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

www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/05/15037/

Stop Surrogacy Now is an organisation that has people across the political and religious spectrum united against the exploitation of women.

It is no coincidence that as other countries are outlawing surrogacy because of the dawning realisation that women are being exploited, the market in the UK is looking to increase availability of British wombs to rent.

Supply is drying up abroad as countries successively protect women's rights, so we must exploit homegrown women instead.

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.

This exactly summarises my feelings on this and so many other issues as well. I used to be so liberal minded and "progressive" about these things, but now I think that humans just don't have the capability to do certain things responsibly. We're such an "all or nothing" species, either it's forbidden completely, or we'll take it to it's most terrible extreme just because we can. There's no sense of moderation at all.

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

Also this. It's not just about individuals and their needs. No one lives in a vacuum. A society that allows (and worse, advertises!) surrogacy is a society that harms all women. I don't want my daughter growing up seeing billboards selling women's bodies.

I'm really confused. I thought the whole point of surrogacy is that the woman is carrying a child for other parents.
Surely a law giving the intended parents full rights from the off stops any back tracking last minute which causes hurt and massive issues for all lives involved?
I mean can you imagine the hurt of having another woman carry your child and last minute she says actually no I'm keeping baby and you have no rights?
I think it's horrendous.

Without this other woman carrying the baby, there would be no baby.

Yes, its horrendous. Buyer beware, eh? Perhaps they should consider that unpleasant consequences await those who buy human beings and women to grow them in, rather than attempting to delete rights from those people that they buy?

Of course it’s horrendous. Buying a baby to order is horrendous. Renting a woman’s body for nine months is a horrendous thing.

Women die giving birth. There are increased risks to the woman’s health through pregnancy and also through IVF and particularly, it seems, with donated eggs.
There does not seem to be much research on the psychological effects on children born into such arrangements.

It's not about the people who want to be parents, and it shouldn't be.

Women don't 'carry' babies.
Babies are not ripe cantaloupe melons hauled around as a favour, and women are not bags for life.

Women make babies. By themsrlves. The entire baby. From scratch. From that microscopic fertilised egg. Created, cell by cell, atom by atom, by that mother. In her womb. From her own body. Every blood cell, every nerve, every organ, every hair, every fingernail. All made, by that mother, from her body, exactly like every mother since forever.

So coy euphemisms like 'carry' can fuck right off and take their deceptive misrepresentation with them. Any woman creating any baby in her womb is that child's mother. Right up until she knowingly, with full capacity and without coercion renounces her maternal rights to her - born - child.

And if there's a necessity to create a law to FORCE an unwilling mother to give up her child, she isn't giving her up. She's having her child stolen from her. And that law is a tacit admission that babies must be prised from unwilling and desperate mothers because they are a contracted product and a deal is a deal, even if it involves the procurement of humans.

A Rumplestiltskin Law indeed.

A nightmare.

Very well put @Barracker

Time will tell what this little girl will think of her commissioning parents/buyers as she grows up and finds out how they treated her mother with such contempt. How terrible for a little girl to be raised by men with so little respect for women.

www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/06/her-name-is-monroe-christine

Great post Barracker. I don't really honestly see the difference between surrogacy (selling a baby) and selling children who are older. What's the difference between selling a baby and selling a 5 year old? Really? It is buying and selling human beings who can't consent.

I've been thinking about this and so went to look for information on what children of sperm donors feel and found this: slate.com/human-interest/2010/06/new-study-shows-sperm-donor-kids-suffer.html

How much more will children born of surrogacy suffer? After all they will have been grown by, and be intimately connected with a mother.
Our species is hardwired to expect certain things after birth, for this connection to continue, for a baby to be taken away from the mother who carried and grew them right after birth is of course going to be a trauma.

The Rumplestiltskin law is the perfect name.
In what civilised society can it be defended to force a mother to hand over her baby to strangers? All over the works Surrogacy is being seen for what it is, a human rights violation. Why is the UK racing towards the inhumane, regressive US model?

What type of anti logic has to be applied to even start to justify the trauma to a baby of separating them from their mother and severing the vital attachment process that every human being has been evolved to need.

Why does money change any of that?

Article in the Mail today about the effect on the NHS of private IVF clinics.

Issues seem to be specifically about the more complex methods of creating then implanting embryos rather than artificial insemination. I would guess as most surrogacy arrangements use donor eggs they fall into the more complex group.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7121593/NHS-spends-120m-year-dealing-problems-linked-private-IVF-clinics.html

I know it will never happen, but I wish that en masse, women would just stop. Stop offering their bodies up for the dangerous process of egg donation, stop offering their bodies up as rentable wombs, stop handing over their children, stop valuing themselves in terms of how self-sacrificial they are, just stop. Stop for their own sakes, stop for the sake of all women, who are then validated as farmable body parts.

If I treat my female body as a product to be bought or rented, and society approves, then all female bodies become potential products to be bought or rented.

I wish women would just voluntarily end supply. But I understand this won't happen. So I'll hope the law can be changed to refuse to allow demand to be met.

Well I agree with everything Barracker says (but so much more eloquently than me).

