To make you aware that surrogacy is going to be liberalised

[VestaTilley]

Today, the Law Commission have published their final recommendations to Government, calling for reform of surrogacy laws in the U.K.

The proposed change would make commissioning parents legal parents at birth. That means that the birth mother would never be regarded as the legal parent, nor would she be listed on the birth certificate.

This has been privately lobbied for behind closed doors, away from women and maternity groups for years. The Law Commission consulted in 2019, but never published their responses or said who had fed in to their consultation.

Law firms and surrogacy agencies are rubbing their hands with glee today: I feel physically sick.

They would have you believe surrogacy in this country is “altruistic”. This is not the case. Women can receive upwards of £20,000 per pregnancy in “expenses” - which is a huge financial incentive to a woman if they are from a poor background.

Do we want to live in a society which creates a servant class of women? Which takes babies away from their mothers at birth?

When pregnant we are all advised to bond with our babies, breastfeed if we can and speak to our babies in utero. How does the NHS square this advice with making it legal for a child to never legally have a connection to its own mother?

If you are in anyway concerned about these proposals please, please contact your MP and raise all the noise you can to try and stop this before it is too late:

https://www.lawcom.gov.uk/surrogacy-laws-to-be-overhauled-under-new-reforms-benefitting-the-child-surrogate-and-intended-parents/

Doesn’t seem very different at all when it’s wealthy American or British or Australian couples commissioning surrogates via the international surrogacy industry in Ukraine or India, does it?

Yes, the reasons are different and not comparable. The ‘stolen generation’ came about from a racist, sociopolitical and national decision. Surrogacy in its current form is coming about from an individualistic idea that there is a human ‘right’ to a child. Completely different motivations.

But there is a direct comparison between a child grown in the uterus of a Ukrainian woman, tasting amniotic fluid flavoured by her Ukrainian diet, hearing the Ukrainian language and having neural pathways forming to begin that language development and then being taken from her within hours or days, travelling 1000s of miles and suddenly surrounded by an American accent, sounds, smells. None of the familiarity. And in adulthood learning what exactly that meant to them. That is trauma. And that is comparable and sometimes when researching childhood trauma you have to look at the best available comparisons because it would completely unethical to just ‘try it out’. Though obviously some countries are seemingly happy to do that.

False equivalence? Are you trying to sound clever whilst totally missing the point of my post?

The OP made a point that one of the reasons she thinks that surrogacy is wrong is because it denies the child the right to know their biological parent(s). This is the same for children produced from sperm donation via a clinic (for the first 18 years of their life at least) and some adoptions. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to assume that the OP would therefore have an issue with those too? I’m sure you will correct me though 🙄

Interesting comments from politicians in Spain in response to a celebrity commissioning mother pictured taking the baby home.

Education Minister Pilar Alegría called the image of Obregón leaving the hospital "Dantesque", referring to the Italian writer's journey through hell.
Equality Minister Irene Montero said the move was "a form of violence against women" and added there was a "clear poverty bias" against women who become surrogate mothers because they needed the money.
Ms Alegría also noted: "This is not surrogacy, this is renting a womb which, as we know, is an illegal practice in Spain."
"Women's bodies should neither be bought nor rented to satisfy anyone's desires," declared Presidency Minister Felix Bolaños.
But Cuca Gamarra - number two in the conservative People's Party - was more cautious, saying the subject had to be approached via "deep and serene debates because it touches on many moral, ethical and religious questions".
Spain's Socialist-led coalition government came to power almost five years ago and has made women's rights one of its key areas of policy.
Earlier this year, it imposed tighter restrictions on surrogacy, banning advertisement for surrogacy agencies.
It identifies surrogacy as a form of violence against women, categorises any "reproductive exploitation", forced pregnancy and forced abortion, forced sterilisation or forced contraception in the same wayy_.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65122973

It would only work as an analogy if men grew babies in their bodies for nine months from sperm, wouldn’t it? The entire point of why surrogacy is not the same as sperm donation is that the reproductive process is not interchangeable between the sexes. Sperm is ejaculated outside the body. When have you heard of significant health risks from a man ejaculating? Women grow children inside their bodies, and the removal of a child from the birth mother is particularly traumatic to both a newborn infant and the lifelong psyche.

Sperm donation on its own is usually used to help a woman have a biological child. Yes, it’s not ideal for a child not to have a present other parent; but the entire point is that the child isn’t then being separated from the mother.

