Commercial surrogacy

[53rdWay]

It looks from the Tom Daley threads like a lot of people weren't aware of what commercial surrogacy is or why any feminists would have a problem with it, or both. So I thought it'd be useful to share some links I've found informative about the issue. Please share others!

Katha Pollitt: The Strange Case of Baby M (this is from 1998, and it is brilliant. "Goods can be distributed according to ability to pay or need. People can’t.")

Julie Bindel: Commercial surrogacy breeds exploitation, abuse and misery

Julie Bindel again: India's surrogacy clinics

Katja Ekis Ekman: All surrogacy is exploitation - the world should follow Sweden's ban

Regula Staempfli: Surrogate motherhood is not work, it is exploitation

Glosswitch/Victoria Smith: The feminist history of surrogacy: should pregnancy give a woman rights over a baby?

Thanks OP. This is an area where I can feel my opinion changing as I begin to locate it as an issue related to the rights of women and especially children. With a v possibly gay DC I had been all for it in an unthinking kind of way.

There's a growing body of research on the importance of the environment in utero including that the baby begins to be attached to its mother from before birth. They come out preferring their mother's voices for instance. (I love that people manage to conduct experiments around this kind of thing!)

No problem at all with the idea of gay parents, obviously great if they can adopt but I know that's hard currently. Could getting used to shaping families differently work? Gay parents joining forces with lesbian parents for example or with single women who were choosing to go it alone? Does the hetero model have to be only way?

I was all in favour of surrogacy, having gay relatives, until a family member adopted a baby, and I did a lot of reading of early trauma.
There is, I'm told, fairly robust evidence to say that removing a baby from its mother is a pretty severe trauma. No matter how young the baby. And should only be done in the child's best interests.
And then I became a mother myself and saw how much my newborn KNEW me, and preferred me over others.
And then I happened across an article about surrogates in India and how they are treated.
And I'm now wholly against surrogacy, except maybe within a close knit family. Maybe.

I think to be anti surrogacy one needs to have read around it, as the instinct is to go "aww, how lovely".

I'm going to add a link about how poor mothers are being exploited for their breast milk. I remember being constantly thirsty and hungry when I breast fed. Women in the UK can expect their employer to provide them with somewhere to lie down and rest when they are breast feeding. But these breast milk farms just provide women with tables and chairs, and their own babies appear to be going hungry.

An Example of Capitalism Literally Milking the Poor
www.stopsurrogacynow.com/an-example-of-capitalism-literally-milking-the-poor/#sthash.Xf6VYecR.dpbs

I don't know, my instinct is to think about the poor mother, carrying the child for nine months and giving birth, knowing all the while she'll have to hand it over and be completely erased from its life.

The birth announcement that made no mention of the mother was quite chilling, I found.

Interesting article on a little discussed impact of pregnancy on a woman's body - microchimerism.

Microchimerism can get especially complex when a mother has multiple pregnancies. The mother’s body accumulates cells from each baby—and potentially functions as a reservoir, transferring cells from the older sibling into the younger one and forming more elaborate microchimeras. The presence of fetal cells in the mother’s body could even regulate how soon she can get pregnant again

www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/babys-cells-can-manipulate-moms-body-decades-180956493/

Thank you for posting the links. We were living in a town here in New Jersey USA with a relatively high number of same sex couples who had DC either via adoption or by using surrogates and/or donated sperm or eggs. Before I became a mother myself I never appreciated the bond I would have with my children and how DH had and has such a different relationship because he didn't grow them.

I have become quite conservative with this area and I believe homo/heterosexual should not be allowed to procreate with donated gamates or use surrogates beyond a close family member or friend with zero money involved.

It upsets me that others have thought I'm homophobic when I'm very supportive of equal rights. What many don't understand is that becoming a parent isn't a right but a privilege.

I don't feel comfortable with commercial surrogacy but maybe that is because I am financially comfortable and could afford not to be paid when I carried surrogate pregnancies. Each of the children I carried are in or nearly in their teens now and show no signs of trauma, we did try to be as careful as we could in that their mothers recorded themselves reading stories and I played these recordings to the bumps. We also spent lots of time together during the pregnancies and afterwards and I am still involved in their lives now even as the eldest approaches adulthood.

I would happily do it again if I was medically fit but I have been lucky it has always worked out well for me, I have seen cases when it hasn't.

