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/

I am completely agog at the horrific views towards surrogacy on this thread too. Utterly baffling, because I don't know a soul in real life, who thinks the way many people think on here about surrogacy.

In real life people are pretty unbothered and nonchalant about surrogacy. They understand why people use surrogates, and why women become surrogates. As a pp said, don't judge a person til you've walked a mile in their shoes.

Most people judging with their terse and abrasive opinions about people who use surrogates, have no clue about what it's like to desperately want a child.

If a woman is willing to do it for someone who is longing for a child, it's got absolutely fuck-all to do with anyone else. Trust me, people using a surrogate, (or being a surrogate themselves,) give zero fucks about anyone's anti-surrogacy opinions. Basically, it's got fuck-all to do with anyone else.

Can you point me to the part of the report which says a surrogate mother not wanting to keep the baby - in circumstances where the commissioning parents have changed their minds, have split up or are unable to parent or have tragically died or something quite dramatic - is forced by law to raise the child.

Can a surrogate mother not give up parental rights and responsibilities by placing the child with social services and later, for adoption by signing some paperwork and completing some assessments as if the child was born from an unwanted pregnancy?

I would be interested to read a case where a woman was forced to raise a child by law in the U.K, I have not heard of that before, with surrogacy, adoption or any other scenario.

And it gives me great pleasure to think Dustin Lance Black , the poster boy for the consultation (literally, he was named as a key influencer on law commission documentation) will be crying into his tea.
He was outraged when coming to the U.K. with the baby acquired in California to find he (and Tom Daley) had to go through the courts to obtain a parental order for the child despite being the legal parents in the USA from birth. He has campaigned for change.
But if they go back to California for another baby they will still have to do exactly the same to bring another baby to the U.K.

I think that's the sensible thing to do. The birth mother can change her mind before the baby is born.

It protects all parties

Yup
That's Ireland for you.
Between this and the cheerleaders for anything Trans, women are getting are getting the shitty end of the stick again.

Misogyny keeps up with the latest fashion, decade by decade.

Oppression!! Help help I'm being oppressed!!

And to add "baby acquired"

🤔

But everyone on this earth HAS walked a mile in the shoes. As a baby.
And <50% have walked a mile in those shoes. As a mother.
This is commodification of the deepest emotions a human can ever feel.

The rational thing for infertile people to do is 'just adopt'. But it's not rational, is it. Its pre rational, its instinctive. For all 3 parties, not just the ones who are adult and wealthy.

In real life people are pretty unbothered and nonchalant about surrogacy. They understand why people use surrogates, and why women become surrogates. As a pp said, don't judge a person til you've walked a mile in their shoes.

I'm curious why you think women become surrogates? Why do you think rich women don't generally become surrogates? Why do you think countries like Ukraine and previous to that India become hubs for surrogacy? Do you know why India banned commercial surrogacy?

NGA Law also advocated to allow "double donation" - that is where both the egg and the sperm have no genetic relationship to any commissioning parent. They are cross that the Law Commission have decided that the requirement for a genetic link should be retained.

Here they set out how things will progress from here - as a pp said there is good reason to think the long grass beckons.

Well NGA law and some of the other law firms commenting seem pretty sure that the stricter regulation of expenses will further reduce the supply of willing surrogate mothers in the U.K. @CrotchetyCrocheting

It's a mystery why.

https://www.gov.uk/legal-rights-when-using-surrogates-and-donors

https://www.boodlehatfield.com/articles/the-legal-considerations-surrounding-surrogacy/

https://childlawadvice.org.uk/information-pages/surrogacy/

You are talking absolute rubbish if you believe only very poor women become surrogates, because they need money for food/to live etc. Many women who are solvent, middle class etc etc become surrogates because they WANT to.

I know that doesn't fit with your 'nasty rich people abusing poor women' narrative, but it's true. If women want to be surrogates it's got nothing to do with you. And it is certainly not just POOR women who do it. What a silly thing to say. Especially as most surrogates get nothing but expenses! That doesn't quite fit your narrative DOES it?

