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

Ineedacupofteadesperately, yy to everything you wrote. I'm glad you had a happy ending

MiniMum97, why? How can you or others convince us we're all wrong?

I'm guessing you know you can't, so don't even try to put one thing forward except a generalised wishy-washy emotive "you don't know what it's like". And actually I do, so what's your next defence?

I am implacably opposed to surrogacy in all cases.
But this review that Dustin Lance Black has worked to hard to contribute to is all about making it "easier" "safer" (for commissioning parents" in the UK.
I'm really concerned about it.

I recommend listening to his radio 5 (bbc) programmes about it. There are six episodes in total. Here is a link to the first.

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p06ttwct

An article by Jennifer Lahl about the types of contracts that are used in the USA, that these campaigners wish to bring to the UK.

www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/11/20390/

I agree surrogacy should be banned. Babies should not be for sale.

Kepeka how would you feeling you found out the parents that raised you had ripped you screaming from the woman who had grown you in her body for 9 months and just given birth to you, while she cried as her breast leaked milk her body was providing for you? You give a lot of weight to DNA, have you considered that all the DNA in millions of cells your body as a newborn would be created from your mother's body, just following a pattern set by that first few cells donated by the genetic parents? They provide the the knitting pattern but she provided the wool and did all the knitting

And whilst I don't want to pick on any particular person, nonetheless the rising demand from transitioners who have given up their own fertility and have a casual belief in their absolute right to expect another woman to carry a baby for them, without a thought about what this is asking of the woman is concerning. Entitlement and thoughtlessness all wrapped up. Not to mention the number of gay couples who clearly see women as nothing more than breeding cows.

It also concerns me greatly that one hardly ever sees any consideration given to the egg donor. I think many people see it as no different to sperm donation. Not understanding the unpleasant and potentially risky nature of the medical process of obtaining those eggs.

Only a couple of weeks ago I had dealings with a young woman who had ended up in ICU as a result of complications of the egg collection procedure. (For her own use).

I am also greatly concerned at the costs that will fall to the nhs and the taxpayer as a result of all this. Whilst fertility treatment is strictly rationed in the nhs, egg donors needing icu will be publicly funded. The surrogate's medical care will fall to the nhs, just as if she was pregnant with her own baby.
Working surrogates are entitled to maternity leave in the same way as if she was pregnant with her own baby - someone commented on another thread about meeting a teacher whilst on holiday, who was treating her family to a nice holiday as a reward after she had been a surrogate, whilst on maternity leave from her work. So employers can expect to be picking up bills for this too.

There is far more to this than the basic contract and fees to the surrogate that are mostly talked about.

But what right does a woman have over the child when the parents haven’t surrendered their rights (in the way that they do when putting a child up for adoption or donating sperm/ova)? If surrogacy is going to be permitted it’s perverse to allow the surrogate to claim the child as her own.

@Pumpkin314 that’s quite melodramatic. I never understood why people feel the need to manipulate emotions in anarguement. It doesn’t work except for very irrational people anyway and their options don’t tend to carry any weight for the obvious reasons. Your argument that the baby is created using the surrogate’s resources on the other hand is far more interesting. Would you like to expand on that?

In principle I wouldn't expect feelings of rejection coming from surrogacy, because the baby was created out of love, and gestated by the surrogate on behalf of the intended parents.
But there are many models to surrogacy and some involve contact between the child and their birth mother e.g. surrogacy by a sister of one of the IPs, known surrogate who remains in the child's life, male IP(s) who acknowledge that the child does have a mother.
So if you are a child of surrogacy who does NOT see their birth mother, how can you help but feel rejected (and/or betrayed by your parents who won't let you see your birth mother)?

I know, I was being deliberately melodramatic in response to kapeka's post that she would be horrified to find out her mother had 'stolen' her if she was in fact a surrogate that decided to keep the baby she had given birth to. And to be honest though I agree it's hardly the way to win an debate, I don't know how people imagine it would go down if a surrogate changed her mind and was legally compelled to hand over her child. What would they do if she said no?

