Surrogacy

[ffsonly46]

Wasn't sure where to put this but feel the posters on here will have plenty of views!

Watching the documentary last night by Tom Daly and I mention to DP that I was put off by his TWAW stance as this is all well and good but clearly they are not when you're not asking them to lend their womb for him and his DH to have children. I said I didn't like the commodification of women's bodies.

He pointed out that in this country no one is coerced or paid, I replied it's not so around the world and in general I was uncomfortable with the donation/selling of eggs and sperm.

We don't know anyone who has used a surrogate but do know people who have purchased and also donated sperm, he asked if I was against this also and I'm not sure, it is still commodifying children, all be it consensually.

Please can you share your thoughts on this?

All the discussion about altruistic surrogacy fall flat for me when I think about the only surrogacies I know of - Kim Kardashian, her sister, Naomi Campbell, Nicole Kidman, Amber Heard, the woman married to Alec Baldwin.

All women with enormous wealth, and women who (I strongly suspect) did not want the hassle of pregnancy, weight, mood, and so on.

I REALLY HEAR Dobbygotthesocks. It must be a bleak dark place for you.

Caution is urgently required here.

My views are a little more nuanced than others here, possibly because of my own background. I would prefer to use logical arguments but on this subject my thinking has been coloured (and changed) by my own experience.

I desperately wanted to be a mother but needed IVF. IVF was unsuccessful.

At that point, we were advised to consider donors and surrogacy. So I thought about it. Briefly.

Because of my own experience of egg harvesting, I gave slightly more consideration to sperm donation than egg donation but both were dismissed pretty quickly. And surrogacy was not an option for me - I could not buy another woman’s body for my use for 9 months and risk leaving her with lifelong issues. I consider that exploitation.

I didn’t consider altruistic surrogacy (or donation) because I have no living female relatives. It isn’t something I could ever think of asking a friend to consider for me.

Subsequently, I met a medical professional who had offered to be a surrogate for her sister. I also met a woman who had altruistically donated eggs. She did two cycles and was sad no embryos were created.

Hearing their (truly altruistic) offers made me reconsider surrogacy as a result. Not for myself, but my general opinion.

I still think commercial surrogacy and donation is exploitative and should be banned without exception.

I’m stunned by the truly altruistic offers of surrogacy/donation and wonder if they could be so highly and effectively regulated so as to avoid exploitation. If that were the case, and I recognize it is a big if, even though it wasn’t an option for me, I think there could be a place for altruistic surrogacy.

[As an aside - I was resigned to being childless and having only step children and cats. Two years post IVF, I was pregnant with what my doctor described as a miracle).

@Dobbysgotthesocks

I do appreciate the depth of your feelings on this. Can I ask you ( sincerely and respectfully) if your sister had a baby with either her or your partner, and you adopted the child, would that be sufficient? Or do you feel it has to be your child genetically?

i suppose the problem I see is that we always start off with the deserving no - sensible- person - could- possibly object cases, but then it ramps up to the using donor material, to buying donor material, to paying a surrogate….then we get to the two male partners who are suing the fertility clinic because they got a female child when they ‘ordered’ a male ( their words). To the man who stipulated that his surrogate implanted children should be delivered by CS because ‘no son of his was going near a uterus.’
Hard cases make hard laws.

When surrogacy is clearly questionable:

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-11131499/Mother-21-IVF-babies-says-hard-talk-things-joy-husband-prison.html

Hello, the next books for the LFN Bookgroup are:
Tuesday 21 March 2023: Towards the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood. Edited by Marie-Josephe Devillers and AnaLuana Stoicea-Deram
Tuesday 18 April 2023: Time to Think – What went wrong at the Tavistock gender clinic by Hannah Barnes
Tuesday 16 May 2023: Hags by Victoria Smith
We are a radical feminist women only group who meet every third Tuesday of the month 7.00 p.m. Join us on facebook or MeetUps We meet via zoom. www.facebook.com/groups/1602858270013933/

This is an excellent book! I'm about halfway through. The chapters are complete on their own so you can dip in and out and it's truly comprehensive and gives real global insight as each chapter is written by a different woman.

Very much recommended.

I personally feel that surrogacy should be treated in a fashion similar to living organ donation with caveats around the surrogate and recipient having an established relationship (eg partners, relatives or very close well established friends).

To me this satisfies concerns re the surrogate's interests (providing surrogacy to your wife or sister or a very close friend may directly serve your own desires to become a mother or aunt / "aunt"). And it gives the child a place in their biological family which includes their birth mother.

I also feel in all but possibly some kind of exceptional case surrogacy should only be an option where the prospective surrogate has had a pregnancy and birth already, with an estimation that future pregnancy and birth is "low risk".

I think the birth certificate should reflect the complex relationship of birth mother, genetic parents and adoptive/receiving parents. And that following the birth the legal framework re parental rights should be similar or identical to that of adoption, with the birth mother having the right to change her mind.

I feel very uncomfortable with commercialised surrogacy or surrogacy where the approach is to remove the birth mother from the family / achieve separation from the birth mother, for the reasons that many others have clearly expressed.

But I do think if I had a sibling who wanted but couldn't have children, and I was able to and wanted to provide my body for that purpose, and in turn I would have the benefits of extending my own family and providing my own children with cousins etc, it's seem an overreach for others to "protect" me from that decision (in the absence of specific factors). Just like I wouldn't want to be prevented from giving a kidney to a sibling.

There is also the rather ethically straightforward if not as discussed situation of one gay mother undertaking the pregnancy and birth of a child who is genetically only related to the other gay mother. Maybe this isn't surrogacy because both are and remain the child's mother but I can't think of any reasonable objections to that.

I think the comparison made by another poster here to living organ donation and how strictly regulated it is, is a good one. Presumably the idea is that there would need to be the same kind of compulsory counselling, psychological and physical assessments etc as happens for live familial or altruistic live donor donation before the proposed surrogate embarked on the process, together with comprehensive life insurance and critical illness policies taken out in case she died or was injured in the process.
In fact prudence would dictate commitment to meeting ongoing medical costs for the types of post birth injury that afflict many women not just in the period immediately after birth, but in the years afterwards up to and including menopause.
The NHS does not offer the type of treatment that other countries do for this kind of thing eg very little availability of post birth physiotherapist unless you pay privately.
This strict process would be all ten more desirable because presumably a move away from the ban on commercial surrogacy would logically lead to the possibility of paid for kidneys etc - why not. It is no different

"I personally feel that surrogacy should be treated in a fashion similar to living organ donation with caveats around the surrogate and recipient having an established relationship (eg partners, relatives or very close well established friends).
"

But a close friend or family member would also be in more of a position to use covertly coercive tactics to induce someone to become a surrogate: guilt-tripping, withdrawal of financial and emotional support if the person won't be a surrogate, the threat of destroying the family goodwill the unwilling woman if she declines to provide a sibling a much-wanted baby (e.g. a parent could freeze out a woman who declines to be a surrogate to provide a baby for her "golden child" sister) and so on.

@aloris

The same is true of living organ donation and that's why safeguards are in place, including I believe confidential psychological assessment and exploring whether coercion is present. So I think those same safeguards can and should be applied to surrogacy. You would not say that relatives shouldn't be allowed to provide bone marrow or a kidney, liver lobe, lung lobe for example but the exact same concerns exist. Some of these procedures also carry significant risks for the donor. At the moment it feels as though surrogacy has significantly fewer safeguards than living organ donation and that's something which concerns me.