The Rumplestiltskin Law

[Barracker]

There is a consultation happening regarding surrogacy.

Here is a link to the Law Commission on the subject.

It's key aim is horrifying.
To sever all rights of a woman over the child she has created with her body, the moment she gives birth to it. Presumably, to sever her rights before she gives birth, in fact. To contractually grant someone else ownership of her body and the child within it.

"Creating a new surrogacy pathway that will allow, in many cases, the intended parents to be the legal parents of the child from the moment of birth."

I'm calling it what it is. The Rumplestiltskin Clause.

I'm taking your child, and there's nothing you can do about it. A deal is a deal. Your body is mine. Your human rights were forfeit when you signed the contract.

It's the stuff of nightmarish fairytales.
Rumplestiltskin was not the good guy.

#TheRumplestiltskinLaw

Rumplestilskin is a Grimm brothers' fairy tale. The fairy tales they produced are not pretty, Disney types. Take other examples: Snow White, Rapunzel, and Hansel and Gretel. However my favourite was The Three Little Elves, though I did wonder why they were just happy with new clothes and shoes whilst the Shoemaker and His Wife enjoyed the luxuries.

Newborns know their gestational mothers by sound and smell, this has been proven. There are several books that suggest that babies don't see themselves as separate from their (gestational) mother until quite a while after they're born. Everyone was up in arms (rightly) about Trump separating parents and their kids at the US border - if that's wrong, how can separating a vulnerable newborn from their mother be right?

Children aren't possessions. No-one has the right to a child. Rich people should not be able to buy kidneys, livers, bodily organs, nor should they be able to buy babies.

All the 'what if' scenarios. Just ban it, it's not possible to legislate to prevent abuse and harm in this situation and surrogacy isn't necessary, it's about wants not needs. Not everyone can have children. That is very sad, but it is part of life and plenty of people throughout history have managed to have a worthwhile life even if childless not by choice. Adoption is an option (I know it's not for all, but it is an option nonetheless).

Lorit particularly appreciate your thoughts. I too was infertile, I too was suicidal as a result, I did end up having children. I know I'm lucky. I would never have ripped a baby from it's mother so I could have one, what sort of parent would I be if I'd do that to a child?

The importance of the biological link between the gestational mother and the child is something that there seems to be an attack on. Lots and lots of minimising. I guess some people don't like nature, but the reality of it can't be denied. Newborns know their mothers, know the woman they've grown inside for 9 months, by sound and smell (at the very least) and denying them that comfort and connection and sense of safety because of some adult's wants is just cruelty.

And I don't care if some women would willingly do it without being coerced (do we see lots of rich women lining up? Thought not). They don't have the right to do this to a child either.

Can she then be sued for not completing the contract or even destruction of their property?

Presuming the mother is of low financial means, could they sue her to go through another pregnancy to seal the deal?

It is noticeable that surrogacy is not something that well off women are typically volunteering to do, so these poorer women would be proportionately much more likely not to be able to pay reparations in a legal case. I hadn’t thought of payment ‘in kind’.

If a mother can hand a baby over to commissioning parents without any feelings of uncertainty, why wouldn't they be able to do the same with social services?

It will be very rare that a newborn is handed over to social services. It happens; it has to happen in some cases.

In the UK you can't pre-arrange an adoption, so there is no possibility of adopting parents being on stand by.

Legally if a woman is determined she does not want her baby she can't be forced to keep it. It's very rare but women do occasionally walk out of hospital without their baby. The usual rules about freeing the baby up for adoption will apply.

It's rare, not very rare.

In the UK you can pre-arrange the handing over of a new born baby.

In the UK a woman cannot abandon her baby or children without legal redress. A father can walk out of a baby unit without any censure.

I agree with barracker and Floral.
Women do not “host” a baby not genetically linked to them, within their uterus. They grow that entire baby from a scrap of genetic material.
There is a trend to deliberately choose a different egg donor to mother, to try and break that bond between mother and child. I find that so disgusting and disturbing. We are moving more and more towards a world where women are still penalised for their biology, yet their unique ability to grow a child is not respected.
Surrogacy should be illegal full stop. You can’t buy a kidney, you shouldn’t be able to buy a baby. It is a horrible trade in women’s bodies, with a tiny baby included, who is not given the choice to stay with the person they most want to be with, their mother. Barbaric.

Can she be sued? Yes she sure can in the US for breach of contract.

And yet women in the USA are no longer able to have abortions post 6 weeks in many states albeit subject to Roe V Wade in the Supreme Courts.

Presuming that along the line, once pregnant, the 'host' will be subject to a contract between her and the foetus.

Presuming that if unable to make that payment, the result is prison.

I agree @SirVixofVixHall

If it's illegal to buy kidneys or any other organs, then how on earth is surrogacy legal. Beggars belief.

Payment for being a surrogate
We think it must also be the case that any fee payable to the surrogate could not be dependent on the pregnancy resulting in a live birth. Therefore, the fee would be payable even where the child is stillborn. More difficult is whether a fixed fee would be payable following a miscarriage or termination.

