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 do people even chose a surrogate mother? Do they advertise? And how can potential ‘parents’ guarantee the mental well-being of the surrogate once the baby has left her? Do they ever give the birth mother a single thought for the rest of their lives and what do they tell the child as they grow up? What if the child grows up curious about their family history (health or otherwise) and find they have no trace to their background, surely that’s a recipe for a major head fuck. People are so selfish and think no further than their own wants and desires.

Are you suggesting surrogacy could be a role you could apply for in a Job Centre?

Biologically the child is not the surrogates.

The surrogate mother is the biological mother/birth mother. Pregnancy and labour are biological processes. I think you mean as the egg came from another women the DNA then the surrogate mother is not the genetic mother. This is true and is the same when any women gives birth to a baby conceived with the egg from another woman. If I give birth to a baby that I am not genetically related to am I not the birth mother?

There is a clause that the birth mother (surrogate) can terminate the adoptive parents parental rights up til 6 weeks post birth isn't there? So the baby cannot be forcibly removed from her.

No, any surrogate mother wanting to keep the child would have to apply for a parental order as the child is not legally hers at birth. These are the proposals and the opposite of current law. It's in the summary report.

www.lawcom.gov.uk/project/surrogacy/

Re sperms donors, I read recently about a man who has donated and 'fathered' hundreds of children. I mean is that really OK? People walking around not knowing anything about him, no contact, no relationship and no idea who the other kids are? What if 2 of his offspring meet and start a relationship? It's really not acceptable, is it?

I was a surrogate many years ago, which sadly didn't work out

It was her egg and his sperm so the child wasn't mine. I certainly didn't do it for any monetary reward and was certainly not well off or had any gains.
I did it purely because I'd had my two kids and my 1st was ivf with a guy who couldn't have them naturally. So I knew what it gelt like and I wanted to be able to help someone else have what many take for granted

Yes, quite.

@L3ThirtySeven

“No decision in life for rich or poor is “truly free”. Not one single decision. That’s an impossible standard you are dictating and it’s simply an excuse to control women’s bodies and decisions.”

ABSOLUTELY agree.
Pregnancy glorifiers don’t like this.

But the baby and she will be forever connected, even if she isn't genetically related to that baby:

Trafficking of fetal cells into the maternal circulation begins very early in pregnancy and the effects of this cell traffic are longlasting. All types of fetal cells, including stem cells, cross the placenta during normal pregnancy to enter maternal blood, from where they may be recovered in pregnancy for the purpose of genetic prenatal diagnosis. Fetal cells can also be located in maternal tissues during and after pregnancy, and persist as microchimeric cells for decades in marrow and other organs.
The traffic is two way.

I think you are amazing

@Indoorcatmum that's because a lot most of the people against surrogacy have zero fertility issues and have had their children, so they have zero idea the pain associated with infertility, which as I am infertile myself NO ONE who has ever carried a child to term and had a healthy alive baby can ever imagine or even comment on. Even successful IVF pregnancies. They think they understand and because they think they might know what it feels like, or are a woman they pass incredibly ignorant judgement on the choices of others.

They love to say it's selfish, or "just adopt " 99% of these comments are from women with kids. I have my own strict rules for surrogacy and not all women who surrogate are doing it philanthropically, they are clearly being exploited. But to name all surrogacy as evil is narrow minded and screams privileged and uneducated.

We now know that DNA and antibodies from the foetus mingle throughout the woman’s blood and can alter her body at the cellular level (blood or stem cell donation from a woman who has been pregnant can be particularly risky for recipients). Not only is the baby affected by the environment in utero, but the mother is, too. For many women pregnancy causes all sorts of complications, major and minor, that aren’t just “a bit of nausea”. Pregnancy can trigger autoimmune disease, t-cell damage, multiple sclerosis, and many other conditions. The impact of nine months of physiological and psychological changes is not minimal for most women.

That’s just for the woman, before you even get to the baby.

I’m not against surrogacy in all circumstances - such as altruistic surrogacy for women who have frozen embryos before cancer treatment. It certainly needs to be regulated, though - but probably to be tighter rather than looser.

