Thank you Lana - I very much appreciate healthy reasoned debate, and I very much welcome hearing different points of view on the subject. And I very much appreciate your kindness too.
The thing that irritates me most in these kind of discussions is that the main focus is on someone’s need for a baby. The fact that that baby is a person too and has a right to know where they came from is important.
The bond between a surrogate and her IPs and her surrobub is life long - I'm confused as to why a baby born via surrogacy wouldn't know where they came from? The surrogate plays a role in the child's life - there's no hiding. They will grow up knowing their tummy mummy. The paperwork from the CAFCASS process documents the entire process of the parental order. A child who is adopted may not know who their birth mother is until adulthood - if at all. A child born through surrogacy will grow up knowing their tummy mummy. Of course they know where they came from. Why wouldn't they?
I think the severance of a relationship with the woman who gave birth to you, either through bereavement or choice, is more likely to impact the child than not having a Dad around.
As above. I'm confused as to why there's discussion of severance of a relationship between a surrogate and their surrobub. They continue to play a role in the child's life - a child born via gestational surrogacy to a heterosexual couple (as would be the case if we were to match with a surro and she were to conceive with one of our frozen embryos) has a genetic mother and father who raise them, as their parents, and they have a surrogate mother who they know carried and birthed them. I'm confused as to why a relationship is being severed and a child wouldn't know where they came from. Certainly that's not the case in the UK surrogacy community in anyone I've spoken to. Perhaps you know couples with different experiences of surrogacy?
I believe people and their bodies are not commodities, that it is wrong to have a contract or feel entitlement over a woman's body and the baby she creates with it
In the UK there is no contract and the surrogate has complete rights over the pregnancy and any baby born. It is up to them to decide to forego parental responsibility to the intended parents. Surrogacy in the UK is altruistic and entered into voluntarily and with all rights resting with the surrogate.
I judge those who buy women or their children to use.
Do you feel that altruistic surrogacy, as it is in the UK, is buying women? Where women such as mustbemad chose to be surrogates without any financial compensation, and did so out of an incredible generosity and kindness to help a child be born to a loving family?