Surrogacy in Mexico

[courageiscontagious]

I want LGBTQ people to have families but I am so conflicted about things like this. This article barely mentions the women that are pregnant. It also really grinds my gears when couples clearly value their own genetic ties (eg here it’s two men who by design will be the genetic parent of one child each who share the same genetic mother) but apparently don’t think their child’s genetic ties and sense of identity matter as much. They’ve chosen for their children to never know their genetic mother, and they’ve also chosen for their children to have genetic half siblings.

surely if genetic ties are important- then the children’s best interests should override the parents wishes? If you were the child in that situation wouldn’t you prefer to know your mother? And failing that, for your sibling to be a full sibling and not a half sibling?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2025/06/03/lgbtq-fertility-ivf-family-planning/83942271007/

I want to be feeling like this is good but it really rubs me the wrong way when they approach these things from an LGBTQ perspective only, glossing over the women and children in the story and what might be best for them.

this story is about how expensive it is. Should it be cheap to rent people to grow babies for you?

thats my rant, please point me to some literature that will educate me so I can get behind this and go back to being a better LGBTQ ally.

You're talking about the physicalities of it. I'm talking about the morality of it, which is what early PPs were referring to; the fact these women are being used for their bodies.

I'm saying that, morally, that's not the case for all. Some women gladly volunteer their bodies to help a loved one.

Well I don’t have a problem with a family member or friend being a surrogate for someone they love, given they truly understand the risks, are not pressured into it and are able to be part of the child’s life. So I don’t have a blanket ‘it’s all vile’ attitude towards it like some. Commercial surrogacy absolutely is vile though, and that’s what we’re talking about here.

I don't see how the physicalities of it are not an integral part of the ethics involved. It is in a large part the physicalities which make women vulnerable and create risk to them in these arrangements which is not the case for eg a sperm donor.

Also, for full disclosure, I have been an altruistic egg donor. I donated 3 times between 2013-2015 and have two biological children out there somewhere. I then ended up with health problems as a result and started looking into the fertility industry and discovered the ugly, dark side of it.

The way egg donation and surrogacy are framed as ‘gifts’ is very problematic and women ARE taken advantage of even when they’re not doing it for money. I was taken in by the ‘gift’ language and was not properly informed of the long term risks. I have suffered hormonal and gynaecological issues ever since and will be having a full hysterectomy next month as a result.

In the course of my work in reproductive health I saw up close the dodgy and money-making practices of these fertility orgs and clinics and went from someone involved in the industry to a campaigner against them.

Some women gladly volunteer their bodies to help a loved one.

I'd love to know what the %'s are between altruistic and commercial surrogacy.
I would suspect that the vast majority of surrogate pregnancies are for money, not for love. There is a big difference between a family member giving birth for their loved one and a poor women giving birth because that's the only way she can support herself, or her other children. I would imagine also that the child born to a surrogate family member has a full relationship with their birth mother - and the birth mother has a full relationship with the child that they carried.

On the other hand, a surrogate that has been paid will never be part of the babies life - they are just providing a service after all.

YANBU. Surrogacy in all forms is wrong. A major study last year found out its 3x higher risk for severe pregnancy complications including sepsis, pre eclampsia and postpartum haemorrhage.

Babies bond in utero with their mothers and want her at birth - nobody else.

The majority of surrogate born babies in the UK are now born to surrogate mothers abroad - Surrogacy Concern and Stop Surrogacy Now UK wrote to Govt wity other orgs in March asking them to ban international surrogacy for Brits: Govt haven’t replied. You can follow both campaign groups on X.

Re Mexico, a British surrogacy agency My Surrogacy Journey has set up a commercial outpost in Mexico City, where they’re offering low paid Mexican women just £12k approx equivalent to be surrogate mothers for wealthy westerners. It’s diabolical. This story was in the Telegraph and Daily Mail.

Plus an increasing number of pensioners are pursuing surrogacy - last week a 72 year old British couple made headlines after being awarded a parental order for a 14 month old surrogate born baby from California.

If you disagree with surrogacy please write to your MP and tell them so - lots of info on Surrogacy Concern’s website.

I do have issues with egg sharing schemes in which women get cheaper IVF in return for sharing their eggs,and could end up in a situation where another woman gets pregnant with her eggs, but she remains childless herself.

Yep, egg sharing is also exploitative. Dangling more affordable treatment in front of women desperate to have a baby, in exchange for their DNA, is completely unethical.

See I struggle with how you are now anti fertility industry after your experiences and now understand it's exploitative.

But still maintain that you don't see all surrogacy as exploitative.

Part of me thinks this a protective thing to help you cope with your own actions and the mentality that you have 'done a good thing'.

But it still leaves me wondering how you can't see how the methods used to reel you in can't be used in a family setting. It's the whole sales pitch but with added appeals to emotion because you know someone.

Not only that but you still don't see how understanding who you are and where you came from on a physical and biological level does matter. There is an issue with adoptive children 'not feeling like they fit in' which is often resolved by meeting biological relatives that needs to be understood. And then if you separate the biological mother from the birth mother the added layer of this complexity and understanding how your commissioning parents only saw the birth mother as an incubator. And this STILL exists with 'altruistic' surrogacy.