I am fortunate enough to have children who are in every sense my own. Of the things that connect us (genetics, gestation, birth, care-giving) I would say genetics is the least important

it’s perverse to allow the surrogate to claim the child as her own

It's in her body.
She created it with her body.
She can stop creating it if she wishes.
Of course it's hers.

And if she doesn't freely relinquish her rights - in an entirely uncoerced way - taking her baby is as obscene and inhumane as taking any woman's baby from her.

We cannot grant third party rights to people over women, their bodies, their organs, or the children those women make. Children are not property, or gifts, or products, or transactions.

What the fuck are we doing here?

The only possible way for it to NOT be her child, is for us to write laws that reduce female people to breeding stock, and their children inside their bodies to be property of third parties, whilst the women do not have basic human rights.

I cannot comprehend how someone can look at a pregnant woman as an entire person, yet believe she has no rights to the baby inside her that she is making.
Is she as free as a man, to leave a country, make a life, do as she wishes with her own body?
Or does somebody other than her own the baby in her womb, and by proxy, her, until that baby has been taken from her?

Your argument that the baby is created using the surrogate’s resources on the other hand is far more interesting. Would you like to expand on that?

It's obvious isn't it? Read a biology book. Women are not incubators. The foetus develops inside its mother.

Of the things that connect us (genetics, gestation, birth, care-giving) I would say genetics is the least important
See, my DCs would disagree with you.
DS has massive, obvious influences on him from his birth mum's genetics, and likely gestation. Also fairly likely his birth dad, especially looks but some other things too. He has SEN of a kind that runs through and through his birth mum's family.
DD undoubtedly gets her looks from her birth dad's family but also seems to have some mild SEN that are also likely from birth family.
It's really easy to dismiss all of these factors. They all matter hugely.

@drsspouse yes I agree genetics affects us but I was more referring to what connects us as parent and child, does the effects of your children's genetic make up make their birth parents more their 'real' parents than you? I would certainly say not.

“If a lot of surrogate mothers change their minds, that's surely an argument against changing the law to rip newborns from them. It suggests surrogacy can be a really problematic experience. It doesn't tell me that the law should be strengthened to make sure they can't keep their babies.”

I agree with this. I find the idea of changing laws to make it easier to take babies away from those who have just carried and gave birth to them to be..problematic at best.

I never used to think much of surrogacy but these days, the more I think/read about it, the more I am against it. I still do think I might possibly do it if say, my sister was infertile and desperate for a child, I might do it for her. But when its about strangers, and the way some will literally rent a womb, pay for this pay for that and some seem to expect to be able to control the woman too, tell them what to eat, and so on. Its just awful when I think deeply about it besides the vision of, wel a woman deciding to help someone have a baby. So simple on fitrst thoughts, but much more sinister the more I think and when I read of how it goes down sometimes. Then hearing there is a proposal to change laws to make it easier to just take babies from the people who birthed them..its all so dodgy and something I think on the whole I disagree with.

And bollocks to the 'taking away a womans choice, much feminism!' croewd. Same lot who yell about choice and such when it comes to sex work rather than looking at the bigger picture.

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.
And this, I find just pure vile to be quite honest. As if its a womans fault is she miscarries. any 'fee' should be paid regardless of result I would say. Though even discussing money changing hands and basically renting a woman..makes me feel a bit ill.

I used to be very pro surrogacy. I watched documentaries and read articles where women had babies for their friends and their sisters, and thought how wonderful and selfless they were.

This movement to industrialise surrogacy and turn women into nothing more than incubators, is sinister and terrifying. Many things can go wrong during childbearing and birth, and it's the woman who will have to live with the consequences.

What happens if a child is born disabled or if the adoptive parents change their minds, or indeed both?

