Surrogacy in the New Statesmen

[OhHolyJesus]

This is a really good article on surrogacy.

"And yet not everyone regards maternal love with wonder. The surrogacy industry, for instance, seems to me to regard it as an inconvenience, since this is a sector set up to cater for the visceral desires of intended parents – that is, the people who commission a surrogate mother to produce a child for them – but which must work against the visceral desires of the women who give birth.
One typical guide for intended parents details the need to engineer an “emotional transfer” when a child is born by surrogacy. The woman who has just given birth must hand over a baby that has lived inside her for months, and there is a risk – to use the cold language favoured by the industry – of “psychological complications” as a result.

In Britain, commercial surrogacy is illegal, although in practice so-called altruistic arrangements do sometimes involve payment changing hands as “expenses”, and intended parents are able to travel overseas to seek out commercial surrogacy services in more permissive jurisdictions. Some progressives decry the status quo as too restrictive, and the Law Commission is currently conducting a review into the regulation of surrogacy and the legal parentage of children born through it: a consultation paper published by the commission in June 2019 gives an idea of what we can expect in terms of recommendations for law reform, including – most troublingly – a proposed loosening of the legal bond between the surrogate mother and baby."

https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/feminism/2021/06/surrogacy-snaps-mother-baby-bond-two-we-should-not-celebrate-it-progress

Unsurprisingly both Freddy McConnell
and surrogacy agency owner, Michael Ellis Johnson and had something to say about it. (Freddy rejects motherhood and Michael, well, Michael bought two babies with his partner Wes has two children through surrogacy).

Lots in the comments...

https://www.instagram.com/p/CQOleRJhWWw/?utmmedium=copyy_link

Well done that husband. I find it really weird how these husbands/partners cheerfully agree to another couple using his wife/partner's body in this way (unless money is the attraction. Maybe I'm just too old fashioned, but it would definitely be a marriage breaker in this household. Why should a partner (same would apply to a lesbian partner) see their significant other risk their health in this way, need to take time off work to look after existing children if the woman is hospitalised or poorly etc for another person or couple to buy a baby from them?

That's a lovely article. When you are a new mother the strength of bond between mother and baby (in most cases, I do understand not all women bond with their baby in the first instance) is so strong it is overwhelming. I could hardly put my baby down and couldn't bear to be apart from her. I remember breastfeeding my second whilst listening to a news story about the awful Kilshaws who bought twins online and brought them over from USA. I had tears streaming down my face.
So it's lovely to read an article by someone currently in that state, with her baby on her lap, explaining why changing the law to deprive mothers of their legal status is so wrong. We must fight the law Commission proposals.

Link to one of the many stories about the Kilshaws. Google is your friend.

www.dailypost.co.uk/news/twins-sold-north-wales-couple-19674697.amp

The comments on the Insta post suggests the writer, as a new mother, is a lunatic and hormonal.

Nice.

It's issues like this that demonstrate how people pay lip service to equality, but ultimately view women as service providers.

The second screenshot above was from a woman who wanted to be a surrogate mother to make someone happy and be paid. So it is about money.

The Facebook comments on the same fair no better sadly. One said the article was T*RF-like (or similar), all from those buying or selling.

Yup. Service providers. And that'll be a BOGOFF for us.

@HecatesCatsInFancyHats

It's issues like this that demonstrate how people pay lip service to equality, but ultimately view women as service providers.

A comment from Two Dad's demonstrates your point perfectly

"I'm just pleased Louise Perry hasn't had to experience infertility that needed her to resort to Surrogacy.

What a harmful and patronising article. I think before she projects such bile she should spend more time researching the positive impact surrogacy has on these children, and how unlike traditional conceptional ALL these babies are wanted, planned for and desperate wanted. There are no mistakes here, only wanted children. Stop confusing UK Surrogacy to Surrogacy in banned states or countries."

What mistakes is he talking about? Pregnancies between heterosexual couples, do heterosexual couples not plan their families?

'Needing to resort to surrogacy' totally ignores adoption for one but also makes the 'service provider' sound like a necessary evil. I won't copy further comments, it's easy to find the page on FB and some of the comments are quite personally targeting the journalist, simply because they disagree. Several comments came from IVF clinic owners and surrogacy agencies, who are all doing this out of the goodness of their hearts and not for £.

