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/

So you see that there can be issues but don't care?

Why do you think that a surrogate baby won't have the same, if not worse issues? After all they will know that they were bought for a price. They might not agree with your perception of how the mother is treated. They might want to know what their birth mother's situation was which led her to selling her body in this way?

Why do the rights of the baby, the commodity, not matter to you?

I'm not putting any great faith in my MP, but the fact is that we can and do have an influence over laws and regulations. If there's a push to ban surrogacy, MPs will be forced to respond.

Why are you shaking? Are you ok? Lol

Don't be ridiculous. Not everyone is as fertile as hamsters. Give it a rest.

It terrifies me that women are having their biology exploited and commercialised like this, whilst being reduced to Uterus Carriers etc.
Women are being dehumanised.

So what? That doesn’t entitled you to exploit another woman and pay her to risk her LIFE for you. Women who do this are just like the men who use prostitutes, maybe even worse!!

there should be laws that would allow to ban the exploitation, but not the surrogacy overall

Maybe you could explain the benefits for the child to be created purely to be removed from its birth mother?

I don't think most posters want to believe that you exist, let alone are the norm for this country.

Reading victimhood into something against the person's will is a kind of coercion.

No one has a right to a baby. If you can't have one of your own, there are some ethical avenues to try. But buying a baby is not one of them.

I can give you two.

Couple 1 have tried for a child for 15 years and a friend offers to try surrogacy using their remaining embryos. The could are now established in their careers, have the financial means to both go part time when the baby is born and have so much love to give to the baby. The surrogate (I don’t to sound cold as she was a loving friend from childhood and not viewed as the mother by herself, the couple or genetically) already has 5 children. She doesn’t want another, she would not chose to have another child in her family. The baby was genetically not hers.
Why would it benefit a baby to stay with a mother who doesn’t want it and doesn’t view herself as the mother?
Its now many years later and they have a close bond but it’s still not maternal.

Couple 2, the girl sees her family member struggle to conceive for a number of years. Eventually when all other avenues were exhausted the girl suggests she be the surrogate. She knew she wanted children of her own but not yet.
She was in her early 30s and not ready for children emotionally, financially etc when she became the surrogate. She viewed the baby as her niece the entire pregnancy, genetically it was. The surrogate and the couple all stayed together for the early weeks after birth so she could recover and both the surrogate and genetic mother could be on hand.
Years later the surrogate went on to have 2 children of her own. Again she always had a relationship with the niece she gave birth to but she never felt like her mother.
The girl she gave birth to has a lovely family who wanted her to be in the world so much.
The birth mother didn’t love her as a mother and didn’t want to raise her. Why would it be better for her to stay with a woman who wasn’t genetically her mother and who didn’t want to raise her over her genetic parents who went on a 10 year journey to be parents to her?

I genuinely don't care if your personal experience of surrogacy was positive.

The harm is to the infant. And to women who are being exploited.

Great if you didn't feel exploited. But its not about you.

Do you believe in adoption? Is that considered ‘ethical’ to you?

Yes, in many circumstances.

Who else is it about, if you're overlooking women having the experience? Are you going to start searching for victims because no one appears damaged enough to support your ideology? It is most certainly about her as she is directly affected by the changes.

If you spend some time at a surrogacy group meet up you would quickly realise the kids are really not going through anything - they're completely normally adjusted with adoring parents who are usually related to them - and the women who have been surrogates are there too planning new matches and having a great time. They wouldn't be there if they didn't want to be. All this seems very histrionic because it's simply about loved, ordinary children needing their primary caregivers to be able to give medical consent in the first year of their lives while the PO was formerly being processed. There aren't legions of women regretting surrogacy - it's not something women tend to do unless they really want to. There aren't legions of children waiting for mental health support as a result of surrogacy.

Using a donor egg is using another woman’s woman’s body just like surrogacy. Just not to the same degree. It’s still risky, uncomfortable, painful and invasive though.

Neither of those scenarios answered why it was of the benefit of the baby to be created only to be removed. You haven’t addressed why this is a good thing for babies at all.

And again to my point - the framing is purely on what the commissioning parents are getting from this arrangement.

Again and again and again! RTFT. Adoption in the UK is about providing families for children who cannot for their own safety remain with their birth families. Surrogacy is creating children purposely to remove them from their birth families to fulfil the wishes of the purchasers. They are not the same.

I have a much bigger problem with adoption. Half the time those babies are wanted by the woman who bore them and are related to them genetically. The defining problem is a lack of funds. The woman's experience is completely different - planning to help a family become bigger and planning to relinquish your child are completely different tasks.

So it’s ethical to have a one night stand and then give a baby away, but it’s not ethical to grow a baby for someone you care about and know that the baby will have a loving family?
Really struggling to understand that if I’m honest.

Surrogacy and adoption are completely different. I don't know if you understand that.

And men can be fantastic parents! You don't actually need hormones to be responsive and meet a baby's needs! Otherwise dads are useless.

So you’re totally fine with your clinic making £6-8k from selling your eggs that you handed over for free? As that’s what will have happened.

You’re attaching the term ‘birth families’ to people you don’t even know.
Surrogates don’t feel like this! And if they think they might surrogacy isn’t for them.
I know if two wonderful women who have become surrogates at different points in their life and neither viewed themselves as the baby’s birth family or mother.

Where do you talk about the child and the potential impact on them? Why create an artificial situation that we know can be very harmful later on in life to the one person that has had no say (and is not considered) at all in this case?

As for the examples you've mentioned - and that don't deal with the child perspective - the child wouldn't have been conceived and therefore not born and hence at zero risk of being harmed.

But if the child has no other value or right than to fulfil someone else's dreams, well then your points might be valid.