Also Joan this is spot on

What type of anti logic has to be applied to even start to justify the trauma to a baby of separating them from their mother and severing the vital attachment process that every human being has been evolved to need.

The idea about the woman having bodily autonomy is an interesting one too - if the woman isn't free to change her mind, keep the pregnancy go abroad and start a new life during the pregnancy then actually it's slavery isn't it?

I'm still getting my head round this and I think I've avoided thinking too deeply about it because I feel tremendously lucky to be a mother and enormous sympathy for women who want to be and who can't. But it still seems clear to me that any legislation must be weighted in favour of the surrogate mother. She's the one doing all the work, growing and giving birth to the baby, thereby putting her own health - and even potentially her life - on the line. I think all other risks must be born by the commissioning parents, and yes, that includes the risk that the surrogate might change her mind. And if that's not workable then what that tells me is that legal commercial surrogacy isn't workable.

I think it's bizarre. If the potential parents do change their mind, does this law force them to take the baby anyway? So you'd be leaving a tiny newborn in the arms of complete strangers who don't actually want him? D'you know, I can't imagine what could possibly go wrong

I doubt that prospective adoptive parents change their mind that often, but even once is one too many human lives ruined.

The other way round is so much more likely, after nine (usually interfering) months of contact with the people involved, you might be thinking again about their suitability to be parents. It's one thing saying yes in the abstract and another handing your infant who you've bonded with to two people who you've since discovered something you dislike/hate/fear about them.

No one would force a mum who changed her mind about adoption to go through with it, despite two people being promised a baby. The principles here might seem different ("It's not her egg! She said we could have it!") but biologically it's not that different at all.

It's also noticeable that the language does focus on the rhetoric of parents who can't have their own children, but this isn't true of all people using surrogates. Some women just don't want to do it themselves, and this is just more outsourced labour.

Kapeka. You say. No. If my mother told me today that I was not her genetic child, but was a surrogate baby that she decided to keep, I would be fucking angry because she took me away from my real mum and family.

I think you will find a surprisingly high proportion of surrogate babies are only partially linked, genetically, to the surrogate parents. Surrogate parents can choose to shop for donor eggs and or donor sperm. In these contexts you are attributing family status to those who sell/and or donate their human eggs and sperm...

Who gets to decide who is really Mum in this situations? I would say its the owner of the body who gestated and birthed the child..otherwise you are giving rights and ownership over women's bodies to others.. a bit like the Republication party is gleefully doing in the USA right now..

I doubt that prospective adoptive parents change their mind that often, but even once is one too many human lives ruined

Traditional adoptions break down surprisingly often. It is a tragedy for the child(ren)-rejected all over again

Children are not commodities

Lorit great post. Yes, what if the way the comissioning buyers behave around the surrogate in a way which makes her feel they would be bad parents? That's a really good point.

Another good point is the outsourcing of pregnancy for vanity reasons which is abhorrent on so many levels.

Great piece by Glosswitch in the New Statesman:

www.newstatesman.com/2019/06/proposed-changes-uk-s-surrogacy-laws-risk-creating-patriarchy-20#amp

I’ll copy & paste an extract:

A more liberal approach to surrogacy is liberating – for some. Biological fatherhood is no longer off-limits for men who are not straight. Biological motherhood becomes a possibility for wealthy women who cannot or do not wish to take on the risks of pregnancy and birth.

But what of less privileged women? Is it truly liberating if your only choice is to specialise? If, instead of being a whore in the bedroom, a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen, et cetera, et cetera., you now get to be just one? (Just like in The Handmaid’s Tale – only this time it’s okay because the god is capitalism instead of the boring one from the Bible.)

The proposed changes in law have the potential to exploit economic pressures on potential surrogates and limit the time frame in which these women might reasonably change their minds. They risk re-inscribing rules that dictate who gets to have babies for themselves, and who doesn’t. As such, they could send us back to a far more conservative age, such as the one in which a friend of my mother’s, who gave birth unmarried in the early 1960s, was coerced into giving up her baby for adoption.

This woman still recalls running out of the hospital, through the snow, her slippers soaked, still bleeding, breasts red hot and aching with milk, following the car that took her baby away. She’d changed her mind. It didn’t matter. She didn’t see her daughter again for four decades. However much traditional motherhood is constructed through artifice and sentimentality, the feelings of those who gestate and bear children have been disregarded far too often for us now to insist they can be signed away in advance.

That’s a really powerful description of the brutality of severing a mother from her baby.

How dare a bunch of 6 men decide that this is the fate that British women should be opened up to.

There are so many heart breaking, thought provoking tragic stories linked to on this thread, The stories are so visceral, they’re hard to absorb. It’s the sheer dehumanisation of the individual women and their babies. They are just seen as accessories and chattels.

I agree that surrogacy should be banned. Disgusting practice. I also think that this is where women's rights collide with gay men's rights because gay men and apparently trans people ( who are usually middle class IT guys) too believe they have a right to buy babies from disenfranchised women. I remember some large international organization ( could have been Amnesty international, could have been the UN, I can't be bothered to check) declared that it was a "human right" to have a child, meaning single blokes can now claim they have the "right" to own a baby and so on. It's gross on so many levels, and so many actual birth mothers are not given the money and resources they need to raise their children.