Gay dads take surrogate to court after she bans them from seeing twin baby girls

[Cwenthryth]

www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/uk-world-news/gay-dads-take-surrogate-court-21231692

This popped up on my Twitter this morning, I thought it might be an interesting case to discuss here. The details are very hazy, and there are two sides to every story, but on the face of it, reading this has challenged my thoughts around surrogacy a bit - poor dads fighting for their daughters sob story, ‘the surrogate’ is painted as manipulative and dishonest. However, I really dislike how the woman is referred to as the men’s surrogate throughout the article, rather than the baby’s mother, or anything in her own right, and there is no regard for the trauma she has been through with a twin pregnancy, premature labour and very very poorly babies. She risked her life to make those girls, we are all very aware how women’s mental health can be severely affected during and after pregnancy. The article doesn’t even reference the children’s point of view/relationship with their mother, ot is all about the gay couple, their wants and their experience.

I don’t really have any conclusions at the moment but wanted to open up a discussion with other FWRers. I think perhaps the current laws are not working as well as they could, reform is probably inevitable and surrogacy isn’t going to be banned entirely any time soon, so needs to be regulated somehow.

the ethics of surrogacy are very dodgy. it is such an enormous thing to do that no amount of money should be used as an inducement.

it's difficult to know the facts of the case from a tabloid article but it looks to me as if these people were trying to circumvent the current law which is that the only payment should be for legitimate expenses, by agreeing a large monthly allowance for the pregnancy. because she gave birth 12 weeks early she only recieved two thirds of the money agreed and felt that she was still owed the rest, whereas the purchasers thought that as she wasn't pregnant any more they didn't owe any more.

I think the law should be tightened up to make it more difficult for people to circumnavigate the ban on payment for surrogacy but the patriarchal arrogance of the people conducting the current review makes me suspect it will go the other way and a capitalist market for renting women's wombs will be legalised and normalised and the emotional and mental health of the exploited women will be studiously ignored because otherwise it is mean to the men.

I haven’t seen anything in the reporting that mentions how the twin pregnancy was achieved. It’s not clear if there was professional involvement like there would be if the woman had had IVF or donor insemination at a doctors office.

If starting the pregnancy took place in private, then what opportunities for counselling and information sharing about risks would there have been for anyone involved?

www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-7857381/Gay-fathers-left-43-000-debt-surrogate-refused-hand-twins.html

Why not? Because they're not the mother? One of them is the biological father.

No, because they weren't pregnant. The way they talk- 'we tried several surrogates over the years but went through miscarriages'

What they actually did was put several women through physical and emotional trauma to fulfil their desires, and it's all about them not the numerous women that went through it.

I just read up that she still would have been entitled to maternity pay but we don't know it she was self employed, wasn't entitled due to earnings/timings etc and also SMP is nothing like a full time wage

They claim in that article that they are both nurses and have spent a lifetime caring for others. You'd assume that's other people, right?

One of them is a nurse at a vet's practice so not quite what they seem to want people to think.

Does she even qualify for maternity leave being a surrogate?

Yes. She gave birth. Maternity leave isn’t just for cuddling. It’s also for the physical recovery from pregnancy and childbirth.

Why not? Because they're not the mother?

Exactly. Miscarriage is the natural termination of a pregnancy. Neither of them were pregnant.

One of them is the biological father.

Irrelevant. They weren’t pregnant.

I know a gay man who wants to be a Dad. I think he would be excellent, but I find the way he talks about surrogates disturbing. It is as if they are nothing more than a fruit machine. I questioned him on this and pointed out that a surrogate is also a mother and he said 'not if we use an egg donor'. He just doesn't get it. The woman who carries a baby for 9 months is legally the mother in this country and, legality aside, her whole body has to change to bring the child into the world. That is not insignificant.

Reading through the lines, these men are inferring that the woman only pretended to want the babies to extort money. It also sounds as if they agrees to pay £17K expenses but only paid £14K. There are good reasons why commercial surrogacy doesn't exist in this country and the arrangements they entered into appear to have slipped over that boundary. The baby is now living with the gay couple and not with their mother and no mention of contact with the mother is mentioned. The commercial surrogacy contract appears to have been given more weight than the current law on surrogacy, which is a worrying sign.

