Surrogacy regret - from a single man

[OhHolyJesus]

Once the baby has been born the regret of what he had done lead him to giving the baby up for adoption.

The woman who had her eggs harvested to make the baby and the woman who carried the baby through pregnancy and gave birth to the baby have not been told this.

twitter.com/jenniferlahl/status/1417527064895254531?s=21

I am reminded of the DNA stories and Long Lost Family type stories where mothers and children are reunited and the mother is just so happy and relieved that the child had a good life.

Imagine being either woman, found by the child as an adult who explains that after being commissioned into being because they are 'so wanted' they were actually adopted because the shame was too much for the commissioning father.

This child was not rejected because of a disability but rejected because it was just all too much for him and he wanted to cancel his order.

It's like reverse social surrogacy.

I just want to cry for that baby.

This may be true then again it may not be
We've only heard it from a Twitter post saying he's in a conversation with someone saying this

@purpleme12
You may be unaware but Jennifer Lahl is a highly respected campaigner against surrogacy and award winning documentary film maker. You can be assured she wouldn't post this if it wasn't true.

If Jennifer Lahl says someone is telling her this, then someone is telling her this.

It's not exactly an unlikely situation, anyway.

After months of psychological vetting and preparation courses, adoption placements, even of newborns, break down, and the child goes back into care.

Why wouldn't we see the situation breaking down in a similar way after a commissioning parent takes receipt of a newborn directly, without psychological vetting first?

Might be true - might not - it’s just hearsay.

That is absolutely devastating. It makes me want to cry too.

Is there a reason why doubters want to doubt? Do you know anything about Jennifer Lahl? It's really not clever or funny.

Its not surprising at all.

The contracts/agreements always protect everyone besides the baby and the mother.

Stands to reason there would be get out clauses /no obligation etc

Poor baby

This is sad but I’m sure there are couples who get pregnant and regret their decision or their circumstances change so they give the baby up for adoption.

People do, indeed, occasionally reject a baby at birth, it's very rare. I've seen it happen in the case of a baby with Down's syndrome, but again, it was the father who rejected the baby and gave the mother an ultimatum - the baby or their marriage.  I often wonder how much longer that marriage staggered on for. Anyway, I digress.
The thing is @toocold54 this father commissioned the baby, two women risked their health to provide the eggs and to gestate and give birth to the baby he had ordered. Women doing this are led to believe they are kind wonderful women providing childless people with babies. There is much emphasis on them doing a wonderful thing, giving a great gift. They didn't go through all that for the buyer to put the baby up for adoption.

This clearly exposes the logical end result of the commodification of childbirth and babies, eggs for sale, wombs for rent.

I feel so sad for the baby. Bought and sold.
I hope it has some wonderful adoptive parents.

Oh my god that's horrendous. I really hope the baby never finds out to be honest, but I expect that isn't possible today with DNA testing like ancestry etc.

Appalling behaviour. This is what happens when you treat a child like a product you can buy off the shelf / a lifestyle accessory.

Though it would have been better if the commissioning father didn't enter into this arrangement to begin with, without having considered the ethics around buying a baby, I imagine that the baby is much better off being away from a father who doesn't want to be a father.

Becoming a parent is difficult enough when it is what you want, it would be infinitely harder, and the baby could potentially be at risk, if the main care giver wanted out.

I hope the child grows to know any potential siblings and is somehow able to find his or her mother.

I do not doubt this story is real. I have seen and heard many in depth interviews by Jennifer Lahl, both on screen and by podcast.

I think they are fascinating and very enlightening. Doubters would do well to inform themselves.

@toocold54

This is sad but I’m sure there are couples who get pregnant and regret their decision or their circumstances change so they give the baby up for adoption.

I'm sure that sometimes there is. Although birth adoptions are extremely rare in the UK as any adoptive parents will tell you. The difference is that those parents did not intentionally commission a child to be brought into being through putting other people at risk before then surrendering the child to the uncertainties and additional traumas of adoption.

Should children be allowed to be created in this way, where they are being created intentionally in the context of rupturing their attachment to their birth parent, knowing the burden and challenges this places on the human involved for life? It's one thing to try and find the best possible repair for a child who has experienced that rupture through removal from unfit parents. It's another to create a child intentionally to experience this and live with it because an adult wants to parent.

Should children be created in this way with this burden already involved and with the additional risks of the commissioning buyer then (as adoptive parents sometimes do) discovering that they cannot go through with it? With all the additional burden and harm that places on the human who will have to live with it?

You get to do the parenting part for 18 years of the commissioned person's life if you're lucky. That's it. The human you've created has to live with their circumstances for their entire life. Plenty of accounts can be found from adults, successfully adopted as children, who talk about the heavy burden and emotional struggles of being 'chosen' to come away from your birth parents to be used to meet the emotional desires of adults, and being supposed to be grateful for this.

The human being created isn't a blank slate and that's one of the many huge issues here.

Another issue: parents wishing to adopt go through a long, hard period of training and highly invasive, demanding assessment to ascertain their fitness to parent and their match to the child. The absolute priority is the child's wellbeing and the parents' fitness to meet the child's needs, and to be as certain as possible that the child will not suffer additional harm on top of what they already carry by the adoption breaking down. Not all who apply succeed. Parents who use a surrogate get absolutely no vetting of any kind. There is no one independently representing the child's interests in the transactions taking place between adults full of their own needs and feelings and wishes.

