Mark Feehily wants surrogacy to be cheaper and accessible for everyone

[Wouldloveanother]

www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-11141771/Westlifes-Mark-Feehily-discusses-privileged-expensive-surrogacy-journey-welcome-daughter.html

Why are men so entitled?

An investigation still requires evidence.

If both parties say there was no intent to engage in surrogacy but the mother simply does not want to be a parent, there is absolutely nothing whatsoever that can prove they are lying.

All you end up with is ‘raising suspicion’.

@user1477391263

I'm actually against commercial surrogacy for other reasons, but we are really really not seeing any evidence that it causes trauma or primal wounds or any such stuff.

Would be (genuinely, not being sarcy!) interested to read any research on this - can you share any links please?

The reason one does an investigation is to GET evidence.

As I said, this can't be hidden, they will find out. No matter how much you desperately wish otherwise. They will.

How?

I'm not opposed to surrogacy - wouldn't be a surrogate myself, wouldn't work with a surrogate myself - I believe that it is the potential surrogate who has the right to choose. That being said surrogacy should NOT be cheaper.

I agree with all this. If you don't like a woman's choice to be a surrogate and want to ban it, what other undesirable births would you want to ban. Should we be sterilising mentally ill women, or those with substance abuse problems? Obviously, this is ridiculous. But also, I would want these women to receive a massive payment, with no NHS funding, which would probably see surrogacy much diminished anyway.

Actually I agree, in theory, that an “altruistic” surrogacy would be hard to prove and potentially easy to hide. The mother would simply put the fathers name on the birth certificate, he’d have parental responsibility and she could walk away.

HOWEVER (And it’s a big however) -
I think there would be very very few people willing to do surrogacy this way in reality and the ones that do would probably be things like sisters doing it for each other. Few surrogates want to use their own eggs, even fewer people than now would want to be a surrogate because actually most people don’t want to break the law. More importantly commercialised/paid adoption would be very hard where it’s illegal (such as in the UK).

Adoption - all about the baby

Surrogacy - all about the commissioning parents.

We now buy and sell babies.

So these commissioning parents - presumably they bang for their buck? They want a good product?
Zero faults?
A right of refusal if the product is fault?
Right to call for abortion if the product is not up to par?
A right to sue the gestational carrier if the delivered product is not what was agreed?

Because in this transaction you have a product (baby), a worker (mother) and a buyer (commissioning parent).

When did we agree to this as a society ?

For the dissembling crew on the thread - it is not an abortion question, it is not a right to choose question.

it is the SALE OF HUMANS.

I thought we stopped that a long time ago.

Few surrogates want to use their own eggs, even fewer people than now would want to be a surrogate.
I assumed most commercial surrogate mothers didn't use their own eggs and mainly used the new mother or donor eggs.
I thought that the surrogate DM often wasn't genetically related to the baby!
Does anyone know if this is the case?

I think that’s correct that most commercial surrogates use either the mothers egg or a donor egg from a third woman.

I was trying to say that not many surrogate would want to do surrogacy using their own egg- but I can see reading back I didn’t write it very clearly.

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3210890/

This discusses some of the findings regarding children born through surrogacy.
I agree that the data is still scanty and we should continue to monitor this area. It's possible that the children born through surrogacy could start exhibiting loads of problems as they get older; this is quite a new area and we don't yet have much long-term follow-up. However, my hunch is that we will not see these kinds of problems en masse; in the case of regular adopted-at-birth children, poorer outcomes are seen from early on in children's lives.

Perhaps not. However I do wonder how parents who've used commercial surrogates will explain that to their children. It's one thing to say lovely aunt Cathy carried you for us, it's another to say we paid a woman who was desperate for money.

However my main issue with surrogacy is that it just cannot be right to have another person control your body for 9m. When I was pregnant with DC, if I wanted to behave recklessly I could (I didn't), if I was diagnosed with cancer and needed to terminate the baby to commence treatment I could have done that with no recourse to anyone but myself, when I was considering a birth plan it was 100% based on what I wanted and what I thought (with medical guidance) would be best for me and the baby. I had full bodily autonomy. In the case of surrogacy I would have had to make all those decisions in tandem with someone who didn't care about me and just wanted their perfect product.

