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.

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

This
I think surrogacy should be banned. I don't think there is any ethical argument to support it.

Surrogacy should be banned.

Surrogacy should be banned. You shouldn't be allowed to buy humans, no matter how small they are.

It's illegal to buy a kidney or a bit of a liver and that would save a person's life, there's no reason that a whole human should be legal.

I hesitate to post this, but I will. It's nothing to do with surrogacy, but I note that the paedophile in the Australian/Thailand case called his daughter Pipah. I had a work colleague year ago called Pippa, whose favourite anecdote was that she went to Thailand on holiday, and locals would laugh when she introduced herself, because her name sounded like the colloquial local name for "blowjob". I don't know if this is true, and I hope it isn't, but seeing that poor little girl's name just then reminded me and make me feel a bit sick.

Steven wrote: "Having our girls in NICU was only the very beginning of our long, excruciating nightmare."

That does sound very entitled.

How does it sound entitled?

If this were a straight a couple that had separated it would not be considered ok for the man to just take the newborns away from the mother

The it would not have been surrogacy would it? The LGBT is irrelevant.
What costs? Their poorly newborns were being cared for free of charge by the NHS.

I've read on here often enough about the expenses involved in having a newborn in NICU. Travel, accommodation, not working...

they didn’t go through any miscarriages

Do you say that to any man whose partner has miscarried their child? They still have to go through the loss of the child even if they don't have to go through the physical process.

Some of the things said here are just horrible.

I'm on the fence about surrogacy. It can be a wonderful thing to do for people. The problem arises when there is a financial transaction rather than "altruistic" surrogacy.

A man does not have a right to use a woman uterus to create offspring for him

Does a woman have that right then?

Two tiny newborns here who have been fucked over for life. How horrible.

Nobody, male or female, has the right to demand that another person them a baby.

Can somebody please explain what this human right to have a child is, where it is enshrined in law, and how it manifests itself in everyday reality?

Another one here for feeling surrogacy should be banned. Agree with many comments here.

The question of "demanding" doesn't arise in this case or, so far as I am aware, virtually any other surrogate case. The arrangement just doesn't happen if the surrogate doesn't agree.

create them a baby

I agree with the PP who pointed out that in this one-sided woe is us poor dads vs evil greedy bitch story, I come away feeling disgusted with the men's attitude and the "journalist's" integrity.

This is a write up of a go fund me begging story which seems to have twisted the legal situation in the UK to pull at our purse strings.

1. The UK has commercial surrogacy. Agencies get paid. Lawyers get paid. Councellors get paid. Clinics get paid. The mother gets paid. Babies are commissioned and paid for.

Don't be fooled by the altruistic label.

1. No surrogacy contract is enforceable. The people commissioning a child know this risk from the outset. The mother can legally keep all the money as UK law only allows her to receive money for costs incurred which is not conditional on the baby being handed over.

1. All parental orders currently require going to court. This costs money.

1. No UK court can force a mother (and yes, the woman giving birth to a child is legally its mother under UK law, regardless of whether another woman provided the egg) in a surrogacy agreement to sign the parental order. This is entirely voluntary on her part, gives her the right to change her mind and is also supposed to prevent exploitation in cases where things go wrong.

1. As is the automatic rule that the birth mother's husband is the registered father on the birth certificate. This prevents men from offering their wives up for surrogacy without this having any consequences for them.

1. This is a nightmare scenario for surrogates - being left with an unwell baby intended for someone else. And being stuck with two unwell babies when you needed money to carry them in the first place, is even worse. So this whole story suggests to me that there was a lot more going on than the article tells us.

As for regulating surrogacy. It is regulated in the UK. We have a whole entire law regulating it already. It works exactly as intended.

This story is not an example of an unregulated system, it's an example of people either not understanding the law, raging against the law because they don't like it and/or breaking the law. We don't have enough information to know which of these applies here.

Furthermore, the current system is an attempt to minimise the inherently exploitative nature of surrogacy agreements. The new proposals diminish the rights of mother and child and remove the constraints which attempt to minimise the inherently exploitative exploitative nature of surrogacy agreements. That's what the calls for more/better regulation are supporting - a system that removes even more rights from mothers and children.

Other countries have banned it outright. We should do the same.

Surrogacy treats a woman as a commodity to be rented. Surrogacy treats a child as a commodity to be commissioned and bought. A similar institution that treated human beings as commodities to be bought and sold is slavery. Is slavery alright as long as we regulate it?

I wonder if two eggs were put back?

Sorry embryos

Another one calling for surrogacy to be banned, as it is in most of Europe. Buying and selling babies is abhorrent

Well you can use all the soft words like "arrangement" if you like, but, ultimately, surrogacy is the act of buying and selling a baby, and, as with any contract of sale, the person who has paid for the goods generally will demand them. Here, this I exactly what is happening.

This is not an LGBT issue. This is a women's and children's rights issue. Women are not vessels. Children are not commodities.

Does a woman have that right then?
Surely, the question is about the rights of the child.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child says every child has the right not to be separated from their parents against the child's will and they have the right to know and be cared for by their parents.

The irony, or should I say the misogyny, of our current legal system is that if a woman flees abuse, the courts use the right of the child to force the child to have contact with their father. In surrogacy, suddenly the courts don't care about the child's right to have contact with their mother.

Excellent post CharelyPaley

It's odd, but in every case I've ever read, whether it's surrogacy or 'private adoption', (USA and South Africa), if the mother hands over her baby to the hopeful adopters, she's a selfless angel. If she doesn't, she's an evil, money grubbing, feckless bitch. Every case.

In this case, the mother had just given birth, prematurely to two very sick baby girls. Her baby girls, that she was caring for and possibly providing breast milk for in ICU.

It sounds like the father's expected her to sign over her rights whilst they were still in hospital, presumably meaning that she would no longer have any right to care for them or even visit without the fathers say so.

There seems to be an assumption that once those baby's were out of her body that she should have no further involvement with her very poorly babies. As if she were just a human vending machine.

No concept of what a mother is at all.

Surrogacy should be illegal. No one has the right to buy anyone.

This is why a total ban on commercial surrogacy is a bad idea. There should be very strict regulation requiring clear contracts, a pro longed period of counselling for all parties before conception and beyond and, controlled clinical conception as a requirement for validity to ensure that this counselling is undertaken.

The court clearly thought that it was in the best interests of the children to live with the fathers and not the mother, for what ever reason.
I don't see anywhere in the reporting that she has protested or tried to get custody or shared custody of the children, which under law, she would be able to do.

Haven't read all the thread yet, but it seems from reading the article that the surrogate is also the girls mother? I thought in most same sex surrogate arrangements were third party - were the egg is retrieved from one woman and a second carries the embryos. It's unclear from the article if that was the case.

*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’m sure they didn’t force the women to get pregnant, surrogates choose to have a child for someone else.