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/

Here's the email I got at 2.40pm today.

Good afternoon,
We are pleased to announce that we have published our recommendations to reform surrogacy law. You can read our news announcement heree. A summary of our final report and all three volumes of the report, including draft legislation, can be downloaded from our website heree.
Thank you very much for contributing to our consultation. We are grateful to everyone who engaged with us on these important issues and have taken full account of all the views put to us.

They are very clear in their report that 'Our project takes as its starting point the UK Government’s support of surrogacy as a means of having a family' and looked to other countries to see what reforms they've made. Guess which countries they picked? The US, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand - all countries I'm sure we can all agree are beacons in advancing women's rights

I have been through fertility issues, as well as baby loss. I still find surrogacy abhorrent. I know the heartache if being unable to conceive - and the heartbreak of losing a baby too, I know how painful and all consuming those things are and the kick to the stomach when you see pregnant women and babies literally everywhere.But surrogacy does exploit vulnerable women, and while a small amount of surrogates do it just to feel good - that doesn't make up for the amount of women who are harmed by it. Then there are the cases where the baby isn't 'perfect' and the adoptive parents decide to abandon that baby and the surrogate mother.

I assume you don’t agree with sperm donation or adoption either then?

I am not comfortable with it at all, unless someone is carrying a child from the embryo of a family member who can't become pregnant, say, and the "mum" is more of an extra special auntie. I'm not even sure about sperm donors- it just seems to be creating thousands of kids who don't know who their genetic parents are, and the more of them there are the more likely they could be closely related to the person they get into a relationship with when they are older without knowing.

"Don't be a surrogate if you are going to view the baby you are carrying as yours. It's simple. They are entering into an agreement."

No woman can guarantee that she will NOT develop an attachment to a baby she's carrying in her womb. That is a completely unreasonable expectation. Your "tough luck" attitude is very callous towards the surrogate mothers. Bringing a baby into the world in an ethos that necessitates asking a woman to be callous towards the child she's carrying, does not seem compatible with the correct motivation for creating a human life.

This. Infertility is utterly miserable, I'm infertile and have been through hell. It doesn't mean my desire for a child makes it OK to rent a woman's body.

As others have said, when rich women start doing it for poor women I'll believe it's genuinely altruistic.

Oh get in your Time Machine and go back to 1823. In utero only affects physiology of a fetus, not their mental health.

It's you who needs a time machine, the impact on a child of removal from their birth mother is well evidenced, and is why adoption shifted from being about providing children to people who wanted to be parents, to providing parents for children who couldn't stay with their birth family. The life long effects on children of that removal, no matter how young they are when it occurs, can be enormous.

Surrogacy is legal child trafficking. It's buying and selling humans. Do you think it's okay to buy a three year old? If not, why is it okay to buy a baby, when we know that removal from the only mother they know causes harm to the baby, just as it would to the three year old?

I have adopted children, if that matters.

But what if your mother had used another woman's eggs to conceive you @Nalupa? Would she be your mother or the woman whose egg she used?

So you are acknowledging that rick people don't do it because they don't have (the inference being that poor people offering to be surrogates do so beucase they do have to).

Agree with you, a lot of people whipping themselves and eachother up into a frenzy on this one on MN.

Yes I do understand this! But money is money, however you decide the write up the invoice.

I can’t help feeling that the outpouring of horror at surrogacy is partly because women feel that it devalues their experience of birth and pregnancy.

Some women have birth trauma, some do not. Some women hate pregnancy, some women feel
amazing. My understanding is that in the UK surrogates more typically are women who have had their own children and have experienced positive pregnancies.

And before we get into the risk to women’s health, there are many other jobs that risk health. Soldiers, deep sea fishermen, farming, fire fighting… Do we ban them because we are monetising a risk to health?

Personally I think the rules outlined in the op's post should be in place for surrogates not using thier own eggs, especially if baby is genetically related to both parents and not made from donor sperm/eggs either. There are just too many variables to make blanket rules for all different types of surrogacy though.

What a silly, false equivalence. If you think ejaculating into a cup is the same as buying a surrogate baby, you need some education in how to think more clearly.

But rightly or wrongly, she had chosen not to exist.

And before we get into the risk to women’s health, there are many other jobs that risk health. Soldiers, deep sea fishermen, farming, fire fighting… Do we ban them because we are monetising a risk to health?

Can you not see that pregnancy is very different from any of those things?

My bio mother would be the woman whose eggs were used as that's where my genetic information comes from. The woman who raised me would be my mother in the real sense of the word. So I would have my mother who raised me and the genetic mother who I am linked to via egg donation.

So in the case of a surrogate using donated eggs from genetic mother who then raised me, I would still have my bio/genetic mother who raised me and mothered me. She would be mother to me in every sense because I am genetically related and raised by.

The only time I could imagine perceiving the surrogate mother as my "mother"would be either if she raised me (but if it wasn't her eggs used then the egg donar would still be my genetic mother), in which case it is like an adoptive mother... as I'm not related to her. Or if she used her own eggs but didn't raise me then she would be my genetic mother.

In my head I can think about who I am genetically linked to as a mother and who raised me as a mother, in different senses, but I can't imagine thinking of someone who birthed me but didn't raise/link genetically to me as a mother to me.

What is it that makes pregnancy special?

Surely the ‘special’ is carrying their own baby.

If I hadn’t been carrying my own baby, my pregnancy would have been 9 months of nausea with some anxiety thrown in.

Apoligies, I haven't read through the replies. My initial thoughts are that it is inhumane that any human being born through surrogacy should be denied the ability to trace their birth mother some time in the future, should they want to. This human's rights are paramount, more than any other individual involved. I can't get past this. Its a grim future for the human race to deny this fundamental human right.

I can't imagine going through pregnancy, birth struggles, finally getting a baby and then having to enter a legal battle to get my baby.

Children are a blessing, not a right. But if anyone has rights it's the woman who carried and gave birth to the baby, not the people who handed over money.

tbh I agree with that. So much work is exploitative in nature, where you can live even how many children you might have is dictated to by finances. This isn't a "let's have no safeguarding at all' but I agree it is an impossible standard.

You seem to think a woman who gestates a baby does not leave her genetic mark on her child @Nalupa

You'd be wrong: www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fimmu.2019.00659/full

What about a couple who use donor eggs and a surrogate (which is quite common)? Then there are three women in the mix. Who's the mother then?

The proposals effectively mean that gay men cut mothers out altogether. There will be children who have no mother listed on their birth certificate.

And while there is a lot of fluffy stuff about surrogates and baby buyers being friends for ever, the truth is often very different.

What is it that makes pregnancy special?

Do I really need to answer that?

If it isn't different from anything else then why aren't all those who are capable of carrying children and giving birth having children on behalf of those who can't?

In the context of the post you are responding to, I don't see how this makes sense. Not everyone capbable of being a fireman is forced to be one...

@Grumpsy "If you haven’t been through infertility then you have no idea of the pain it causes."

I do sympathise but again I state that it is the person who is born who has the human right to find out their birth mother should they want to. Their needs are paramount, not an infertile couple. Sorry.

@Clymene that was in the context of egg donation, whilst the baby would have the blood of the woman/mum gestating the baby, the actual genetics would definitely not be hers.