How many humans is it ok to suffer situations that a casual bystander sees as 'sad' but to them may be devastating and affect their entire lives in the service of parents getting lovely chances to parent?

In order to learn more of Lahl's work investigating surrogacy and the fertility industry I share the following:

Podcast interview with a veteran gay rights activist who is against surrogacy

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/venus-rising/id1481872967?i=1000453100687

A podcast interview with a woman who found out her child had numerous siblings due to the prolific sperm donor she had to make her child

podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/venus-rising/id1481872967?i=1000504426235

A film about human egg harvesting and examples of women who suffered from ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome

A you tube interview with a surrogate mother who found out the commissioning father of her children was a paedophile when the FBI came to her door to ask her how many children she has had for human trafficking purposes

A you tube interview woman who donated her eggs and who was lucky to come away from the experience with her ovaries and is so traumatised for the experience she is in therapy and wonders if she will be able to have her own children

A you tube interview with a surrogate mother who entered into surrogacy so to afford her own fertility children to have a family who was very badly treated by the commissioning parents and ended up in a court battle.

Unbelievable yet so believable. How did we get here?

This is what happens when you treat a child like a product you can buy off the shelf / a lifestyle accessory.

Absolutely SirSamuelVimes, the whole thing is reprehensible, immoral and unethical, turning babies into commodities to be traded and women's reproductive capabilities into items for hire.

Dreadful.

This is the result of viewing women as separate body parts (womb haver, egg donor).

Parents who use a surrogate get absolutely no vetting of any kind yet the mothers who birth and give up their eggs for surrogacy are vetted for their fertility fitness, looks, race, morality (surrogate mothers can't be former drug users and many are asked to refrain from sex during the pregnancy) and intelligence.

Reminds me of what Granny Weatherwax says about sin:

"And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."
"It's a lot more complicated than that--"
"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."
"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"
"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."
--from Carpe Jugulum, by Terry Pratchett.

I'm not religious, but the attitude of the "father" of this baby is about as close to sin as you could possibly get. Treating people - the women, the baby - as things. Things to be ordered, bought, hired, and returned.

Genuinely disgusting.

'People as things' invokes imagery of the slave trade and I can honestly say you're not far wrong SirSam.

'Expenses' or 'compensation' is the language often use to neutralise the commercial nature of surrogacy and normalise it. It is often accompanied by the body autonomy argument, usefully presented on that Twitter thread here

twitter.com/skyleravery5/status/1417549232345534464?s=21

I'm sure it won't take long for a comparison to be made between this man changing his mind about being father to a child who is already born and breathing to a woman terminating an unwanted pregnancy. We already have surrogacy being argued as 'reproductive rights'. Give me strength.

Then I think we could place bets on how long it would take for someone to point out that as this single man is gay he shouldn't be discriminated against if he changes his mind, in the same way that as (some) single women can have abortions we shouldn't allow rights for one and not the other whilst completely ignoring the issue of access to safe, legal abortions, the fight to get them etc...

I would like to hear from this man, I would like him to tell us his thought process. I'd also then like to hear from the child in about 20 years to see how he or she is doing. What an awful beginning.

What process is there to ‘vet’ potential parents/buyers in such a situation? To adopt (well in the U.K. - I don’t know about elsewhere) you have to bump through so many hoops. Is this more like a ‘transaction’?

And for those not believing it - well I don’t know but I can imagine this happening (and worse - remember the couple where the stay at home dad murdered the baby - he really seems to hate the child?)

Excellent points @OhHolyJesus and funny you should mention a comparison to abortion.....we've got filicide thrown in too!

That poor child, treated like a commodity. I hope he/she has a wonderful adoptive family and a happy life.🙏🏻 There are no words to describe the man.😡 The surrogate and egg donor should be told.

Told you it wouldn't be long @FannyCann.

A predictable diversion from what has actually happened.

@KittenKong

The vetting process for surrogacy in the U.K. isn't standardised as far as I can tell. Different surrogacy agencies work in different ways and have slightly different requirements mostly focused on the surrogate mothers and their ability to relinquish the child and their parental rights.
There is compulsory counselling done to assess this. Of course you don't need to go through an agency so there is no regulation.

For the commissioning person or couple there is an assessment performed by social services once the parental order application goes in. This includes a home visit (or remotely during Covid, I remember Sophie Beresiner writing a column about what she should wear for the zoom call) but by this time the baby has been in the full time custody of the commissioning by parent/s and this is always what is referred to if there is a dispute in court as a judge would usually rule 'in the best interests of the child' for the child to stay with the parents he/she/they have come to know and any genetic or biological connection a surrogate mother has to the child she is 'reclaiming' is dismissed, or certainly not prioritised. I think that's why the law commissions proposals are so clearly a move to commercial surrogacy, as the current process has 'wiggle room' for the mother but their wish would be to remove this.

The case you mentioned, about the stay at gone Dad and also thinking about adoption reminded me of Elsie Scully-Hicks. I'm not sure that the adoption assessment done would have picked up on the risk posed to her, clearly she was placed with the couple and all was well. Then it wasn't.

I imagine it must be very difficult to assess people for adoption and/or surrogacy as anyone can put on a good act, some better than others and of course there are genuinely good people who would make excellent parents, more so than some who become parents biologically rather than legally, but for surrogacy it appears to me to be about paying for it, if you have the money I'm not sure what else matters.

@underneaththeash

Might be true - might not - it’s just hearsay.

And if it is true? What then?