What I am against is the blithe disregard of what it means to buy and sell a human person, and to devalue some of the very things that make us human in the service of rich people’s “right” to treat a child as if buying a new car, and women as if they were merely commodified artisanal workshops for the production of a luxury consumer good. That isn’t humanity, and it isn’t equality. It’s using a serf class of people as the equivalent of biological vessels for people production for the wealthy. I’m not religious either, but god help us!

I know three or four couples who have used surrogates. (It’s surprisingly common amongst wealthy software millionaire types who decide late on in life they do want a kid after all.) Some of them are American and went and bought a surrogate baby there and shipped it over. One paid his graduate student to have twins for his wife! (Unethical in even more ways.) They’re all also older - in their early fifties for the most part - and very well off. And the women who “made” the babies are not well off. I don’t think human children should be thought of as the equivalent of a new Tesla for bored rich people. It’s pretty horrific that this is becoming normalised as a consumer choice.

Surrogacy is wrong. I agree with PP that I will agree with it when rich women are doing it for poor women. Look at how normalized it’s becoming in Hollywood for rich women to pay poorer women to take on all the health risks so they can ‘keep their bodies intact.’ Paris Hilton used a surrogate because she was ‘scared of giving birth.’ It’s disgusting and wrong.

The UK should ban human trafficking and this baby slave trade altogether.

This is really thought provoking, thank you.

YABU. I am close to a couple who had a baby via surrogate in the UK. It was a genuine altruistic surrogacy and I won't go into more detail on that. The surrogate's biggest legal concern was being stuck with the baby she didn't want. It happens a lot more often thank you think i.e. baby comes out disabled in some way or the parents change their mind, and the poor woman is stuck with a child she has no intention of raising. I think clarifying the law is a good thing.

They love to say it's selfish, or "just adopt " 99% of these comments are from women with kids*

I have fertility issues so I'll continue to have my say thank you very much but then I think exploitation of other human beings is everyone's business.

It's precisely because I found producing a baby so difficult that I am against surrogacy. Infertility, then constant miscarriages, all day all pregnancy sickness, a cervical erosion that made me think that I was miscarrying so constant stress, I actually lost weight during one pregnancy. I didn't expect any of that, both pregnancies were slightly different, no 2 are the same.

Bodily autonomy doesn't cover things like selling parts of your body. It is also not bodily autonomy to sell your child or give it away as a present. Babies aren't objects, they are human beings.

There is a summary of the consultation response in the full report (pages 11 - 18): https://s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/lawcom-prod-storage-11jsxou24uy7q/uploads/2023/03/2.-Surrogacy-full-report.pdf

Apparently more than half of the 680 responses they got were from people opposed to surrogacy (often using the Nordic Model Now! Response guide), so they state that most of their proposed reforms were disagreed with by the majority of those responding to the consultation.

Why is parenthood not a right?

Also, there Equality Impact Assessment (here: https://s3-eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/lawcom-prod-storage-11jsxou24uy7q/uploads/2023/03/EIA-Surrogacy.pdf )

incorrectly uses gender rather than sex as one of the criteria they are legally obliged to consider the impact of their proposals on. Which for a proposal that is utterly tied to the sex of the participants is pretty fucking outrageous.

Just interested in what you know about the birth mother? Who is she? Where is she from?her age, economic status? Does she have other children? Did she get paid? Did she suffer any complications in pregnancy or birth? Does she have contact with the child?

Thanks
It was her 10th and last attempt sadly.
I wished I had been younger and I would have tried again for them.
I will never begin to understand her heartache. I understood a bit due to having my 1st through ivf but not her sheer desperation and sadness of never being a mum.
I consider myself incredibly lucky to have 2 kids and I miscarried one in between.

I find it really odd that people are using the exact same arguments against surrogacy that people use against abortion (thr rights of the child, etc). And yet when these arguments are used in the abortion debate, they are shut down. So much hypocrisy and double standards on MN. Makes me sick.