That's a beautiful story @OddBoots and a wholly unselfish thing you have done.

I agree commercial surrogacy is vile. I disagree wholeheartedly. I don't think it can all be lumped together though. @OddBoots and other surrogates know their circumstances and I find a lot of people who are absolutely against it have absolutely no personal experience of surrogacy. I say personal experience counts for a lot in situations such as these.

Each to their own in this respect. It's easy to say you disagree with surrogacy when you have happy healthy children. That is down to pure luck, the good luck of fertile couples and the bad luck of infertile couples.

Perhaps reading a tiny bit of the Tom Daley thread would mean we don't have to go round in the circle of explaining everything all over again from the point of view of the baby?

I read it, I agree that commercial surrogacy is something that should be eradicated, I know quite a lot about it due to the nature of my career and I'm not disputing that it is exploitative by its very nature.

I simply stated that altruistic surrogacy shouldn't be lumped in and that it should be decided case by case. It's often the people who have the biggest opinions who have never been directly affected by it.

Much like many important issues, living through something is quite different from reading about it.

Ignore the inflammatory headline (seems to have been written by a different author to the article):

Surrogates who kept the baby - www.babygaga.com/15-baby-stealing-surrogates-who-actually-won-in-court/

(Posted the above to demonstrate that carrying a baby isn’t simply being an incubator - birth mothers bond with unborn babies, whether they have a legal ‘right’ to do so or not)

The more I read about commercial surrogacy the more I am against it. It feels akin to selling a kidney to survive. Reading about surrogate mothers in India being treated as dehumanised cheap incubators is heartbreaking.

Surrogacy also seems to ignore that pregnancy can be fatal to the mother and often has lifelong impact on the mothers body.

It is rightly banned in this country.

I do find it odd that commercial surrogacy is being touted by some as a progressive cause at the same time that the TV adaption of the Handmaid’s Tale is really popular. Guess if the exploitative system is capitalism rather than theocracy, we’re just not supposed to complain?

Everything in history was 'progressive' once. The Nazis were hailed as progressive as thats how eugenics were viewed at one time. All progressive means is 'the way in which the future is headed and how things will change'. The politics around that direction can be both liberal minded or authoritarian.

'Progressive' has been distorted into being interpreted as 'liberal' due to people being so used to the future being liberal and because people have become complacent about the influence and strength of authoritarianism at present.

''Progressive' has been distorted into being interpreted as 'liberal' due to people being so used to the future being liberal and because people have become complacent about the influence and strength of authoritarianism at present.'

Excellent point.

Guess if the exploitative system is capitalism rather than theocracy, we’re just not supposed to complain?

That's a brilliant way of putting it.

Thanks for interesting thread OP, will have a proper read later but I agree, a lot of people automatically jump to "awwww, cute" at the thought of surrogacy without really thinking it through.

With a generation of sterilised teens hot on the heels of the gays who seek the use of a woman's body to propagate a baby for them, not to mention the woman who is currently contesting a compensation case with the NHS demanding that the NHS fund not one but FOUR surrogate babies for her there is going to be a massive demand for surrogates in the future.
I wish I could resurrect Huxley for a chat. The future looks bleak.

I recommend listening to Dustin Lance Black's podcasts on surrogacy which are interesting and informative. Sorry I can't copy a link, it doesn't do one for some reason. Search Surrogacy on bbc radio iplayer 5.

And don't let's forget the plight of these Cambodian mothers.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0001bpp

This one's on Radio 4

I've never had children because I've never really wanted to be a mother but I see the whole of commercial surrogacy as completely exploitative. Interesting that there are few women in our own country queueing up to become surrogates through pure altruism but many, many dirt-poor women's bodies being used as mere containers for rich westerners wants.

I had a conversation with my boss last week about this very subject. A touchy one for him because he and his wife have been unable to start a family, and were patently considering the surrogacy route. His view was that women's bodies were already being exploited by being for sale through prostitution so surrogacy was less dangerous and much, much more lucrative. To say I was shocked would be an understatement

Why is every small chink of altruism immediately turned into commercial exploitation? (Rhetorical question)

Bitter that's an interesting justification he has there. It reminded me of this: www.objectnow.org/news/2018/9/20/ten-ways-surrogacy-is-like-prostitution

Surrogacy is the use of a woman's body, and can be a "choice" - but honestly (like prostitution) given female socialization, how much of a choice can it really be?