I'm considering being a surrogate

[TheTwirlyPoos]

We have two good friends, they are gay.
They are desperate for a baby and I'd love to help them.
I've had two children of my own and am done.
My husband is uncertain and concerned I will become too attached etc.
Where do we start thinking about this?!

Not Mumsnet, honestly! There is a lot of bad feeling about it - mainly to do with commercial surrogacy which this isn't, obviously.

I'd find another website that is a bit more balanced - but do do a lot of reading and considering, it's a huge thing to do.

Commercial surrogacy is morally abhorrent. Surrogacy for friends/relatives adds a whole different dimension to it. How are you going to feel knowing this is your child and you have no say whatsoever over their upbringing. What if they plan to do something you would never allow? What if they separate and the child is then being raised in an environment completely different to the one you imagined. How will your husband and your children really feel knowing you have another child.

Just don't.

I imagine asking others who have been surrogates? Alongside the physical and mental challenges and so on. There's probably a fair amount of medical information available, I'd start with the BMJ.

Have your friends considered adopting? There are children waiting for a good home, though of course that comes with different challenges.

You can go for an egg donor. And not be related to the child.

It is never in the best interests of the child to remove it from its mother immediately after birth. The long-term developmental and emotional damage is irreparable. Sometimes in tragic circumstances it cannot be helped. But to deliberately inflict that on a child is wicked. Surrogacy is always only ever about what adults want and perceive as 'their right' to a child. Personally, I don't think anyone has a 'right' to a child.

If it were two gay guys adopting a puppy, they'd still have to wait 8-12 weeks until it could be humanely separated from its mother. It's insane to me that we will remove human babies from their mothers as soon as they're born and give them to caregivers who are complete strangers to them.

Yes but even then you will have carried that child and there will be a bond.

Why can they not foster and/or adopt? There are thousands of children in the UK without families.

True.
I am not sure it's that easy to adopt though. But most likely easier than doing surrogate.

It's a really kind thought OP, but in my view it's not the sort of thing you can do just to be kind. There are two major issues with it:

1. The physical and emotional impact on you (and your DH, existing children). Obviously pregnancy is inherently risky and there is some research to suggest that surrogate pregnancies are higher risk. Then there's the giving up a baby. I would imagine it is very difficult to predict what impact that would have on you, but it could be massively difficult.
2. The ethical implications for the baby of removing it from its mother at birth and deliberately bringing a baby into the world in order to raise it without a mother. I think removing the baby from you at birth would be traumatic for it. I know some surrogate-born children who are now in their early teens and who really struggle with not having a mother. The same ethical implications are there for single or gay women who use a sperm donor but I think culturally being raised without a mother is slightly different to being raised without a father.

Obviously you have to weigh these things up for yourself but it's not something I would ever consider. I am fully in favour of men who don't have female partners adopting or raising children in a co-parenting relationship with the mother. Neither of these routes involves deliberately conceiving a baby that is removed from its mother.

Well, you have two children already. You are in a good place to know what it would be like to grow this child in your womb for 9 months, talk and sing to them, dislodge a foot from under your ribs, feel them hiccup, give birth to that child, stroke their cheek and let them grip your finger with their tiny hand and then...you know, hand them over to someone else like you'd just finished a shift at work.

Do you know that your risk of severe maternal health complications in a surrogacy pregnance is triple the risk in a naturally conceived pregnancy. Are you prepared for a 1 in 13 chance of severe health complications. What would be the impact on your husband and children if you were to die?

Really really think carefully about the reasons you want to do this, and at every turn ask yourself ‘is it in the child’s best interests?’

How would you feel if you fell out with them and never saw the baby you’d brought into the world again?

This.

I think gay people can be great parents (I know several) but surrogacy isn't the way. Even though in theory the woman can choose to put themselves in the position of breaking attachment with the baby, the baby cannot choose. It is the planning of a traumatic loss of the relationship with it's mother, ignoring all we know about babies in utero, the 3rd and 4th trimesters etc. You probably learnt a little about that in your antenatal classes?

I know from experience that even babies adopted very young are affected by that initial trauma. But at least adoption involves making the best possible future for a child when the trauma has already happened, rather than planning the trauma to happen.

How old are your children op? Id think carefully about the effect it may have on them. Pregnancy and childbirth can leave you with lifelong injuries and can even kill you.

The fact that you say they are both good friends of yours could be a problem. Will you see them and the baby regularily, how will your kids feel seeing it? What happens if they split up and get new partners that may not be so invested in the baby, or are crap parents?

Goodness me. That was a long time ago!

This creates huge complications for the woman and the pregnancy, no genetic link to the fetus makes carrying the pregnancy to term very difficult, aside from reducing the woman to an incubator only

Yes, much riskier for the baby and the mother.

I mean it literally makes you shudder doesn't it. Like the kind of thing you see in a sci-fi film and are able to reassure yourself that at least it doesn't happen in real life...until it does.

OP what happens if the child is born with a significant disability/illness that will mean a need for life-long care - will your friends be so desperate for the not-so-perfect child and will they be willing to give up their lives to care for it or do you think you would be 'left holding the baby'?

Oh mate. Don't do it.

Before the 'longing for a third baby' thing I was going to say:

Is it in the best interest of your existing kids (IMO no, obviously - treatment if IVF or donor egg can be traumatic & emotional, potential significant long lasting harm to you from the birth, potential impact on your MH, feelings of kids involved)
And if not, why would your friend's desires trump your own kid's well being?

But the third baby thing kind of answers that 😢

I hope you're okay.

And yet it is done. A friend did an pregnancy without complications with a donor egg.
It was their own child though. She didn't produce eggs.