I think your post explains perfectly well why regulation rather than banning is needed.

One of the non-negotiables in surrogacy regulation ought to be that the surrogate retains full bodily autonomy at all times. That includes the same rights to terminate the pregnancy as anyone else would have.

But how do you legislate against emotional blackmail? Perhaps the IPs couldn't legally require the surrogate to do/not do something but it could be really hard to withstand their requests.

How is that different to the fact that some women might face pressure from partners or family to go through with a pregnancy against their will?

Its not a reason to ban women from having children with their partners because some of them might be subject to emotional blackmail - it’s an argument for addressing the emotional blackmail/coercive control.

Thanks for the link to the study! It will be interesting to see if they continue to follow up as the children get older.

So these commissioning parents - presumably they bang for their buck? They want a good product?

Zero faults?

A right of refusal if the product is fault?

Right to call for abortion if the product is not up to par?

A right to sue the gestational carrier if the delivered product is not what was agreed?

That already happens. I mean the case that immediately came to mind was an American couple who’s surrogate was having twins. The girl, was born healthy. The boy was born with Down syndrome and was refused. They wouldn’t take him home.

That's an interesting study which demonstrates there is an impact on women's interaction with their children they're not genetically related to:

"The unexpected finding of significantly lower levels of mutuality in both the surrogacy and the egg donation families than in the natural conception families suggests that the absence of a biological link between the mother and her child may be associated with less positive mother-child interaction at age 7."

Despite this finding, the study concludes "the quality of family relationships has a greater influence on children’s psychological wellbeing than the presence or absence of a biological connection between the mother and the child". I'm not sure how they reached that conclusion.

Many of the children in the study were born via traditional surrogacy and most of them kept in touch with the birth mother. I think there is a very definite move away from that in recent years towards gestational surrogacy and zero contact between the child and its mother after birth.

Of course none of this tells us anything about children who have no mother figure in their lives at all, which is what this thread is about. And the increasing trend for gay men to both inseminate the eggs so that they don't know who the genetic father is.

Should we be sterilising mentally ill women, or those with substance abuse problems?

I'm not sure why people have such trouble distinguishing what people do with their own bodies versus requiring use of other peoples bodies to achieve their aims.

The boy was born with Down syndrome and was refused. They wouldn’t take him home.

This is sickening. I'm wonder what those in favour of surrogacy think should happen in situations like this.

One of the non-negotiables in surrogacy regulation ought to be that the surrogate retains full bodily autonomy at all times. That includes the same rights to terminate the pregnancy as anyone else would have.

Well of course they should, but I don’t think that would sit well with the commissioning parents would it? They would just go abroad where it is easy to gain near complete control of the surrogate and everything they do. They do already.

I mean check out this mess…

people.com/human-interest/surrogate-mom-melissa-cook-triplets-living-deplorable-conditions-birth-father-court-documents/

Not sure what the basis is for that. In 2018 for example, out of about 280 surrogacies, 120 were in the UK and 80 in the US. So more than 70% in countries where the intended parents would not have total control over the surrogates bodily autonomy.

I would think most intended parents would rather secure positive outcomes by having a relationship built on trust than attempting to coerce their surrogate which would be pretty impossible to do (especially from a remove of thousands of miles).

Yes they do, that's why as much skin to skin contact as possible and kangaroo care is encouraged on NICU

@TheKeatingFive If you are not a surrogate then it is not your body and not your choice. It isn't up to you to tell women if they can get pregnant, and under what circumstances. Don't you think that is very controlling?

If you are not a surrogate then it is not your body and not your choice. It isn't up to you to tell women if they can get pregnant, and under what circumstances. Don't you think that is very controlling?

Only if you think laws against selling organs are also controlling because 'their body their choice'?

The power dynamic is not equal, that's plain for anyone to see. Vulnerable, poor women are being exploited by the more powerful, who want to rent their wombs. If it's a free choice, why don't we see the wealthy doing it for the poor? You know the answer to that question and are being very disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

They can do whatever they like, just not with the aim of giving a baby away at the end of it. If they feel they cannot cope with the baby they have given birth to for whatever reason, then it should go the usual social services/adoption route.