Times article on surrogacy

Exactly. He was profiled the other week

We longed for a baby. Now we have two, born four months apart

www.thetimes.com/article/13e6557b-5f1f-4de2-bd94-5750337ad895?shareToken=c241f55ea06a87cdbf6fdddbe2485f24

@Arran2024 I don't want to quote it because it's long, but your post at 11:10 literally made me shudder.

It's like something out of The Handmaid's Tale.

I am not as anti surrogacy as some people on these boards but these articles are pushing me that way. I find his description of laws that are intended to protect surrogates as extremely distasteful. Plus his dis calls for empathy for his situation while displaying absolutely zero for other people nothing short of disgusting.

This is the second article in a week in The Times featuring this man and his campaign for easier access to surrogates. He and his wife now have two children born a few months apart (4 months I think), one surrogate and one their own. Both articles all about him and his wife and none of it about the surrogates or the impacts on the babies.

Thank you for sharing this, I’ve read it and the comments. Surrogacy articles on The Times almost never allow comments so it’s heartening that as this one does they’re so strongly against it. I’ve always assumed a higher up in the paper has used surrogacy as the coverage is so uniformly pro the buying people rather than the woman or the baby. I wonder what’s happened…

So this man and his wife had one baby by IVF, another by IVF that died in infancy, then one naturally and finally one using a surrogate. He's like the worst case ever for surrogacy, there was absolutely no need for them to use a surrogate.

"According to these antiquated rules, in Britain the surrogate is always the legal parent and the biological parents have to go through a long and uncertain judicial process to effectively “adopt” their own offspring."

Yet without them, the woman who gives birth signs herself into indentured servitude and has no rights over the child. Without those rights, she is vulnerable to exploitation. She is likely to be poorer than the parents, she needs those rights.

Rohan Silva sermonizes on empathy but displays a frightening lack of it to the woman who has born the child.

We need to cut out all this language of one side being antiquated and one side being progressive and see this from all angles, this is a complex situation where potentially one side can always get hurt.

This is what they do, but they have to be vetted by social services and apply to the courts. This takes ages. They want to avoid this by having the purchasing parents' names on the birth certificate.

That case involved adoption ie none of the prospective parents were biologically related to the children and the birth mother wanted to relinquished them, so new parents had to be found.

Surrogacy involves deliberately creating the situation where a child is going to removed. And usually at least one of the new parents is biologically related eg the man has used his sperm to create the embryo. It is the biological connection that means the UK court will normally allow the child into the country and then the parental order.

International adoption is pretty much frowned upon and it is very difficult to bring an unrelated child into the country.

This is the part I don't understand.

A child who loses a mother at birth to death or abandonment is acknowledged to have suffered a severe loss, no matter what wonderful care they might receive from the surviving or adoptive parents.

So how can it be right to engineer that situation?

I have always been liberal minded and have supported many progressive causes but I have come to despise these articles that start with we are the good people, they are the bad people that has become the trademark of progressive politics. Every social reform needs to be reasoned and judged on its own merits not declared to be righteous by some pillock who thinks they are the high priest of some new religion of social justice.

I just saw another article pop up on my Facebook about a woman who adopted - but paid for - some babies from the US in the 90's then had them taken off her and sent back. She was vilified by all accounts and even Tony Blair commented on it at the time. How is that any different to the rise of surrogacy?

Something I always wonder when I read these articles where obviously one parent is genetically related and a genetic parent and the other has its rights infringed by having no rights...can you not apply for guardianship or adoption? I know of two cases where this happened with foster children and everyone just got on with the application etc.
Why can't this be done?

I couldn't have children and I adopted.

Adoption rates are way down as people look into surrogacy instead.

Adoption is hard because the children available to adopt in the UK have mostly been removed by the courts, not relinquished, and have many difficulties, often related to foetal alcohol.