@FannyCann

Yup. Service providers. And that'll be a BOGOFF for us.

"And you play a central role in that plan!"

This reads like a mind control advert, or is it 'empowerment for the people pleasers'?

And twins? They have it all planned out don't they.

Also I suspect there will be some (il)legal shenanigans regarding parental status to get the babies back to whichever European country. Why else are they asking for a non-married woman. Tales of SMs having to pretend they are/were in a relationship with the sperm producer are not uncommon. Iirc Kelly Martinez who featured in @jenniferlahl film #bigfertility had to do that for one of the couples that hired her.

twitter.com/JenniferLahl/status/1244620151984537601?s=20

Sophie Beresiner is promoting her new book in British Vogue and promoting the agency of the the Two Dad's who complain about the journalist in my OP.

She is also moaning, again, about how the U.K. law is archaic and needs reform, disingenuously failing to mention why the law is what it is (I'll let you in on a secret, it's to protect women.)

www.vogue.co.uk/mini-vogue/article/having-a-baby-with-a-surrogate

@FannyCann

That's a lovely article. When you are a new mother the strength of bond between mother and baby (in most cases, I do understand not all women bond with their baby in the first instance) is so strong it is overwhelming. I could hardly put my baby down and couldn't bear to be apart from her. I remember breastfeeding my second whilst listening to a news story about the awful Kilshaws who bought twins online and brought them over from USA. I had tears streaming down my face. So it's lovely to read an article by someone currently in that state, with her baby on her lap, explaining why changing the law to deprive mothers of their legal status is so wrong. We must fight the law Commission proposals.

I am someone who didn't bond for a good while with my baby (traumatic birth and PTSD), but that doesn't mean that I'd have found it anything other than mentally tortuous to have had the baby I grew given to someone else (had I been a surrogate, which obviously I wasn't!).

I think pregnancy and childbirth, and also surrogacy, is such an incomparable emotional and psychological ground-shift in a woman's life that you take years to properly process it. I can imagine that there are surrogates who think they haven't bonded with their baby and are able to hand it over to the commissioning parents when it's born, but I think those women will still spend years afterwards playing through the whole scenario in their mind - what they put their body through, what they did for the CPs, is the baby happy, did the baby miss its mum, did the CPs really appreciate what the woman did and the risks she took, etc. There may well come a time, say 10 years after the whole thing was declared a roaring success and the paperwork was all signed, where the woman is still processing what happened all by herself, long after the CPs have pretty much forgotten she exists.

It's such an emotional burden to put on a woman's life.

Exactly PearPickingPorky
Just because you haven't bonded with your baby doesn't mean you would want to give it away!

I have vague memories of a program on tv that featured a woman who said she had no maternal instincts and didn't love her daughter. The little girl was about nine I think, and I think father and grandparents did a lot. But the woman said she looked after her to fulfil her parental responsibilities but just felt dead inside about it all. From what you could judge via a tv program she seemed a "good enough" mother in terms of looking after her, keeping her safe, schooled etc but no doubt the daughter suffered emotional neglect.

However in hindsight I don't think there was much examination in the programme of why she felt that way. Maybe she was judging herself by societal, gendered expectations to be "maternal" and was in fact a perfectly good mother? Probably she had had some trauma or imperfect parenting herself and maybe that was the cause. Maybe she was on the autistic spectrum and had difficulty with emotional relationships.

Anyway there was never any suggestion she would have given the child away, or cheerfully gone through childbirth again to sell the baby.

Also sympathy to you @PearPickingPorky for the traumatic birth and PTSD. It must be terrifying compounded by the complete loss of control. I hope time has brought healing for you.

Oh it has, FannyCann, don't worry. I'm a few years down the line now and well. But I was very much going through the motions, providing excellent care to my baby, but the emotional side was switched off (not just to my baby but in all aspects of my life) for a while.

But a woman who acts as a surrogate saying that they feel nothing at all for the baby they have given birth to, or an emotional disconnect with their own pregnant body should probably indicate some sort of psychological vulnerability, rather than an indication of their suitability to be used as a gestational vessel for other people's benefit.