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/

How have I not answered? The baby was created to be part of a loving family with parents who very much wanted to love and nurture them.
They weren’t removed from anything as no one involved felt the surrogate was a mother to the child.
Of course it’s a good thing for babies to be brought up in a family who actually want them.

Plenty if women can go out on a Friday night and get knocked up by someone they barely know, why is that better? Why does it benefit a child to be created out of lust, not love and to parents who aren’t together?

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.

Rubbish. None of the pro surrogacy supporters here answered my previous post, asking how it is happening that surrogate born babies are being denied medical treatment because the surrogate needs to consent. In an emergency doctors can make a best interests decision for a child if the legal parents can't be reached (eg if they need emergency surgery and parents are uncontactable in the moment), or go to court the same day and have the parents overruled if they refuse treatments child needs ( eg if a child needs a blood transfusion and the parents refuse due to their religion).

That is a straw man argument to make it sound like the law needs updating in the interests of the children, and I don't believe it's true. When my adopted DC were placed with me and before we had the adoption order, I had paperwork from the LA, the legal 'parent' at that time, allowing me to make medical decisions as needed. No reason commissioning parents couldn't do the same.

But in the UK most children who are adopted are not babies but older children. The issue is that their parents have been found to be unable to care for them adequately. It's not a matter of insufficient money, but rather not prioritizing the child's needs. Parents who can't even be bothered to feed or dress them appropriately, or who have neglected them in other ways, or have been downright cruel. Some might well want the child but are really not capable of parenting.

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.

Again, it's not about the adults choosing this, it's about the baby who has no say. To that baby, the surrogate absolutely is their birth family, and is all they've ever known for their entire existence.

@whataboutthechild 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.

In what way is it not considering the child?
I’m curious to know what reason you think the majority of heterosexual couples up and down the country have for having sex and creating a child together?
They have one because they want one.
Because they have a biological desire to do so. Because they feel they would be good parents who can give a child an excellent life.
How is that different between a child born from a 2am shag and a child born through surrogacy?

Do you believe in selling 5 year olds? Is that considered ‘ethical’ to you? Is it just new borns, or can we sell them up to 6 months old? A year? Where’s the cut off?

I wrote to mine two days ago.

Haven't had the courtesy of a reply.

No, again you are talking about the joy the family get from having the baby. It doesn’t really matter if the baby is brought up in a family who actually want them when you ethical point is should they have even existed at all.

I don’t know why you are wilfully ignoring the evidence of trauma of children removed from their birth mother, which has been shown again and again. At best we can hope some children don’t experience that trauma later in life but that’s a really poor way to go into a situation.

Anyone remember the case of the paedo who purchased a baby, and the law sided with him over the birth mother’s objections, once she found out he was a pervert? I think it might have been in Aus…

Let’s face it, no child has a say what family they were born into so it’s a fundamentally flawed argument.

Your angle seems to be the child doesn’t have a say and if they did they probably wouldn’t agree so it shouldn’t happen.
But a child conceived from sex doesn’t have a say either and who’s to say they would have chosen to be born to that family?
I can tell you if I had a choice I would rather have been born via surrogacy to parents who wanted me desperately than to an abusive alcoholic but those are the cards that are dealt.

Again, everyone seems to be rejecting any positive stories about surrogacy because they don’t want anything that goes against their own view which isn’t based on experience or facts, just feelings.

The two children I know via surrogacy are lovely well adjusted children, well one is almost an adult. They love their parents and they are aware of the surrogacy background and still have a close aunt type relationship with her.

Just went to find the case, and found this. How do the pro surrogacy lot suggest this is dealt with? Is it acceptable collateral damage?

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/may/19/man-who-sexually-abused-surrogate-twin-baby-daughters-jailed-for-22-years

In what way is the woman within whose body the child grew not related to that child. Her body has grown that child, her cells become part of the child forever. It is her child. No-one would say the child was not hers if the egg was not hers but she had chosen to have a child in this way because she was infertile otherwise. What is the difference between a woman using a donor egg and a surrogate - they are equally the mother of the child. Surrogacy sucks, to be honest.

I don’t agree with paid surrogacy, however I have no issue with surrogacy as a concept itself.

https://news.sky.com/story/court-rules-child-can-stay-with-paedophile-dad-10242442

So women should do it for free? Who for?

Again, everyone seems to be rejecting any positive stories about surrogacy because they don’t want anything that goes against their own view which isn’t based on experience or facts, just feelings.

We should never base safeguarding on some positive anecdotes. We need to look at the worst potential outcomes and work from there.

It reminds me a bit of those high-class prostitutes who say they pick their own hours and clients, it’s all really easy money and they are very happy. We can’t base our entire worldview on them or we’d be ignoring all the women trafficked, coerced or having to do it through pure desperation. And the potential for harm needs more (not equal) weighting to ensure the safety of all - especially in the case of children.

This is quite a pathetic link if I’m honest. It’s totally disingenuous to compare this to surrogacy in general when there are thousands of girls across the country abused by their biological fathers every day.

There is absolutely nothing to suggest a couple who go down the surrogacy path are any more likely to sexually abuse their children it’s disgusting to try to suggest that.

It’s absolutely right that men or women who are on the sex register or who have had any convictions of abuse of any kind to children are not able to peruse adoption or surrogacy. Unfortunately there’s also nothing to stop them having a baby naturally.

Plenty of women chose to become a surrogate without payment, often for a couple they know very well.

https://www.legalizesurrogacywhynot.com/mark-newton-s-and-peter-truong-s-story

More child abusers….

I don't think it's far-fetched at all to think that someone who buys a baby might be doing so for nefarious purposes. It's a paedophile's dream, who are you kidding?

So to you it shouldn’t be something people are entitled to, but more something a close family member offers to do out of love? That’s something I find far less problematic to be honest.

Your post is so wrong on so many levels. By that logic anyone who does IVF is a monster? My kids are genetically mine and my partners and they don’t feel anything other than normal.

So you don’t think a child abuser would be attracted to the idea of buying his own little baby to abuse? Are you really that naive?

Im someone who was abused by my own father, that makes me want to protect children, not increase the risk to them.

Exactly.

Not plenty. A tiny tiny fraction of surrogacies are altruistic. Even the ones that are can come with lots of issues.