Gay men and surrogacy - the new “be kind”?

I don't understand what you mean. How does it put children at risk?

One of the reasons we don't typically criminalise mothers who give up babies, or have them taken - barring very extreme circumstances - is because it puts children at risk.

We don't criminalise a woman who gets pregnant even after having all of her children placed in care - and rightly so. We don't criminalise someone with a serious and inheritable illness for getting pregnant.

Cant see a comparable risk of exploitation or profit-making in those examples.

Think it’s always worth exploring situations where things feel taboo, as I mentioned upthread about being uncomfortable asking after the woman who has just given birth. Where women seem to be an inconvenient necessity.

With the first situation mentioned too, there’s a specific reason each child is taken from the mother. In many cases won’t be what she wants - like Constance Marten who would have brought up babies in a freezing tent with a man who throws her out of windows.

To that end, do many women of sound mind, contact an adoption agency while pregnant to say, “I’ve conceived and am having a baby altruistically only because I want to donate it to an infertile couple.” They could be sure they don’t want any (more) of their own children and seek donor sperm (free online or from a sexual partner ambivalent about any resulting pregnancy), to then purposefully bear a child to give away. Bypassing the bespoke big pharma interventions in commercial surrogacy. Do any? Would that be encouraged?

It’s interesting reading the regret stories of women who’d never been pregnant before entering into a bespoke arrangement to bear a child.

Personally I would do something like:

Make it illegal to contract away your parental rights except in an adoption scenario where the state stands as an intermediary guardian for the child, even if the other person involved is also a biological parent.

Make it illegal to withhold contact where child and mother requested, or withhold full information from the child, unless a court deems this is in the best interest of the child for safeguarding reasons.

Make it possible that a child could always potentially have a legal/financial claim against a biological parent, except in the kind of adoption scenario I already mentioned.

This would have a significant effect on the fertility industry.

ETA: And I would apply this to both the woman who carried the child and any donors of gametes whoever carries the child.

PlanetJanette has done a great job of describing the difference between forced adoption and surrogacy in terms of the immediate after birth experience of a child.

Only from the perspective of whether the mother is choosing it or not. I haven’t seen an explanation from the baby’s perspective.

It’s patently ridiculous to say surrogacy can’t be banned so we should just regulate it better, given there are multiple countries around the world, including a lot of mainland Europe, that have banned it.

And the majority of this thread has been focused on the impacts and legalitied of the separation of the baby from its mother. The fact remains that the entire process before that moment is fraught with legal issues.

The answer to not wanting a child is not to have one. Not to give it away.

Where a parent refuses to or cannot care for a child that has been born, the obligation of society to the child is to step in and take care of the child, according to the child's best interests.

What we say about the parents - whether we approve of this all - depends on the situation. Parents are dead? Mentally ill? Maybe extremely young? Child was conceived by rape? Possibly these are reasons where we don't judge much or at all.

Parents are drug addicts? We might see this is the best course of action but we might also be disapproving of the kids of decision making that created a situation where such an unfortunate outcome is the result.

Parent (maybe the father) pisses off because he or she would rather not put time and energy into a child? Well they are selfish fuckers and we condemn them. Parents who can have an obligation to love and care for their kids whether they want to or not.

1. For a child conceived by any sort of artificial insemination and surrogacy arrangement, what makes you think the lab or men involved don’t know who the biological father is?
2. Re your second point, I have simply reported what the stats say about which men present the greatest risk to a child in the home.

What if they don't know who the father is, biologically? Are they both an equally high risk? Or both an equally low risk?

And even if one or both of the intended parents are related to the child, that's not what matters to a baby.
The primary bond is between the baby and it's mother, the woman whose body it grew in. The importance of that bond is recognised in forced adoption, which is only done as a last resort, but not in the current laws on surrogacy.

It’s not ‘exercising their fertility’ - it’s making a baby to sell.

Babies have human rights you know. One human right is not to be sold.

So when a Ukrainian woman feels that in order to feed her existing children and secure them a home, she has no other option than to take a payment of 8x her annual wage in return for having a baby to give away to someone abroad?

We have already discussed the inequalities of power in a surrogate/purchaser relationship and the widespread exploitation of women that has become part of the surrogacy industry.

Just look at the involvement of organised crime groups and human trafficking related to surrogacy that has already been identified. This is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.

www.eurojust.europa.eu/publication/surrogacy-and-human-trafficking

PlanetJanette has indeed come up with a description but it’s not one that’s accurate in all cases or even sets a clear distinction in relevant ways.

Some babies are made with donated sperm and eggs so are not genetically related to their purchasers at all. For reasons discussed earlier in the thread, this is suboptimal for the child.

The circumstances around the conception and financial arrangements could be scrutinised as part of the social services investigation when the mother seeks to surrender parental responsibility.

Obviously some people will lie to evade any laws, and sometimes they'll get away with it. But it would be more difficult, and fewer people would do it.

Surrogacy is illegal in most of Europe, so it can't be that difficult to word a law. Any baby whose mother intends to relinquish PR would come under the care of the local authority, just as happens with non surrogacy children already in the rare cases that a mother wants to do that. It's not rocket science.