Gay couples and even single men are increasingly seeing surrogacy as a fertility treatment they can legitimately use to create a family. There are surrogacy seminars held in this country aimed specifically at men - these men are affluent and well able to afford it. The men buy eggs from elite athletes or supermodels or ivy league students then have embryos implanted into poorer women in say Mexico. They often have two surrogates at once, each carrying the child of each of the men. Or they find a surrogate who will have twins, with the embryos made from sperm from each of them. But also single men are commissioning babies.

Then there are the people in their 60s and even 70s doing it. There have been two recent cases where the courts were asked to grant parental rights to very elderly parents. One case, the "mother" had died, had been in a nursing home previous to that. The father was sending the child to boarding school as soon as possible.

There is so much dodgy business going on. People just dont turn up to collect the baby, change their mind and want the surrogate to have an abortion. They control everything the surrogate does, like what pain relief she can have during labour.

And the baby is treated like a package. We don't take puppies away at birth but babies are OK? Some of these kids will never know birth mum or dna mum. And they will told to be grateful to their parents for cresting them.

Adoption practice changed considerably when the impact of loss on the child was realised. Nowadays most UK adoptions have some kind of ongoing contact with birth family (another reason some people dont want to adopt). But surrogacy ignores this.

I could rant for hours about surrogacy! There are some good anti surrogacy accounts on X - SurrogacyConcern and StopSurrogacyNowUK. The gov has put surrogacy reform on hold for now but there are lots of people lobbying for changes. Ireland recently gave the surrogacy industry everything it wanted, partly driven by a gov minister who has a child born through surrogacy. We have to stay vigilant. There is concern that eg Stonewall will pivot to fertility rights now that they are struggling with trans rights.

"There needs to be more effective rules, psych assessments and legal procedures in place though to protect all parties involved."

Especially the poor babies who have no voice in the matter but their life starts with the worst loss imaginable for a child. Even puppies get more time with their mothers because it's recognised as incredibly important for their emotional and social wellbeing.

And through Facebook. Not an agency that would (as a hedge against legal claims, if nothing else) offer some degree of screening and support for both sides, but fucking Facebook!

Babies aren't presents. They are human beings with their own feelings and interests.

If a mother is unable to care for her baby and has to give it up, that is a tragedy and a deep trauma for that baby. Nobody should be engineering this situation on purpose.

it’s time for our regressive legislation to change

It is Rohan, but not in the way you mean.

Jesus, one of those comments actually referred to the baby as a "transaction".

No, that's what I had yesterday when I bought a top in Next. People should never be for sale.

and legal procedures in place though to protect all parties involved.

This isn’t possible. As soon as you protect rights for one party, you compromise the rights of the other two parties, no matter which way you order it.

I’m not completely anti surrogacy, I would never hire a surrogate but I would happily be one to give someone a child. There needs to be more effective rules, psych assessments and legal procedures in place though to protect all parties involved.

All the comments bar three are against surrogacy, and the three who were not weren't exactly making a case for it.

1. "Some people are clearly not hardwired for empathy, if the posters here are representative? Good grief."
2. "Agree with this article."
3. I've screenshot this one because it's quite rambling.

Here are screenshots of the top comment, another which I thought very to the point, and a third (the rambling one mentioned above).

For those who can't read them, the comments are overwhelmingly against surrogacy.

I do notice that these articles always seem to present the highly emotive case of a woman who cannot conceive for medical reasons, rather than some of the other situations in which surrogacy might be used. The case in his article seems to be fictional I think?

There was a court case a few years back where a gay couple had found a woman on Facebook and met her once (I think it was at a railway station) before flying her out to Greece to be impregnated at an IVF clinic. It turned out that she had learning difficulties so her ability to fully consent was doubtful. When the baby was born she of course changed her mind and the men brought a court case against the baby’s mother. I remember that the judgement stressed what an utter lack of concern the ‘intended parents’ had shown for her and her family. In the end the baby remained with the mother and her husband, with access granted to the father.

I noticed this article at the bottom of the one in the OP. I thought that the face in the thumbnail looked familiar...

https://archive.ph/c0Wbk