Baby born to Surrogate Mother still with her nearly one year on

[OhHolyJesus]

Due to the travel restrictions this little girl remains in the care of the surrogate mother and her husband and as she approaches her 1st birthday she might be with them for a lot longer...

"For the biological parents, the entire process of traveling to and from the US to collect their baby could take up to three months, according to Chrislip.
“I just don’t know if they can take that amount of time off of work,” she said."

So tricky to collect the order you made from China when you can't take time off work...

www.google.co.uk/amp/s/nypost.com/2021/03/24/surrogate-caring-for-baby-year-later-due-to-covid-travel-rules/amp/

By definition she is no longer ‘a surrogate’ any more in an extended scenario like this.

@ChattyLion

By definition she is no longer ‘a surrogate’ any more in an extended scenario like this.

By definition she never was. A surrogate mother is a female who cares for and raises a young if the mother is absent - died or rejected the infant. In human cases the surrogate is actually the commissioning parent as the actual mother is the woman who gives birth to the baby, regardless of whose genetic material created the embryo.

Wouldn’t the contract state what will happen if the IPs can’t collect the baby.. which surely from a welfare and a legal perspective can’t just have no age cut off? Would there not be any kind of expiry date on the IP’s right to take the baby?

And if non-collection of the baby isn’t in the contract.. how could a contract only about IPs taking a baby at birth, be read as also valid to cover IPs taking a settled young child? Shouldn’t it go back to court at least for someone external to oversee it from the child’s interests?

You would think wouldn't you Chatty. Surrogacy seems to be a manic word that means all normal safeguarding conventions can be erased. It appears to be completely unregulated with regard to child protection.
There is so much more to this story, from a legal and financial viewpoint.
I'm also interested in what sort of financial arrangements the commissioning parents and the Chrislips have come to. There are obvious expenses of things like milk and nappies, baby clothes and any equipment they needed to obtain. Then there are the medical expenses, the baby must, at a minimum, have had her inoculations and normal developmental checks, whatever they do in the USA.
Then there is the issue of payment for caring for her all this time.
Foster parents in the UK are paid a minimum of £450 a week.
We don't know if Emily has had to give up her job to care for the baby, or maybe she was SAHM and that was why she did the surrogacy to earn some money. If she is working then she must need to put the baby in day care along with her own child. What if the commissioning parents objected to this?

I also feel sad for their own son, who will be used to having a little sister, who one day will be given away....

Magic word. Not manic.

This is just horrendous. Communication will be so hard for the little one and I know that's just one issue!

I also feel sad for their own son, who will be used to having a little sister, who one day will be given away....

He surely will have huge trauma too - he may well feel that if they give away his sister then they could do the same to him too. He'll be wondering about her and wanting to know about her. Will there be communication or will all communication be cut off? It's horrendous. The little girl will probably miss her brother too.

How can an American citizen be given away to people from another country when women who have given birth in America are prevented from taking their natal child home eg back to the UK even though they are being deported? It seems like a massive loophole.

Surrogacy seems to be a magic word that means all normal safeguarding conventions can be erased. It appears to be completely unregulated with regard to child protection.

There are enough children in dreadful traumatising situations in this world, why are we creating more intentionally?

@growinggreyer

How can an American citizen be given away to people from another country when women who have given birth in America are prevented from taking their natal child home eg back to the UK even though they are being deported? It seems like a massive loophole.

That is a very good question. Magic world indeed.

@growinggreyer

How can an American citizen be given away to people from another country when women who have given birth in America are prevented from taking their natal child home eg back to the UK even though they are being deported? It seems like a massive loophole.

I don't understand that either. The USA makes such a big deal of citizenship. Acquiring US citizenship simply by being born there seems an incredibly generous gesture by the state so it seems odd that a new American citizen can be treated so cavalierly.

I'm also slightly puzzled given the US history of slavery that this particular method of buying and selling people is still allowed.

Shouldn’t it go back to court at least for someone external to oversee it from the child’s interests?

Yes. In fact shouldn't it be court regulated and monitored from start to successful finish to ensure that the human being created for adults with enough money has some protections and rights in the situation? What happens to her if the adoptive parents now pull out having missed their wanted baby months? Will she be kept by her birth mother? Wanted, or grudgingly? What impact will it have on her that she's spent her first year of life with an adult intentionally protecting themselves by trying not to bond with her or get attached to her? How badly has that fucked up a year old baby? Will she end up in an orphanage? Worse?