Being brought up in a loving family isn't contradictory to being impacted by being removed from the birth mother, though, is it?

All those trauman in many adopted children despite having been brought up in a loving home? (Trauman due to separation according to science).

Neither children nor women's bodies are trading objects in my world. This is where ethics should come in. Just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should do it.

Thanks so much for drawing attention to this op. I will contact my MP.

The proposed change would make commissioning parents legal parents at birth.

^ this in particular is so so concerning for the rights of the surrogate and infant.

These changes are clearly all aimed at improvement for the commissioning people and not the most vulnerable mother and infant.

Did you ignore the part where it was mentioned that babies are currently experiencing delays in treatment while doctors have to get hold of surrogates (busy mums with families of their own) to give consent for medical procedures and treatments? Doctors don't have time to do this and it's not in the baby's best interest. Unless you're going to ban surrogacy you must do something constructive and this is constructive for children for this reason. I have no idea how you can sail on past this hugely significant point and claim it's all about the parents. Children obviously need their primary care giver to be in a position to consent to injections, Investigations, having blood taken etc. At the moment they're not.

Thank you. Either the mother is the one who carries the baby or the mother is the one whose eggs they are. So, an egg donor can come back after they have donated, and her eggs have been used and claim the baby as theirs? Or is the baby the child of the woman who carried it, nourished it and cared for it for nine+ months?

I am not up on surrogacy laws so what is their standing on this: A single mother who has had her children decides to become a surrogate. At five months pregnant, the woman finds out she has cancer and the treatment will kill or disable severely the child she is carrying. She has no family but her children to speak for her. Who is the priority?
Same basic situation but the mother has a horrible accident and needs surgery or she will die and having the surgery will kill/disable the baby she is carrying. Who gets priority?

Well that is the consequence of constructing a situation where the infant is separated from the birthing mother, and so legal mother, at birth isn’t it. That is a situation created BY surrogacy. That situation would not arise without surrogacy having taken place would it?

I know that doesn't fit with your 'nasty rich people abusing poor women' narrative, but it's true. If women want to be surrogates it's got nothing to do with you. And it is certainly not just POOR women who do it. What a silly thing to say. Especially as most surrogates get nothing but expenses! That doesn't quite fit your narrative DOES it?

Take it from the experts @DannyZukosSmile

As I just posted. NGA Law/Brilliant Beginnings are very put out about proposed restrictions to payments to surrogate mothers. They say this will "worsen the existing shortage of UK surrogates".

Doesn't quite fit the narrative of surrogacy in the U.K. being purely altruistic now does it?

I’m happy to debate if you can provide me the referenced research.

Children born of surrogacy are not ripped from their mother’s wombs and thrust into pits. They are willingly passed over to loving family (nearly always biological family). They have a parental figures. They are not lacking.

Not all adopted children have issues, someone nuclear family children have issues. Surrogacy has been happening in the UK for a long time and legal in its current form since 2008. Therefore there are children out there born of surrogacy, please find me the quantitative data that shows they have needed professional support later in life, qualitatively I have never heard of this being the case, their needs are met and they grow to be happy, healthy children and young adults.

Again you’re all arguing it’s BAD for the child but not providing evidence, I’m inclined to see therefore that it is your belief it is bad not a fact.

Fair point re applying for rights. Two responses:

Surrogates do not want you to defend them on this. I've no idea why you're bothering as the specific group of women you're mentioning feel quite differently to you and want the ips under the spotlight from the moment they deliver (and so do their partners!). Women who change their mind are very rare and usually should never have been surrogates in the first place - something that would be addresses by the proposals. In the cases that there have been, women who have changed their mind have had to go to court. This is still a good idea, looking at the results of those court decisions and the reputation of those women in the surrogacy community.

