order to ensure the most ethical outcome for the situation as a whole.

You make a number of good points. This isn't at all straight forward.

But parents having a baby together in any circumstances are not creating a child intentionally to do one of the most traumatic things possible to a child of immediately removing it from its mother for adoption.

If you adopt a child, you are intensively and invasively screened through a very long process which you may not pass, and your suitability for parenting is thoroughly assessed, and you must undergo training: not for general parenting skills but to understand the needs of a child who has experienced removal from birth parents. This is because, as is explained to adoptive parents from the start, adoption is rooted in loss. It is nobody's first choice; not the parents and certainly not the child's. The child is not a blank slate, but someone with a history and attachments and a life that has to be valued; the birth parents are not vanished from the child's story. Much trouble is gone to by adoptive parents to support children with this, including children removed at birth, to understand this, to be supported with feelings for the parent they did not know and were removed from. And adult adoptees speak of the difficulty of coming to terms with this removal, and how hard this is. Children born of donor insemination are expected to have rights to history, to contact, because of the damage done by removal of all history. Children are continued to be exposed to even highly abusive parents, sometimes past the point of safety, and while this is far from ok it is done based on the research that not knowing your history, not having a relationship with the person you grew from, can be damaging to the child and future adult, sometimes more so than protecting the child from contact.

And yet with surrogacy, the child's rights are removed at a stroke, and the parents have no such assessment, training, a requirement to demonstrate that they are able to put the child's needs ahead of their own and to meet this trauma. In this case, the child has been conceived with the outright plan of creating this trauma in the hope it just won't matter very much.

It's highly questionable. And that's before all the ethics around the use of women's bodies, human trafficking, whether it should be possible to buy or commission a person.

I take your point about anyone can birth a child regardless of how unsuitable: my point there was that stories about altruistic surrogacy may sound lovely, but aren't always, and the drive to do this is not always the lovely one it looks like. The nice stories and the nice outcomes should not mean it's unkind or wrong to look at the grim and very questionable aspects, or regard poor outcomes as just collateral damage to good intentions.

At one point shipping kids off to Australia was thought a lovely and altruistic, modern and progressive thing to do, all good intentions and wonderfulness. Now we look back on it and the lifelong damage it caused, and it's obvious that a whole lot more questions should have been asked, and a lot more caution involved.

Of course they don’t. It’s never about the woman

its all about the baby that they want

My first time posting on the Feminism board. I'm staring at the photo. Its making me feel emotional and not in good way. The vibes I'm getting are they don't give a shit about the woman.

Couldn't all that be said for children conceived in the age old way? A couple trying to conceive will also be planning for it, envisioning a future which may not be anything like the baby will want and things can go wrong, some women are distraught because the baby is the wrong sex I've seen that on MN, some parents will be devastated that the baby isn't "perfect" whatever that is. We don't say people shouldn't have children for those reasons. Other babies aren't even wanted and may be neglected or abandoned.

The women like the psychopath you quote have children, narcissists have children, sexual predators have children and all those children get damaged and some get murdered but we still don't legislate against procreation.

I don't know enough about how children born this way feel, maybe there are studies that would inform how we think. Even then it could be confusing, I never felt I fitted in with my family, my siblings older and younger than me get on, spend time together but I exchange Christmas cards and maybe a phone call once or twice a year, as a teenager I was convinced I was adopted but apparently not so even if a child conceived by surrogacy says they don't feel part of their family I wouldn't know if that was any different to how I felt.

To be honest I don't really know how I feel about it, it is very complicated but I do know I would have been devastated if I couldn't have children so I feel sympathy for the couples who desperately want a baby.

I couldn’t care less if they’re kissing the woman or if she’s on their shoulders like a hero, surrogacy should be banned. It exploits women and treats children like commodities. A few ‘nicer’ photos , including the mother, (because she is the mother), doesn’t make this disgusting practice ok

perfectly put.

the buying and selling of human beings is illegal, but it’s ok if they are babies??

and let’s consider that adoption starts from a place of loss, this is acknowledged and there is lots of support and training around this, and it is generally accepted that children who are adopted into secure, loving family homes will have considerable trauma as a result of being adopted - so how the fuck is this ok ??

No it won't. They can fly to states where the laws are liberal on abortion and surrogacy alike.

Overturning Roe v Wade will have no effect on the rich at all.

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

The term birth giver is abhorrent.

The woman who shot her three children in cold blood and successfully killed one of them in order to be able to have a boyfriend who didn't want her kids, who was found to be a quite staggeringly cold psychopath, had at least one surrogate child for an agency, I can't remember if she wanted to do a second and was turned down or whether she went through with it. Quite a legacy for those poor kids to inherit. But she liked being pregnant and making people happy, and didn't get emotionally attached much to her kids. That was altruistic.

There are all kinds of reasons why some women may want to do this. We have got to as a society get past the idea that because there are some aww bless, lovely feels anecdotes about some individual cases, it does not make the situation as a whole okay, or mean we should not look at the extremely dodgy and questionable aspects - such as the entire focus on adult desires and feelings with no regard at all for child and what is planned for it for the moment of conception and how it may be affected throughout it's life in order for adults to have their lovely decade or two - or that the many cases where things do go wrong should be regarded as collateral damage because it would be nasty to say no to a few nice, well intentioned people who would be sad.

It's a way of thinking that's caused a number of disasters and it needs to change.

Birth giver? That is horrible. The woman who carries the baby for nine months, nourishes it, provides its whole environment is not a "birth giver" she is a mother.

This.

The female whose body gestated the genetic material, whose body exchanged blood with it, who carried it, whose movements and sounds and heart beat built the brain and nervous system pathways, who gave birth to it, is the mother.

That the providers of genetic material made this more complicated and the child has an extremely complex genetic history is neither here nor there. Pretending this away benefits only those who would like to commission a child without guilt and overlook that they are creating a child to quite intentionally to break its most fundamental bond with its mother and not value it, because inconvenient to them and their feelings.

This is not child centred. This is abhorrent on multiple fronts.