Surrogacy to get maternity leave and pay?

[coldandflu]

Light hearted and kind of a bit of snark at my company....
But they pay a good chunk of salary whilst on maternity leave and I didn't qualify with my first unplanned by a couple of days.... Needed to be at the company for three months only.

Anyway, would I be unreasonable to be a surrogate for someone and get a year paid of work?

Hmmm

Why do you feel one is okay but not the other?

The outcome is exactly the same for the child who was unwittingly brought into the world.

I agree. Adoption yes, not rent a womb as I think of surrogacy as.

Anyway, would I be unreasonable to be a surrogate for someone and get a year paid of work?

Why would you? It's not like you'd have a newborn to look after, which is surely the point of mat leave?

You get maternity leave if you have a stillbirth.

Yes you can. You can claim for a still birth too I think, but I might be wrong about that.

Why would you need a year off if you’re handing over the baby at birth? You’d have to have six weeks off but it really doesn’t take a year to recover from giving birth when you don’t have a baby at the end.
You seem a bit bitter that you didn’t get a year on full pay when you more or less got pregnant immediately when you started at the company. Not sure why.

Nobody should be allowed to buy a baby.

It’s unethical because the baby is being used as a commodity for someone who wants one. Babies are not commodities. If you’re happy to grow and give away a baby, would you be happy to give away a 3 year old because your friend wants one? Or a 7 year old? In some countries, young girls are being given to older men for wives. Is this ok?
Where would you draw the line?

Buying and selling humans, no matter how small they are, is utterly wrong.

And yes, to the point of the thread - YWBU to go through the dangers of pregnancy for a year off work, and to abandon the resulting child.

I’d feel exactly the same way about the situation you describe. For whatever reason it’s done, it’s morally questionable and ethically wrong.

This.

Do you really get maternity leave when you are a surrogate?

Yes you do.

Imo if a woman can't carry but has a willing female relative, then it's just about fine, the ethical qualm for me there is that the baby is still being torn away from their birth mother, which is horrible.

Anything else, like say, a random woman from another country, then it's purely renting a womb and that to me is totally wrong.

A surrogate is someone who carries the baby, the mum is the person who raises that baby. The egg comes from the mum as well, not from the surrogate.

It's a lovely thing to do and I feel for everyone who can't carry children for health reasons.

Also, it can only be altruistic in the UK, you can't just pay someone to be your surrogate.

Not always @Carrotcake55 sometimes there's no "mum" to give an egg, for a start, or her eggs may not be viable.

Bloody hell, it's not the same.

As a surrogate, you know it's not your child, it's not your egg. You are helping a friend.

What about all the pregnant women that take recreational drugs during pregnancy and have their kids taken away by social services? Probably they should just leave them endangered because how can you 'take the baby away from the mum,:right?'. And adoptive mums are never mums then because they didn't carry the baby?

Yeah, that's true.

I'm thinking more about cases where a woman has ovaries with eggs but eg does not have a uterus or can't carry a pregnancy for whatever reason.

Surrogates should get some maternity leave to physically and emotionally recover from pregnancy and childbirth but not sure that a surrogate should get 12 months.

If you adopt a child of any age you get adoption leave, for the very good reason that this child has, in the best case scenario, lost birth parents and possibly a set of foster carers, and in the worst case scenario, lost a number of previous carers and endured neglect or abuse. It’s going to take time and effort to bed in to their adoptive household.

They should get this maternity leave in jail IMO, alongside the baby commissioners.

I agree with others that surrogacy is human trafficking and shouldn’t be allowed. And FWIW went through 8 years of infertility and IVF before conceiving my daughter so I do understand the pain. I don’t think it’s a “light hearted” topic.

But I sense your post is about crappy mat leave more than anything. So you started a new job at 6 months pregnant? Not surprised the company didn’t want to pay you for a full year off. But mat leave shouldn’t be down to the company. It’s a total disgrace that the UK offers only 6 weeks and practically nothing for fathers (Have I got that right???)

In my country both parents get 5 months full pay from social security. That should be the minimum we provide as a society.

That's not the same. I'm wondering about the reality of a surrogate having mat leave when they have no baby to bring up. I can understand having some time off to recover but then I would expect the non bio mum to get the actual mat leave as they would in an adoption.