Bearing a child is not something you toss off in a few minutes. A woman’s body grows the child from her own blood and cells. Pregnancy and labour can take anything from minor to very serious tolls on a woman’s health, and she always bears those risks, since no-one, whatever her previous pregnancies have been like, can predict how a future pregnancy might go. She might bleed out with a PPH, end up with a 3 degree tear, have to have an emergency hysterectomy, stillbirth, end up with pre-eclampsia, GD, postpartum psychosis, triggered multiple sclerosis, have lifelong medical issues, trauma. There’s always the non-negligible risk of serious effects. Women have to take time to recover from a pregnancy. So there are significant risks to the woman, before you even get to the trauma for the baby - and decades of research in attachment and child psychology have shown that being removed from the birth mother has serious adverse psychological effects, however early it’s done; and is very significantly more psychologically traumatic than having an absent father.

To pretend that sperm donation is equivalent to pregnancy is to pretend that reproduction is somehow equal across the sexes and the man’s input is equivalent to the woman’s. But we know perfectly well that it’s not. The entire basis for why women have been historically owned by men is that it’s not. Pretending that this isn’t the case is, frankly, intellectually obtuse in the extreme. Why else do you think women’s oppression happened? By accident? Nothing to do with reproduction at all?

It's not your baby. It's hers.

Exactly @myveryownelectrickitten - and egg donation and sperm donation are only comparable in so much as both are gametes...it ends there. The process to harvest and even how eggs and sperm are made are so different they cannot be fairly compared.

If men had periods in order to produce sperm and didn't have orgasms when having sex in order to conceive, well, it would be a different world we live in.

I think surrogacy should be illegal. It's immoral and unethical. It's treating women's bodies and babies and commodities.

I have a friend who was adopted at birth. Her adoptive parents have recently died. She was an only child. Now in her 50s she is grieving her adoptive parents but also feeling the abandonment of not knowing anything about her birth mother. She is going to start the process of looking for her now.

The whole idea that this has no effect on the baby is astonishing to me. Just because the baby was a result of a commercial transaction (how awful is that) it doesn't mean the child won't grow into to an adult who yearns to understand their roots.

And even if it is a donor egg the baby has grown as a result of the surrogate mother gestating the baby. To claim that there is no link is literally making a woman an incubator. How vile.

I have never been supportive or comfortable with surrogacy and this makes me even more so. I agree with the person who said it should be illegal.

As a couple who could not have children naturally our only option was surrogacy. We met a wonderful stay at home mother who was prepared to carry our fertilised embryo and had 2 wonderful children that are our lives. She had no genetic link to them. They are loved and healthy and our surrogate used the money to put herself through college which she missed out on when bringing up her own kids. She eventually secured a job that she had always dreamed of having which gave her financial independence for the first time in her life. She didn’t want to be on the birth certificate but we remained friends with her and her family. We go on holiday together and she loves our kids as if they were her own, but she reminds them that she is not their mother nor could she ever be.

I appreciate that other people will have strong views on the matter, which is fair enough, but the suggestion that this is simply a money making enterprise could not be further from the truth. She did it because she wanted us to also have the joy of having our own family, which is a gift that can never be repaid. Ironically she thanked us for helping her achieve her degree which changed her life, but on the scale of things our part was minuscule in comparison to what she did for us.

As the old saying goes, never judge someone until you have walked in their shoes.

I hope this helps others see that it’s not as black and white as done think.

Thanks for reading

Excellent post.

As a couple who could not have children naturally our only option was surrogacy

Wrong.

Have you ever met a surrogate?
Have you ever been in the position of not being able to incubate a child of your own?
Have you spoken to anyone involved at any stage of the process?

Such visceral reaction is ridiculous and sensational.

To clarify a few things:

• Most surrogates aren’t growing their own baby, the egg is either from one of the parents or donated. In fact all reputable surrogacy charities advise surrogates to not use their own eggs.
• It is altruistic - women do it BECAUSE THEY WANT TO. Many have their own families already.
• Yes expenses are covered but these are heavily scrutinised to make sure they are JUST expenses. Any form of payment or financial gains gets the parents in deep trouble.
• Couples and surrogates go through counselling and lots of initial stages to make sure they are socially compatible prior to implantation.
• It can take years to match the parents to the surrogate and it entirely surrogate led (they choose who they want to carry for) hardly cohesive.
• This legal change is campaigned for by surrogate charities/not-for-profits who guess what are run by THE SURROGATES!
• Surrogates have campaigned because IT PROTECTS THEM from being left with an unwanted baby that’s not biologically theirs.
• These changes bring us in line with most other first world nations.