We take the view that for payment to be linked to the child being born alive would be incompatible with the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (“UNCRC”).19 We invite consultees’ views as to whether any fee being paid to the surrogate for her services should be able to be reduced in the event of a miscarriage or termination and, if so, if any reduction should be confined to the case of a miscarriage or termination in the early stages of pregnancy.

Jesus Christ

Payment on results

No cases have reached that level in our courts but I’ve read plenty of surrogate contracts American women sign and the language is awful. I often say it reads like a slave contract. We bought and own you for the next 9 months and you better obey, or else.

*Advertising in respect of surrogacy
Advertising in respect of surrogacy
We provisionally propose to remove the ban on advertising surrogacy arrangements with the effect that anything that can be lawfully done with respect to a surrogacy arrangement can be advertised. Information on international surrogacy arrangements is accessible on the internet. If domestic surrogacy is to be regulated and facilitated in such a way as to increase its attraction compared to the international surrogacy arrangements, then it must be possible to convey that message freely and to provide information to those that need it.

^^ I am relatively sure those are genuine US adverts although they are so i cannot be sure...

Rich people should not be able to buy kidneys, livers, bodily organs, nor should they be able to buy babies.

Exactly - if I'm not even able to buy/sell a small part of a human, I definitely shouldn't be able to buy/sell a whole human.

we changed our mind because the baby was born disabled

This chills me to my core. These are children we are talking about not picknmix, not a washing machine, human beings. If there is an injury at 6 months old resulting in life long disability do those purchasers get to return the child as long as they kept the receipt?

Transactions are conditional.

Parenting is not conditional.

Surrogacy is slavery.

Sell one woman you sell them all.

Sell one baby you sell them all.

There are women being trafficked to provide surrogate babies, they are dying and imprisoned.

The fourth trimester exists.

Perhaps instead of trying to restrict opinion to those who would lower themselves to abuse via a surrogacy arrangement (because it is abuse), the opinions that should count are those of parents. The people (particularly mothers) who having lived the process of gestation and birth and understand the enormous responsibility, the closeness to death that bringing life entails.

Surrogacy is slavery.

Surrogacy should be banned.

Here’s a great quote from Martha Gill’s opinion piece in The Times today.

I briefly followed an “independent surrogate” on social media. My understanding of “independent” was that the whole process was completely underground - she finds her intended parents online; the man comes to her house to provide a sperm sample; she inseminates herself; she relinquishes her child at birth.

I, needless to say, found it all impossible to get my head around. All that because it makes you feel good to gift people a baby? Suffering all the worst parts of pregnancy, labour, third degree tears and weeks/months of recovery... all for the warm fuzzy feeling and an undisclosed sum? That’s not a fair swap. “Sacrificing their health to please strangers” indeed.

Are the Times actually the only sane news source now? Those adverts and the question on payment in the event of miscarriage made me feel sick!

Here’s the link for the Times article:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/surrogacy-must-be-a-gift-not-a-baby-market-clk9r26n9

Very powerful article in the Guardian..
Catherine Bennett

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/09/who-better-than-men-to-rule-on-delicate-subject-of-surrogacy-law-commission

Great Guardian article. I like this line
Unaccountably, affluent women almost never seem to have babies for very poor couples

Yes, it's such a mystery isn't it.

If surrogacy is legal then trade in organs should be legal because surrogacy is definitely worse than selling a kidney. After all, healthy adults have two of those, the operation and recovery takes a lot less than 9 months and - crucially - it doesn't involve selling babies.

Catherine Bennett is excellent - a rare voice of sanity on women's issues in the Guardian/Observer universe.

The whole thing is horrifying. One of the worst aspects for me is this idea that the right of gay men to have children is more important than the right of women not to have their bodies commoditised. Because once again, those of us who say that that is wrong are liable to be accused of being bigots.

Agree re CB
mobile.twitter.com/bennett_c_?lang=en

Perhaps you should all actually read the paper, talk to some people who have been through the experience and then make up your minds. Educate yourself before forming an opinion.

That Catherine Bennet article is brilliant.

The law commission is made up of 6 men. No women.
Deciding upon the proper remuneration should that woman lose her own uterus during the course of providing a child to others. And deciding that she probably should have a few pennies more during her last trimester for food. You know, so that she can make the baby nice and cute and fat.
Deciding whether to sever her rights to the child she created completely just in case her mothering instincts become inconvenient for the purchaser.

All men. Making this decision.

I'm scared. I had told myself the UK weren't as likely to slip into their own version of the Handmaid's Tale as the US.
But there will be millions chucked at advertising this.

It feels like battles are on all fronts now.

Perhaps you should assume we already have, Minimum97.

And even if a poster hasn't, the answer to the question of whether people's body's can be farmed out like animals, doesn't lie with the people who have already done it and survived the experience unbroken.

The answer lies with every person who has been irrevocably damaged by this, and every person who has a similarly farmable body, and every child born from such an arrangement grown up never knowing for sure if their birth mother was exploited for her poverty or her kindness.

I get a say in whether my female body is marked as potential farm stock by men. Just as I say if any woman can be returned to being legal property of a man.

And I say I will object until no woman ever is property or breeding stock.