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/

Why can't you sell an organ but you can sell a baby?

That's what I don't understand. How is one exploitative and so is illegal but the other isn't?

WTAF

Sorry, missed out the important part of the backstory - my mother wanted another child but couldn't have one. She knew this girl and that she was pregnant. The girl didn't want the baby - me, so offered to sell me to my parents instead of getting the abortion she would have got.

I’m happy to be educated on this if I’m wrong,
but why is surrogacy a bad thing? If a woman is willingly carrying a child for a woman who cannot, but isn’t the biological parent, then what’s the issue? Is it different from sperm donation? Egg donation? Some women can’t carry a pregnancy but desperately want to be mothers. I understand the need to not make it a monetary thing or create a situation where women are forced into acting as a surrogate, but surrogacy as a whole is surely a positive to help infertile couples?

Presumably because organ donation is permanent and pregnancy isn’t? And a surrogate isn’t always the bio Mum, quite often eggs and sperm are used to create an embryo which is then implanted into the surrogate who acts as the carrier?

But that’s adoption - not surrogacy at all.

I agree.

My parents actually did buy me from a young teenage girl who got pregnant by accident and couldn't keep the baby. They gave her enough money to go off an start a new life elsewhere.

So your parents gavce a young girl money in exchange for a baby. You do realise the story you are telling is literally buying a baby. Is that something you are advocating as being acceptable in society and law?

It's not adoption. It's selling a baby.

Why can't you sell an organ but you can sell a baby?

That's what I don't understand. How is one exploitative and so is illegal but the other isn't?

Men also have organs.

That’s the real reason. Men don’t like themselves being treated as biological vessels. Women have always been treated as such (and encouraged to think of themselves as such).

I don’t think kidney donation should be illegal. I sure as hell don’t think it should be legalised as a commercial market, though. Imagine new legislation in which people could legally offer to sell one of their kidneys, and when they had agreed to give up a kidney, then weren’t able to change their mind because the buyer had signed a contract and was then the legal owner of the kidney? We’d think it was dystopian fiction.

@SwordToFlamethrower

why is any of this YOUR business

In the US and some other countries you can also pay money / “expenses” to the birth mother as part of adoption. That’s also selling a baby.

And you think that's ok?

If so, at what point does selling a baby become selling a child, or a person? And are you ok with that too? Maybe we could just start a trade in people, history tells me that is very profitable.....

You were the product of an unwanted pregnancy, not a surrogacy arrangement. You weren't deliberately conceived to be handed over as a transaction.
Your (presumably adoptive) parents handed over money for you because I'm assuming your biological mother would otherwise have refused.

The money bit sounds distasteful but it wasn't surrogacy, it was adoption.

What happens if a baby is born with disabilities? What happens if there are scan anomalies? Can the surrogate mother be forced to abort? If she refuses will those who are buying the baby have the right to refuse to accept the baby? The whole process is so fraught with difficulties.

Look what happened in the Ukraine.

If you are a poor infertile woman you do not have the option of being able to have a child by using a surrogate.

There is a reason many European countries have banned surrogacy.

People make a choice to be a surrogate. They get paid for it. Of course, they shouldn’t have parental rights over the child, especially if not biologically theirs. Its absolutely right that the parents of the baby should get immediate custody without a legal battle. This isn’t a mother with her baby being taken - it’s a woman who views it as a job and a way to make money. She shouldn’t be allowed to just change her mind.

I can imagine it's very difficult to accept that someone bough you to be their slave as a baby, as you weren't made to do excessive physical work.

It must also be difficult to think that your mother sold you on.

me?

Errr noone bought me.

I am query whether we accept it's ok to buy and sell humans.

Of course not! I’m arguing against commercialised surrogacy here - which is, as a pp pointed out, influenced by US laws (in which you can buy a surrogate and also in which adoption is also a commercialised market).

Neither adoption nor sperm donation nor surrogacy should be a commercial market. They should be regulated, but not commercialised. IMO the current U.K. situation is better all round that these proposals, and though it needs more explicit regulation, this should be around the needs and rights of the child (and the biological mother), not the interests of those who want to buy human beings.

Americans can't seem to understand this.

I find those who oppose abortion in America are all about the baby.

Once the baby is born they only care about the poor barren couple not the baby.

I find it really illogical.

@coeurnoir it's very unusual that you experienced no issue with your parents lying to you throughout your childhood and that you were never aware you were the only child who wasn't related to the rest of the family.

Most children who are lied to are very aware that there is something off, particularly when they have siblings. Presumably they and your parents' family and friends were all complicit in the lie.

I don't agree with surrogacy. The concept is totally wrong. So the legislation is meaningless IMHO.

And IMO this is yet another area where Brexit has had a damaging impact on women - because rather than having the protections and precedents of the EU and other European countries, the expectation is that we should be more like the US - in which individualism, money and the commercial market is privileged at all costs.

This thread shows what a slippery slope this concept is. Started off discussing surrogacy (mainly with donor eggs), and ended up with someone saying it was totally fine for her parents to buy her off a young girl. Jeez.

Genetically, the child is not the surrogates. Biologically, maybe it is, she grew it and gave birth to it.