There needs to be clear guidelines as to who the child belongs to

A baby is not a possession.

I also think surrogacy should be banned. No one has a right to have children. The world is already heavily overpopulated.

buying all the essential equipment needed for newborns we were already in minus funds

Well, they had months to prepare for the fact that the surrogate was having twins. And surely they'd worked out costs in advance? You do that if you're having a baby, no?

Agree that them mentioning the fact that they had to drive 3.5 hours to the hospital is very 'poor me' - doesn't really compare to the surrogate mother having to give birth to premature twins, does it? Selfish gits.

In fact, the whole thing is selfish. They show absolutely no compassion for any of the women involved in helping them achieve their dream of parenthood.

We only have their side of the story and it still paints them in a bad light. So I’d definitely love to hear the mother’s side.

So they didn't pay up the full expenses incurred by mother - who had had to take a considerable time off work and incurred related expenses, presumably, for a traumatic premie birth - and they're the victims?

This is why even altruistic surrogacy should be banned. If you don't have enough to cover the surrogate's full expenses if something goes wrong - what then?

What happens when these children grow up and are asking for origin stories so that identity formation is not traumatic? "Oh, your mum had you three months early and it cost her quite a bit of money which we didn't reimburse her for and then we took her to court for trying to make us pay it". Lovely.

They tried several surrogates over the years, but went through miscarriages and failed pregnancy attempts.

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again, eh? Do expenses include mental health care for surrogates who have miscarried?

Babies are not products you can buy. Women's bodies are not hosts you can rent.

I read it as the mother asking for the remainder of the money that had been agreed in advance rather than her asking for additional money. We don't know the facts of the case but it all makes me feel very uncomfortable.

I once commented on here that I thought surrogacy was wrong, that I believed it harmed all women for any of us to be viewed as commodities and that no-one should be able to rent out parts of another person’s body. I may have said I’ll believe surrogacy is an altruistic act when I see rich women carrying babies for poor, infertile couples.

A lesbian poster accused me of homophobia because, she said, surrogacy was the only way gay couples could have a child and I wanted to remove their right to be parents. Hence, I was a homophobe.

So I’ll not bother joining in this time I think.

But her act of changing horses mid-stream is unethical. And here comes the argument "Surrogacy is unethical". Well, this woman should never have agreed to it then. Her body. Her choice and all that. She made a conscious decision, one she was not coerced into, and then changed her mind

Why does the responsibility only fall on her though? If surrogacy is unethical why doesn't that stand for the 'purchasers' too? That if you treat women like walking incubators and humans as commodities to be bought and sold, that is the risk you take and it might not work out for you?

Maybe it should just be accepted that contracts to treat pregnancy, birth and babies as business transactions can't be enforced because it completely ignores the human factor.

I think surrogacy should be banned. I don't think many people necessarily understand the attachment and bond you form with the baby inside of you while pregnant until you've actually gone through it.

I don't mean that no one can understand any part of having a baby without ever being pregnant but that you really cannot understand how the bond forms almost immediately after conception or realisation of pregnancy for many mothers. I believe whoever gives birth has a significant impact on the dc even if they may not be the biological mother ie where a surrogate has an egg implanted. Adoption is the way forward for this scenario or possibly in the future babies bred in a lab but that too makes me horrendously sad to think of as a mother.
Unfortunately there are also some prominent role models out there saying this is ok. It's really not and who knows how 'ready' these surrogates really are when they enter in these legal agreements.

We only have their side of the story and it still paints them in a bad light. So I’d definitely love to hear the mother’s side.

^this.

Exactly. Miscarriage is the natural termination of a pregnancy. Neither of them were pregnant.

So father's aren't affected by miscarriages? They can't be upset or go through trauma?

In every surrogacy situation one of the three parties - the birth mother, the adoptive parents, or the baby - gives up rights, or in the baby’s case has rights removed. Only people who are happy for that to occur support surrogacy. I don’t.

issues with sperm donation

story from child of donor

study showing psychological issues of children conceived using donor sperm

Ultimately, children are not best served by being a commodity. Learning that your very existence is transactional is never going to be a positive thing. The above examples are part of a growing body of evidence that even sperm donor children suffer psychologically.

