To say these men shouldn't be allowed to keep this child.

[GrabbyGabby]

2 men hire a surrogate to have a child for them via IVF. They wanted 2 boys (had names and gmail accounts for them already🙄).
The IVF clinic implanted a female foetus, and now they are suing the clinic.

I don't think they should be allowed to raise a child they clearly don't want.

www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/same-sex-couple-sues-fertility-clinic-over-alleged-wrong-sex-embryo-implant/

YABU they will be fine parents and their daughter will in no way be scarred for life

YANBU babies arent commodities. They should never be bought and sold, and being female is not a defect

That's because for most adoptions in the UK up until recently attachments were formed and broken, as children are often not removed for many months.

For babies going through foster to adopt there aren't the same issues, the process is exactly the same as surrogacy.

Women who are identified to be unlikely to care for their children are out through a foster to adopt pathway, when they give birth they can say a goodby but the babies prospective adopters are approved as foster careers first, they take the baby at a few hours old. So there is no attachment to birth mother to break. This has been proven to be beneficial for the children in these cases.

There is an issue getting adoptive parents to go for F2A though due to the risks involved, hence why local authorities are really pushing for it atm.

Exactly the reason sperm donors cannot remain anonymous in some other countries. People have a right to know who birthed them, who their genetic parents are. If they don’t have the right to that knowledge, history shows it’s deeply traumatic for some.

It's quite simple, if you are pro choice you are pro a woman being able to choose. No caveats, no restrictions.

If you think women should be able to abort in only certain circumstances you are not pro choice. You are also not pro women.

Although your views are abhorrent to me, at least you are consistent unlike many on this thread. You don't believe women should have any agency over their own bodies no matter the scenario.

"No matter the scenario"? That's quite a leap. I think it's odd that you're telling me what I believe when I haven't discussed my opinions on abortion in any detail here. I'm not going to derail the thread by getting into that.

I think everyone can agree that it's really far from "quite simple".

Using another person's body to benefit yourself is morally wrong. I believe that where prostitution is concerned too. Surrogacy is problematic on a whole other level as there is an innocent child being passed around.

I do not doubt that these children go to people who desperately want a child and will cherish and care for them. That doesn't mean I don't take issue with surrogacy in the first instance. I think it is morally wrong to create a life with the express purpose of selling them on. No matter how much someone wants that child. A child should not be a transaction. A human being should not be a transaction.

And to top it all off, engineering that child to tick certain boxes and then say it's ok to abort the pregnancy if those criteria aren't met? Well that's morally bankrupt right from the off, but on a global scale, that's also going to cause some serious problems for the female population.

I am pro women. I believe women should have a right to life. Not to be discarded before they are born on the whims of others because they're not male.

You have stated multiple times you are not pro choice when it comes to abortion, I'm not leaping to anything, merely going off the words you have used.

You have stated multiple times you are not pro choice when it comes to abortion, I'm not leaping to anything, merely going off the words you have used.

I said that I don't use the terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice" but used the terminology for the sake of argument to respond to a point.

I said that I don't agree with abortion and don't think it is "ok".

You have told me that I think abortion shouldn't be allowed under any circumstances.

At no point have I said that or outlined the entirety of my opinions on that very complex matter and have said that I'm not getting into it and derailing the thread.

My posts are all here for anyone to read.

You can try to discredit my opinions on surrogacy this way if you want. I maintain I am pro-women as I think it is heinous to say that it's ok to abort females in the womb because you'd rather have a baby boy. You've said such abortions are fine and that it's the mother's choice to abort for any reason at all.

I can gather from all your posts that you think there is no moral issue with implanting embryos into a woman as a transaction to have the child when it is born, and to abort the pregnancy if it is later discovered that "whoops, it's a girl".

@alphapie
curious about your background and understanding of attachment, fostering and adoption. Not asking, just making a statement as much of a hat you say is not backed up by academic or practical evidence. I’m an experienced social worker who has worked and studied in this field. You’ve bandied about terms “attachment” without clear understanding of the emotional development of a baby and how pregnancy and the birth process impacts upon the long term psychological and emotional well-being of the child.

It's definitely backed up by evidence, as have cited throughout this thread. Attachment theory is well understood, accepted and documented. Knowing who it's gestational carrier is at birth doesn't = a bond or attachment.

Before IVF went through the adoption process here in the UK and had a failed F2A placement. Hence why unfortunately I know a lot of the ins and outs on that process, which I believe in even if it didn't work for us.

Unless you can point to evidence of the contrary there is no basis to think surrogacy impacts the children that are born. The only studies into this area group children from surrogates with adoptees which muddles the results (obviously)

So you don't agree with abortion and don't think it's ok but it's silly for me to think you're against it?

You are as far from pro women as you can get, but again, at least you are consistent with your views, unlike some on here who pick and chose what they think women should have a say over.

So you don't agree with abortion and don't think it's ok but it's silly for me to think you're against it?

You asserted that I'm against it under any circumstances.

You're just playing silly beggars now.

When did I say you're against it in any circumstances, I merely said you don't think women should have agency over their own bodies, which is accurate if you are anti abortion.

Women should have the right to abort for any reason they deem fit.