I think you have a blindness to the idea that this type of surrogacy faces just many many issues with abuses of power and relationships that can't be just ignored.

It will catch up eventually.

Why are you ‘struggling’ with this, are people not allowed to change their minds after having direct experience of something?

I don’t need help ‘coping with my own actions’ and have said very plainly that in most cases, even altruistic ones, surrogates will experience pressure and the coercive ‘gift’ language is problematic. I just don’t think we can say that in 100% of cases a known surrogate has been pressured or coerced. If they have done very thorough research of ALL the risks, have offered to do it themselves and were not asked, have undergone extensive counselling, etc.. who am I to say with 100% certainty that they’ve been exploited? That’s kind of infantilising.

I accept and agree that the vast majority of surrogacy is on dodgy ethical ground, but nothing is 100%. If you disagree that’s fine. Seems like splitting hairs for the sake of it though.

@Jumpingthruhoops what about the morality in respect of the resultant children, not knowing their genetic parents. What about them being treated as a commodity?

My point is I'm struggling with you changing your mind and STILL being blind to a whole bunch of issues that you've partly identified through your own experience but then remain unable to see how it wouldnt just affect someone with the situation you found yourself in.

It's about the principles and practical implications.

The problem with safeguarding is you don't go 'oh well we should just support altruism because people are being nice' precisely because we understand just how vulnerable those involved can be and just how fair reaching the implications are for when it goes wrong.

There's no 'splitting hairs' as you put it. It's saying the number of instances where it's unequivocally easy to see the 'good cases' is so vanishingly rare as to be negligible. Understanding how good, particularly middle class, families are at hiding abuse (because so many don't have an alternative reference point so can't identify it as abusive), is the defining point.

How is that any different to adoption? Those children don't have any contact with their bio parents until they are of age. Presumably you're not against adaption?

Adoption of babies tends to be pretty rare these days unless the baby has been removed due to risk factors and those babies are not created purely to be adopted they are created in less than ideal circumstances thus forced adoption by the law or without the mothers consent in a lot of cases of adoption of a perfectly healthy baby that’s not involved within social services / cps / other countries brand of service.

Either way that doesn’t change the impact on the infant being removed even if we like to think it’s different. To the infant it’s not.

I've explained what I mean. Women who've decided to offer their womb for surrogacy presumably understand the risks and have decided to go ahead anyway. It's actually rather patronising to suggest that women can't think for themselves

If children were being conceived with the plan for them to be adopted you'd have a point. In the UK adoption is child-centered and focused upon meeting the needs of children who are not able to be cared for their birth parents.

Right. But as per PPs point, regardless of the logistics, in both instances, neither child will know their birth parents, which rather makes it a moot point.

@Jumpingthruhoops I am adopted and I am not against it. But I wasn’t created purposely for another family, my adoptive parents didn’t ‘buy’ me, they didn’t get a woman to carry me and give birth to me and then hand me over.

I don’t see adoption as the sole purpose of giving another person, separate from the birth mother, a child which is what surrogacy is. The main purpose of adoption is to give a child, already born, a safe home with loving parent/s where their birth parents are unable to do so.

@Jumpingthruhoops it is not a moot point. And with adoptions in this country, it is only done in the best interests of the child. The child will have knowledge of their origins, sometimes some form of contact will be maintained.

Surrogacy does not have the best interests of the child at the heart of the process. It is all about the people purchasing/exploiting the surrogate to provide them with a child. It is a commercial transaction. It is not looking at it from the child’s point of view at all. It is not regulated from the child’s point of view unlike adoption

@Jumpingthruhoops surrogacy is like going to the bad old days of Magdalene Laundries where adoption was all about the adoptive parents, no regard for the child, no regard for the birth mother. Thank god we have moved on from them when it comes to adoption

With adoption, it it recognised that every adoption starts with trauma.

Adoption is making the best of a bad situation. It happens (in this country at least) when it's decided that the trauma of adoption is less than the negative affect of the bad situation. Those bad situations include things like growing up with a mother addicted to drugs and unable to look after the child.

In surrogacy, the trauma of the child is ignored. People pretend that babies are blank canvasses and will have no feelings of seperation from their mother, and gloss over the human rights abuse of deliberately creating a person with no roots to their history.

The "bad situation" that is being avoided is that an adult or two who really really wants something don't get what they want. Their needs and the baby's needs are not weighed up to see if giving them what they want is worth the potential damage to the baby. They have the power in this situation, it's all focused on what the adults desires, not the baby's needs - or the mother.

It's exploitative to the core.

We call the period just after birth the 4th trimester for a reason. Human babies are born needing their mother as due to their head size they have to be born completely helpless. We acknowledge the life long trauma caused when a child is removed at birth due to maternal neglect - why is this any different?

It isn't aand you're going to have these babies grow into adults without any maternal relationship. They're pretty much fucked. Then they'll go on to have their own babies, not necessarily knowing what that maternal relationship is about and it's importance