The baby, once born, has to come first. You cannot start moving a baby older than six weeks just because an adult wishes it. This is the accepted cut off point in adoptions in the states and while I don't know where they got the figure from, I can see that you cannot keep the option open to change primary care giver indefinitely. Most women are well recovered by that stage and if they're not, it could be due to significant issues that would take longer to resolve. How long is the baby supposed to wait? However it's vital to say that 99.9 percent of the time this does not happen and we're talking about a hypothetical that says more about your own lack of experience than the real perils of surrogacy.

Of course not all have issues. Like not everyone die in a car crash so why should everyone wear seat belts? What's the point?

But I have to come clear and admit that I'm brought up in a culture which views children very differently compared to the UK. I feel that the debate back home (Scandinavia) is different when it comes to surrogacy and the view on adoption (mostly international adoption at home) is also starting to change due to more knowledge today.

When should we meet and discuss?

I work with children and I have a ed psych degree

And yet you are unfamiliar with the concept of the primal wound?

You keep asking for research, it's already been posted up thread. There is an approximate shit tonne of evidence that children removed from their birth mothers at or very soon after birth (old style adoption) and children removed later than that for their own safety (modern adoption) are negatively impacted by that removal. Even if they are very young. Even when they don't remember it. Even when the birth mother was neglectful, scary, dangerous. Even when they were wanted, loved and cherished by their adoptive parents. Do you seriously think this somehow doesn't apply to children removed from the birth mother under a surrogacy arrangement? Why would that be the case?

How many people are you willing to sacrifice until enough time has passed to see the longterm effects on big enough a sample for you to be satisfied? We're talking about human beings.

And to think that as long as.you get love, you'll be fine seems so archaic. And it's certainly a recipe for guilt in those cases where love hasn't been enough. Amazing.

There’s plenty of research on attachment, adoption and trauma from adoption at birth, from the sixties onwards, ftom situations where babies would be given immediately to “loving families”, especially in the US where adoption from birth has been common for a long time. This is clearly directly comparable to surrogacy. The attachment harms of adoption became clear by the 1980s, and this substantially changed adoption practice in the U.K. and Europe. But it’s taken decades for practitioners to take seriously the traumas caused by early separation from the birth mother, which is why this is very very rarely done in the U.K. Your idea of surrogate babies being welcomed into the loving arms of their real family was how many people thought about adoption until the later, long term consequences of adoption at birth became clear. (This also influenced changes in clinical practice with newborns and premature babies in ICU, towards skin to skin and physical closeness with the mother being seen as essential and therapeutic.)

Technological surrogacy is still very recent, historically - if you’re talking about any using IVF-associated technologies as opposed to the Biblical kind. So 1980s onwards, really - more like 1990s. And if you’re arguing that surrogacy in its present form has only existed in the U.K. since 2008, how can there be longitudinal studies on attachment and lifetime psychological well-being for surrogate babies born since then? We won’t know for decades what harms there might be for these people. But we do have work on adoption trauma - including relinquishment trauma for babies freely given up at birth - for a much longer timescale. And work on how hard adoption is, too, even much wanted adoption - including adoptive parents not finding it easy to bond with the baby. There’s a lot more evidence for this than for surrogacy, as yet.

Just to give you an idea of how unevidenced this field is - a wealthy American colleague of mine who had a baby via surrogacy in the US told me he and his wife weren’t even there - for visa reasons - for much of the baby’s first three months: “But our paediatrician told us that the baby wouldn’t even remember anything of his first six months, so it was fine if the nanny looked after him a lot of the time until we could fly him over.” (True story. I was 😮)

Now, I’m sure most U.K. families “commissioning” a baby aren’t going to do that. But it tells you something about the blithe and completely unevidenced way surrogacy is treated in the US, which this report wants us to emulate. Because it’s built into the whole idea that what the baby can’t remember doesn’t matter. And cones along with a big dose of the “adoption is great because the child is much wanted” narrative that still survives in the US. And what if it does actually matter, quite a lot? I guess we’ll find out in a few decades’ time if all these poor babies are beautifully well-adjusted, or if they aren’t.