So many variables. For instance, if a surrogate has never experienced having a child before, how will she know how she's going to feel after she's given birth and seen her child? Her feelings and emotions will be ignored in favour of the 'purchasers' right to claim the baby.

Yep my own thinking has led me to retrace my steps too.

At one point I might have been ambivalent about the infertility process whereby an infertile woman conceives via donor eggs and IVF, because I deemed unequivocally that the mother is the woman who is pregnant.
Even with that, I knew I would never contemplate being an egg donor because I could never relinquish my emotional attachment to a child that was genetically 'of me'. My ethics inform my conclusion that any genetic mother MUST, by necessity, cede parental rights to the actual pregnant mother, and yet this contrived situation would be intolerable to me personally.
And that leads me to another dilemma.
The dad.
Hypothetically, every father that exists is simply a genetic donor of sperm. Just like an egg donor, he doesn't actually make the baby, isn't pregnant. Yet don't we go to considerable lengths to allow him to claim parental rights, even if he didn't intentionally father a child?
So isn't it weird that an egg donor has no rights (which I think is as it should be, because a pregnant woman has primacy) but in normal circumstances every sperm donor - as in your average dad who simply provides sperm even as a one night stand can claim rights?

It seems to me that during the medical IVF egg/sperm donation procedure there is a tacit severance of genetic egg donor parental rights in order to ensure she has no claim over the pregnant mother, her body or her baby she creates. It's a necessity.

And my discomfort with this process was something I suppressed because I fundamentally believe you CANNOT sever the rights of a woman over the baby in her own womb.

But now we have the opposite situation.
A contrivance to sever the pregnant woman's rights, in some cases to reassign them to the egg donor, but more often to sever the rights of ALL women involved in the process of creating a child from their bodies, either their ovaries, or their uterus.

And it occurs to me that no matter how contradictory these principles, there is an underlying principle which disturbs me to my core.
Women create a child. Men do not.
But men may sever those women's rights to those children, and to their own bodies, in whichever way men choose.

And I think we've lost the checks and measures of ethical process over the last 20 years. And where once we might create tightly controlled exceptions that were understood to be watertight, we've mutated into a consumer-led, clickbaity society where ethics takes a back seat to popular zeitgeist.

I no longer believe we as a society should use medical procedures to create children in any woman that are not from her own eggs.

We have proved incapable of keeping a finger in the dam. We need to plug the hole permanently.

does the effects of your children's genetic make up make their birth parents more their 'real' parents than you?
We are all real, nobody is fake.

Maybe I'm being optimistic, but I wonder if tougher laws meaning less rights for the birth mother will make some women reluctant to become surrogates? I really hope so.

According to the Law commission surrogates want these changes too.

It may stop women who are not yet surrogates from going down that path. I guess all we can do is hope.

Are there surveys of the people who were born from surrogacy, I wonder? They weren’t surveyed as part of putting together these proposals, from what I can see.

Someone really should carry out a study.

I read this article last year and it struck a chord.

"The law on surrogacy now treats the birth mother as little more than a vessel – and that is inhumane."

I heard someone (a female lawyer) give a paper on this and it made me very uncomfortable.

Partly because she very much minimised the ethical issues of exploitation and commodification which clearly became apparent in countries like India as something which could not happen here. Her rather rose-tinted view was that women here would enter surrogacy fully informed, fully consenting and not coerced in any way, because that is how it is in Britain... (much the same as no women are ever coerced into prostitution...)

Partly she gave no consideration of the rights of the child to stay with the person who carried him/her. None at all. Her discussion of child welfare was around the lack of clarity about legal parentage from birth (because a baby is going to know this )

She talked about the need for and right to have a child. I realise this is difficult territory but no-one has the right to have a child, do they? No-one needs to have their own child to the extent of putting another woman in a life-threatening situation.

Partly because my experience of family law is so jaded that I think this is simply another opportunity for lawyers to make money.

It was all too much ‘move along folks, nothing to see here’.