I’m lucky enough to have conceived and carried my own DD but know others who have gone through surrogacy. I fully support this change in UK.

Don’t gatekeep a beautiful experience from others by being ill informed and not doing your research. Have some shred of empathy.

I was a surrogate in 2009. Myself and my husband were made to named on the birth certificate ( him because he agreed to the surrogacy ), but 6 weeks later through the courts the baby became legally recognised as the parents child and birth certificate was changed to reflect this. This was always normal practice , and our surrogacy agency supported us all through the legal sides of it. It was simple enough too.

I’m so glad you posted.

Its nice to hear about surrogacy that worked out for the commissioning parents, but surrogacy laws shouldn't be written for when it all goes well.

The consultation was flawed. More than half of the respondents thought it should be illegal and yet here we are.

This is it.

‘To pretend that sperm donation is equivalent to pregnancy is to pretend that reproduction is somehow equal across the sexes and the man’s input is equivalent to the woman’s’

It wasn’t an analogy! At no point have I said sperm donation and surrogacy are the same. I agree that they are not.

Perhaps I didn’t make it clear in my first post (although I thought I did in my second post), I was referring to the OP’s point about surrogacy denying a child the right to know their biological parent. There’s plenty of recent credible evidence that outcomes for children are not adversely affected by having same sex parents . That includes male same-sex parents, many of whose children were presumably taken from their surrogate at birth. I am sure you have an argument for that though.

You seem reasonably intelligent so I am not sure why you are deliberately missing the point of what I have said. I can only assume you have your own agenda to push? Anyway, I shall let you carry in arguing with yourself. Over and out.

The consultation was by the Law Commission. Their remit is to identify areas of law which aren't functioning as intended, out of date, or otherwise failing to deliver its intent. They can't opine on the merits or morality of the key policy outcomes the law seeks to achieve.

If the government decides to do anything as a result of the report, it will be for it and then Parliament to consider representation on the legality of surrogacy. But honestly I would be amazed if anything came of this - worst point in the election cycle, competing priorities, contentious issue on a devolved matter with spending implications. Absolute nightmare of a Bill to deliver.

Bravo! This should be required reading in schools!

I had a similar thought process. I was never comfortable with it but the more I learned, the harder it was to think any of it is okay. While I agree there is a spectrum of harm (a poor woman in India forced into surrogacy to pay off her husband's debts on one end vs. a healthy 40-yr old mother being a surrogate for her daughter who had uterine cancer on the other), it can never be argued that surrogacy is a halcyon moral thing and in most cases it's exploitation by the rich of a subclass of women who are seen as breeders. The surrogates want to buy eggs from naive, young, pretty, (white and Japanese are more expensive to purchase), athletic and physically slim young college women so they can create designer babies to be birthed by poor, disadvantaged surrogate mothers. In 16-20 years, there will be a lot of young people who take a history course on the war in Ukraine and connect that to their birth certificate showing their date and place of birth. Will they wonder what happened to their birth mothers (surrogate and egg)? How will those convos go w/ their parents?

I feel exactly the same as you.
I think we need to remember that no one is entitled to be a parent.

There’s a lot of evidence for same sex female relationships being just as good as, (in fact possibly actually slightly better) for children. But there really isn’t the same body of evidence for gay male relationships — not at all. I’m a LB woman so I’m well aware of the research that exists — and it rather reinforces, rather than undermines, the importance of the mother-child dyad. This isn’t to denigrate adoptive mothers, nor fathers. But loss and trauma resulting from separation from the mother is a real thing, and it’s dishonest to wish it away or pretend it doesn’t happen.

Women are human, but not human enough apparently to have the right to decide whether they want to be a surrogate mother. Not human enough to have the mental capacity to assess the risks of pregnancy and childbirth. Not human enough to have empathy or the desire to help other women struggling with infertility.

But women are human enough to assess the risks of going into combat with the armed forces or as humanitarian workers in war zones. We were human enough to risk our lives working on Covid wards during the pandemic.

We are human enough to have the right to terminate pregnancies, and the right to give a unplanned baby up for adoption, but apparently not human enough to start a pregnancy with intent to give the baby up for adoption.

Human enough to permanently donate organs, but not human enough to donate a mere 9months of the function of one organ.

If you think women are human, then give us full agency and control over our bodies.

This is an argument to keep the process as is it then, not to change it.