Any child moving from their original family to a different one should do so under the auspices of children's social care. And it'd be pretty obvious what was going on if mothers were trying to relinquish PR of newborns at birth in favour of the bio father and his long term partner of either sex, wouldn't it? Then that bio father would get DNA tested and he and his partner would be assessed, as kinship carers are already when mothers can't or won't care for their children. Any babies trafficked here from overseas would mean the purchasers being assessed by social care before the babies could be brought here, as happens in international adoption.

Would that 100% stop surrogacy? Nope.There are a lot of crimes which can't be eradicated, that doesn't mean we shouldn't have laws against them or that we should try to regulate them on the grounds that we can't prevent every one from happening. We should make them as hard as possible to commission and prosecute those who do it anyway.

This article is not about gay men but it discusses the costs involved - the commissioning parents paid £151k and the judge said only about £23k of that was justified - i assume that's what the surrogate got. The whole thing is a racket and no one, gay or otherwise, should go anywhere near it imo (and I'm not even going to start on the ethics of elderly parents using surrogates) .
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14756779/amp/Elderly-couple-70s-parents-surrogate-baby.html

"They" means all the people talking about regulating surrogacy. The Gov has a consultation on it atm. The Law Commission proposed changes which have been set aside for the moment. There are plenty of interested parties keen to change the law here so commissioning parents get parental rights from birth and the advetising for and payment of surrogates is made legal. I definitely wasnt referring to you.

So on the traumatic separation, there is obviously a difference between a child being forcibly removed from a mother who does not wish her to be taken away and is incredibly distressed as a result in terms of the trauma and stress involved for both the mother and the baby; and a baby being removed from a mother who is calm and voluntarily choosing to relinquish parental responsibility, done in a managed way.

So you accept that in the surrogate cases where the mother has actually changed her mind but is contractually forced to give up her baby while feeling distress, this is traumatic for the baby?

And we haven’t even started to touch on the issue of rejection of the baby by both surrogate and it’s purchasers. This has also happened and can also leave the child stateless. Baby Manji was one of the first. Baby Gammy was rejected by his purchasers for having Downs Syndrome, while his twin sister was accepted. The male purchasing parent turned out to be a convicted sex offender.

I’m sure the Ukrainian surrogate who gave up her baby and then was sent back to a war zone on a long distance bus because the people buying her baby were too cheap to get her a taxi despite her caesarean would have felt some distress.

Your post makes absolutely no mention of the rights of the child or any consideration of its welfare. Why would anyone want us as a society to enable more of the above scenarios happening?

Right, so just don't tell an IVF clinic that surrogacy is what is intended, and biological father instead contributes to the mothers costs during pregnancy rather than making a payment and the model falls apart.

Actual human trafficking always entails exploitation. By its very definition it involves force or coercion.

What would be interesting is if those who want to criminalise surrogacy could explain what specific acts would be criminalised without resort to loaded and unspecific terms.

Who is the 'they' you talk about.

If it's referring to me, that is the direct opposite of what I've said. So either you've missed this or are choosing to misrepresent me.

In terms of regulation - I would support an international convention governing protection of surrogates to address exploitation and coercion, promote a properly regulated framework of surrogacy providers who have obligations in terms of the welfare of the surrogate and ensuring she is aware of risks, implications etc, that sets out standard terms of a surrogacy contract which includes terms that support surrogates, including protections in the event that she changes her mind, ensures healthcare costs are properly covered etc.

It is if the mother conceives the child with the intention to surrender her parental responsibility to the father, and is being paid to carry the child.

I don't think we should criminalise any woman for getting pregnant though, whatever the circumstances. I would not want to laws to punish a woman who becomes pregnant, and then makes a decision, for whatever reason, that the best thing for the child would be for its biological father to raise it. But surrogacy can be made difficult, and vanishingly rare, without doing that.

Banning IVF clinics implanting embryos into any woman they know is not intending to bring up the child herself would be a start.

And a mother seeking to voluntarily surrender parental responsibility should be a safeguarding issue, and anyone proposing to raise the child, even if it is the biological father, should be subject to the same scrutiny by social services as a potential adopter. And it should be a criminal offence to have made any payment to the mother in such a case.

Exactly. When they talk about regulating it, they mean more power and rights for the purchasing parents. Nothing to help the surrogate that's for sure and nothing for the child. And still if they try to regulate it here, people will still circumvent the law by going abroad.

Plenty of surrogacy involves adopted embryos, where no one involved in the birth or parenting of the child is biologically related.

Tbf this makes it much harder to bring the child back to the UK. But it happens.

But yes the fact that one commissioning parent is usually related is how people get parental rights. But most women who have babies don't abandon them. And they usually aren't paid to be pregnant.

So we should regulate all human trafficking instead of banning it? That'd be better? For gangmasters and pimps maybe, but not for the trafficked.

That's not what's happening though, look at this couple, two men creating a motherless child with no vacancy for a woman in their queer family:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5161891-surrogate-mother-wins-access-to-her-biological-son-in-landmark-case-after-gay-couple-said-it-was-homophobic-for-her-to-be-involved-in-their-motherless-family-with-no-vacancy-for-a-woman

It's disingenuous to say that surrogacy is 2 parents mutually agreeing which parent the child will live with. It's people with money paying a woman for the use of her womb and the ability to discard and disregard her after the birth.