They are presumably suing because they paid for a service (gender selection) they didn't get. If they still want and love the baby they did get I don't see a reason it should be removed.

But commercial surrogacy should not be a thing.

@alphapie

Although your views are abhorrent to me, at least you are consistent unlike many on this thread. You don't believe women should have any agency over their own bodies no matter the scenario.

Your words quoted above.

"No matter the scenario"

A court action is a matter of public record. This little girl will one day read that her buyers/parents viewed her as:

-a medical mistake
-a financial burden
-unwanted and in need of immediate replacement (with the much superior male model)

Now we can only speculate on how she might feel about this, but on the balance of probabilities I would guess "not great".

And it's perfectly possible to be pro abortion, but troubled at the scale of sex-selective terminations in certain cultures. Because the women there are making decisions under troubling circumstances.

Unless you can point to evidence of the contrary there is no basis to think surrogacy impacts the children that are born.

Except for the fact that we know children born from anonymous donor gametes (or indeed who are lied to about their origins) does have a significant impact on the children that are born.

So there is considerable basis for thinking children sold by their mothers will be negatively impacted.

You're aware children via surrogate do get told their 'origin' story right,

The trauma for those children is from not knowing their roots. You are daft

Yes, no matter whether it's around abortion, surrogacy, I'm presuming sex work you include in that too.

You believe women shouldn't be allowed abortions for certain situations, that's being not pro women.

Why would you leave a vulnerable young baby girl with human traffickers who have publicly announced they see her as substandard goods due to her sex?

@Namerchangerextraordinaire bloody hell.

You think ripping a baby away from her primary caregivers is ok?

Fucking up her main attachments and causing her a lifetime of genuine trauma?

Get a grip

I am really interested in this point that some coutries already have a requirement for would-be inteneded parents to go through the same adoption vetting. Would you mind explaining a bit further - are these adoption-like screening requirements mandatory for residents who want to become surrogate parents or is it for surrogacy that takes place in the country whereever the intended parents are from? Are they carried out by neutral state officials or by the clinic/agency they are doing business with?

One of the problems with surrogacy has been that it is such an international 'business' that it's extremely easy for people who would be turned down for adoption to go to low/no regulation countries for surrogacy and circumvent the vetting (see e.g. Paradiso v Italy for a good example plus well known cases such as Baby Gammy). It's one of the points that was very prominent in the Law Commission's review as it's extremely difficult to have any water tight pre-conception screening system as it can just be circumvented by going abroad to a low-reg country. Essentially they seemed to rule out the possibility of having mandatory requriments for those reasons so propose a system to incentivise screeing etc instead. Would be incredibly interesting to hear about where that pre-screening already works esp as the bill is going to Parliament in a few months.

At the moment in this country there is no duty to inform social services or any form of agency before you start a surrogacy arrangement (or indeed once you have completed it) so no automatic form of assessment for all would-be parents in surrogacy arrangements. There is a degree of assessment if you apply for a parental order once the child is born but that is very different from adoption as it takes place once the child is already with the intended parents. Depending on how the surrogacy takes place there might also be agency and/or clinic screening but again that depends on how and where it takes place.

@Mia85 in the US (not sure in other countries but not sure as haven't looked further than the US on this topic) in a fair few states the intended parents need to go through the same vetting as adoptive parents would do in that state. For some it's only the non bio parent who has to go through the vetting, in others both need to go through vetting despite one being the biological parent to that child.

One could argue the US vetting process isn't great, I'd be one of them tbh (it's a lot lighter than the vetting process in the UK for example when it comes to adoption) But it's still something

Thanks v much for the reply. It's incredibly difficult to create any mandatory regulation for surrogacy so v interested in how it is done elsewhere. If you regulate surrogacy that takes place in your jurisdiction then it's easily circumvented by going elsewhere (or doing a DIY surrogacy withour donor eggs). If you regulate your residents - regardless of where the surrogacy takes place - then your reliant on them declaring the surrogacy and regulation will almost always take place once the child is born, at which point it would have to be a clearly harmful situation for the surrogacy not to be approved.

You're aware children via surrogate do get told their 'origin' story right,

The trauma for those children is from not knowing their roots. You are daft

Being told your origin story doesn't overturn the trauma. The trauma is not knowing who your mother is or who the woman who provided your egg is.

All these children know is who their dad is. And from all the adopted children I know, information about their birth mother is crucial to their sense of self.

I wonder if these men's poor children even know which one of them is their father. I know a lot of gay men who pay women to be surrogate mothers mix their sperm so that they don't know. No concern about what's best for the child; it's all about them.

Who is to say they won't know whose egg they came from and about the surrogate?

If anything this being public at least means this child will definitely know about her back story, even if the parents were going to hide it, so can ask questions.

I'll say it again, find me one study that shows a negative impact on the children from surrogacy that doesn't group children from surrogacy and adoptees.

You're stretching to find issue, you're now comparing the trauma of children from donors who don't know who they came from with a child from a surrogate who lives with her biological father and there is no reason to think they won't tell her about the woman who donated the egg and the woman who grew her inside her body.

And they can tell her about medical centre they paid a huge amount of money to and demanded compensation from because they didn't want a girl @alphapie. I'm sure that will make her feel good