I know a gay man who wants to be a Dad. I think he would be excellent, but I find the way he talks about surrogates disturbing. It is as if they are nothing more than a fruit machine. I questioned him on this and pointed out that a surrogate is also a mother and he said 'not if we use an egg donor'. He just doesn't get it. The woman who carries a baby for 9 months is legally the mother in this country and, legality aside, her whole body has to change to bring the child into the world. That is not insignificant

I have heard men speak this way as well. They genuinely believe using an egg donor and not the surrogate’s own egg means she has no connection to the child, bar incubating it for them. She is seen as a commodity. They will say nice things about her, but nothing more than you might say about a pleasant Ocado delivery driver. Men (and I include my own DH) have no real clue as to the magnitude of birth. I suppose we can’t expect them to understand. But we can legislate against women being treated as commodities.

I'm getting increasingly uncomfortable with the framing of wishes and feelings as real experience equal and to be treated as objective reality. Such as 'we conceived' and 'we went through a miscarriage'. No, they may have been thrilled by the woman they are using to produce a baby conceiving and very sad that the woman they were using had a miscarriage, but they're inflating their own participation and importance out of all proportion, and that's what leads to the erasure of the real people in the situation, who are truly having those experiences and need to be considered first.

If a mother is unwilling to surrender the child after birth - and this may well happen, because she's not a machine, she's a person, and third hand wishful thinking is nothing like the hard physical reality of experiencing actual pregnancy and birth, no one can forecast how that may affect them or change their thinking - and one of the adoptive parents is the sperm donor, then it should shift straight to the same conditions as any other hetero couple who are not living together.

Legal co parenting, and the reality is with babies and very young children that the primary carer will be the mother with the father's contact gradually increasing until overnights are appropriate. I understand how devastating this may be for parents who have waited for and prepared for their baby to come home, but it's not a tv or a washing machine, mess happens when you play with people's lives.

So father's aren't affected by miscarriages? They can't be upset or go through trauma?

Of course they can. Where did I say they were unaffected? I said they didn’t go through a miscarriage. Which they didn’t. Just like when a woman goes through a horrendous birth- her partner is affected but he didn’t have the horrendous birth.

As a basic rule the biological father should have equal legal rights as the mother to be given hospital updates and visit his children in hospital. I really disagree with the current default legal position that the mother's husband is the legal father. People shouldn't have the right to put whatever they want on the birth certificate - this legal document belongs to the child, and should be an accurate record of their biological parentage.

Initially I thought this was about the surrogate and her boyfriend trying to extort money from the couple, but I'd like to hear her perspective. I do think she has a right to be financially compensated and I also think she should stick to her agreement but that's why surrogacy needs much more state involvement, to ensure everyone gets proper counseling and understands fully what they are agreeing to.
I don't feel comfortable with this thing where the egg comes from one woman, another carries the Pg, sometimes the gay couple don't know who the biological father is either. I think it's denying children a right to know who their biological parents are.

My partner would never say he went through a miscarriage. But then his concern, as well as the loss, was for my welfare. These men don't sound remotely bothered about the 'several' women that went through it.

The figures discussed on that DM link are interesting.

According to Brilliantbeginnings.co.uk, in the US - where commercialised surrogacy is legal - surrogate mothers can be paid $20,000 to $30,000

In the UK, which has an 'altruistic' system, surrogates are paid around £12,000 to £15,000.

These amounts are very similar, once a currency conversion has taken place. So much for the US ‘selling’ women and babies and the U.K.’s ‘Altruistic’ approach.

Ultimately, children are not best served by being a commodity. Learning that your very existence is transactional is never going to be a positive thing.

Exactly. We know the issues with adopted children and birth parents - and adoption is what we'd call a necessary or lesser evil. Something that can't always be helped. Even the children of sperm donors are evidenced to suffer identity issues.

Babies aren't products. Nobody has a "human right" to "own" one.