The whole magic word and sacred group exemptions are appalling, they have to stop. Safeguarding cannot be bent this way. Human beings should not be bought and sold, never mind created into situations of destructive trauma that they will have to spend a lifetime with (mental health statistics and worse really not good here), because an adult with enough money wanted to possess a baby.

What impact will it have on her that she's spent her first year of life with an adult intentionally protecting themselves by trying not to bond with her or get attached to her?

Just thinking about the child and the first year of her life and how aside from the development of crawling, walking, feeding herself and all the usual things we expect a child to do in their first 12 months, she will be recognising her family and those around her, learning the english word for mother, not the chinese word. I consider it a sort of 'animal imprinting' that happens in the 4th trimester with the father and extended family as the baby learns to make out faces. Having weekly chats via a screen will mean nothing to a nearly 1 year old. There will be no relationship.

A short TV piece on Emily is here. She talks about the boundaries she needed to create to protect herself whilst caring for her daughter in this unexpected and extended period of time and considers it the same as caring for her cousin's child...but it's clear that this couple are being paid for their time and the expenses are covered. 24hr babysitting will no doubt add a decent amount to their monthly income as she parents her son who is 2 (? - so she got pregnant with her daughter quite quickly after having her son).

The presenter asked what it would be like to see them reunite but it's not a reunion, unless it's about reuniting with the gametes your had removed. All the language is about the commissioning couple seeing their daughter for the first time. Not a word about the little girl's reaction or indeed her wellbeing or development.

It ends with the possibility that Emily might have a sibling for this same couple and how remarkable Emily is.

www.yahoo.com/gma/surrogate-cares-familys-baby-1-133918792.html?soc_src=social-sh&soc_trk=ma

@BewareTheBeardedDragon

If the father is a Canadian citizen surely he could have come alone long ago?

I find it very odd that he hasn't.

Reviving this thread as DM is reporting another one. (She's on tiktok apparently - I don't do tiktok).

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9698243/Nanny-raising-UK-couples-surrogate-son-10-months-COVID-19.html

How many? How many? Someone needs to research this scandal.

I do wonder how many of the babies stuck in Ukraine got picked up eventually. My bet is quite a few were abandoned.

This thread is a depressing read. The pandemic has really highlighted the cruelties of the surrogacy industry.

Here is the TikTok

vm.tiktok.com/ZMdhCcx5e/

"We're in the loop just like everyone else is"

How many are in the loop?

So disgusting. This poor wee baby ripped from his birth mother at I assume (seconds old) to be raised by a nanny who has kids.

So he's built bonds with the "siblings" and nanny-mum just to be ripped apart to go to new Scottish family!

We don't do this to puppies, why are we doing it to babies?

Surrogacy should be banned.

This just highlights the problems with pre-birth parental orders. These babies should be under the protection of the courts and/or social services. For buyers to just turn up a year later and the babies be handed over without any oversight is beyond appalling.

And how many of these hundreds of babies born in Ukraine are still there?

I'd hazard a guess a fair few buyers won't have turned up, will have stopped paying the bills and the babies quietly shunted into an orphanage.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-europe-52673225

I've seen the lady on tiktok before. She was a surrogate and gave birth to a baby who couldn't go to the intended parents due to covid so was given to another 'nanny' the intended father has since died and baby is still with that nanny.

When Alexander could not go to his birth parents in the UK they needed another 'nanny' for him and the agency contacted this lady, who is on tiktok, who has been caring for him since birth. She has said they have had difficulties getting his paperwork sorted so he can leave the US.

So both the baby she gave both to and the baby she is caring for were born to surrogates, are being cared for by someone who did not give birth to them and are the intention is for them to be sent to families in another country.

Very sad all around.

So that's three that we know of.
I bet you could easily add a 0 to that figure.

If this happened in the U.K. the surrogate mother would be the legal mother and if she didn't want to care for the baby it would be taken over by social services.
Even if she did care for the baby I feel SS would get involved somewhere along the line and the final hurdle of the court review if the parental order would mean some protection for these babies.

That they can be in the care of a nanny and then just picked up and taken across the world with no child protection involvement is so shocking.

Also, without going through the whole of the thread, but I'm pretty sure it is was mentioned, there is a problem getting health insurance for these babies. At the very least they need all their childhood vaccinations etc. But if they suddenly became seriously ill I wonder who has legal rights to make medical decisions? And how it will be paid for.

The US doesn't track what happens to children after adoption, apparently they are not tracking surrogacy either. From what I have learned due to the 'rehoming' scandal, the adopters can show up anytime, 'rehome' the child on craigslist or dissappear it completely. There is no tracking of what is happening to these children.

The selling of children needs to end and there needs to be greater tracking of international adoption and surrogacy.