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.

Or is there the chance that they're going to be brought up by two loving parents who wanted them and love them?

Worth talking to adult adoptees regarding this: there are plenty to be found in forums online who would say that no, this is not of itself enough. Which is why in adoption circles, both of families who have adopted and adult adoptees, you run into the phrase 'when love isn't enough' quite often. If you apply to adopt, in the early stages you're often talked to about 'adoption is nobody's first choice'. Not yours as a parent, not the child's as a child in need of parenting. It is built out of a situation of loss.

In whose interests is it to minimise the loss involved here? I've heard adult adoptees talk about the pressure to provide their adoptive parents with the longed for child to love, and to hide their own loss and grief. The celebrated 'gotcha' day, which for the parents is one of joy and fulfilment, but to the child may be the day of separation from the person they're no longer allowed to know, but carry half the genetic heritage of.

Adoption is at least frank and honest about these issues, and the interests of the child are always paramount. In this situation the child is a thing, the idea of 'commissioning' a child, a person, horrifies me.

I agree, surrogacy should be banned. Having a child (having in this sense starting to mean owning) is not a right.

I prefer the law in the U.K. to the US version. It is a risk but it resides with the couple.

I've missed you Barracker excellent post x

What is a reasonable expense onemorecup?

Anything considered to be making a profit
I probably worded it badly. For -profit surrogacy is banned in the UK.

Yeah I stand by the fact that they've been royally fucked over (no need for little stars we can swear here).

Aside from the difficulties of being born premature, attachment disorder is a real thing.

Being grabbed from your mum and taken up by two random people is never good.

Surrogacy is just intentionally creating an orphan.

Fuck that.

I say that as an infertile woman who tried desperately to have a family and just had miscarriages.

A reasonable expense will depend on the woman's life before the surrogacy, surely. A woman with a highly paid job, a big house with a big mortgage, use of a cleaner or housekeeper, used to weekly/daily exercise, beauty treatments, massages, high cost food bill etc, etc. Why would this woman give these things up because she is carrying a child? If she wouldn't forgo these things to carry her own child, why would she to carry someone else's? She wouldn't. And nobody would want to pay for them. Which is why you won't get rich women being surrogates. You will get poorer women who won't be in a position to negotiate anything other than the bare minimum. If that £17k in eluded IVF expenses, that surrogate mother was receiving very little.

Female empowerment and choices is a bullshit argument. Women with a full set of choices in life don't become surrogates, any more than they become sex workers.

I truly find surrogacy extremely upsetting - for the children even more than the mother. It feels so wrong to actively bring a child into the world only to rip it away from its mother when it needs her the most. (Adoption from birth, while an equally sad situation, is obviously different as I don't think any woman gets pregnant on purpose to then give away a child for adoption).

What hath technology wrought

Being grabbed from your mum and taken up by two random people is never good

Having known children born through surrogacy brought up in loving gay families and children born through surrogacy brought up in loving heterosexual families - and equally having known children brought up by their biological parents in abusive homes - this statement just is not true.

Well, they aren’t ‘random people’. One of them is the child’s biological parent.

Love is not enough

No, love is not enough. They have taken advantage of the woman who was the surrogate, she's been through a horrendous time and all this article says is 'me, me, me'

I think surrogacy should be banned but there needs to be enough funding to address the problems caused by 'black market' surrogacy as the problems exist now and will be even worse if it's made illegal. There will be more abuse of women and of children.

Being grabbed from your mum and taken up by two random people is never good

This is always going to have implications for the children, no matter how loving their childhood they are going to have to deal with the fact that they have been taken from their mother and not brought up by her.

this statement just is not true

Of course it's true. There will always be implications of this no matter how good your subsequent childhood is. They will have to deal with the fact that they were only born because somebody paid for them, with the potential feeling that they were a commodity, feeling like you are owned because you were bought is really going to screw up a child well into adulthood.

They aren’t two random people but I agree that removing a baby from their mother is not good (unless in danger etc).

Those poor twins in the future - seeing that their fathers took their mother through legal proceedings to remove them, haggled over the price and promoted the whole thing on the internet with their photos so that people would donate.

The buying and selling of human beings. Horrendous.

Banning surrogacy is entirely realistic , France Germany and Norway manage fine.

In Germany can face arrest for bringing a child bought from commercial surrogacy abroad back into the country. Not sure how that works practically as the commissioners adopt the child instead before crossing the border to avoid arrest.

If anyone is ambivalent about surrogacy read more about baby Gammy and the child sex offender who 'commissioned' him. That will focus the mind very quickly.

4. 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.

Of course not. However, in a disputed case they are entitled to hold that a child is better off with one parent than the other and make an order accordingly. It doesn't sound as if this mother necessarily had any actual interest in keeping the child.

The 4th trimester is only just starting to be understood and researched.

This stuff really matters, best outcomes for mother and baby are to be together. We used to understand this, mothers were supported by families and "lying in" was the norm. Even when I was born in the 70s mums would be in hospital for 7-10 days.

We knew this stuff matters, but, we didn't value it enough to prove it's worth, and so, we have a situation where the needs of premature babies are being forgotten in the squabbled over cash.

Absolutely disgusting. I agree, those babies are being let down.

www.babycentre.co.uk/a25019365/your-baby-and-the-fourth-trimester

This is why surrogacy (except perhaps in the case of sisters) should be illegal.

There will always be implications of this no matter how good your subsequent childhood is

According to long term studies into the the effects on babies born to surrogate mothers - fears that they will suffer psychological harm are unfounded.

Surrogate babies show no difference in temperament or behaviour compared to non-surrogate babies.

And, interestingly, 90 per cent of families still have good relations with the surrogate mother with no tension or conflict.

I'm too old now but I would have liked to have been a surrogate to a woman who could not have children and I'm not poor or disadvantaged or controlled by evil men by any stretch of the imagination, I'd have chosen to do it myself, with no payment, purely as an altruistic act.

I nearly did but I was in my late forties by then and we decided against it.

Surrogacy should be banned where the mother is using her own eggs. If another woman's eggs are used then the babies really are not hers and she has no right to them.

If anyone is ambivalent about surrogacy read more about baby Gammy and the child sex offender who 'commissioned' him. That will focus the mind very quickly

But abuse isn't limited to children born by surrogacy. Plenty of children are horrifically abused by their biological parents.

FFS pregnant women aren't incubators.
Gestation is an intensive biological process where a woman makes a baby out own body.
Its not just heating up sperm

This is why surrogacy (except perhaps in the case of sisters) should be illegal

Yes but there's an unexpected impact to legislation of this kind.
They recently banned commercial surrogacy in India (although we also have a ban on commercial surrogacy in the UK although reading this thread you'd never know) unless it's through a close family member.

The effect: young females are being coerced and pressurised (with no proper clinical care) into being surrogates for other infertile family members. Result: less choice, less power, less control for women.
Historically, when commercial surrogacy was legal in India, all women concerned had far more control over the situation an could make choices that worked for them.

In India, the women pressured by family members into free surrogacy were already doing that anyway even when commercial international surrogacy was legal.

The multinational huge profit making surrogacy agency suddenly seemed to have noticed them though.

Surrogacy should be banned where the mother is using her own eggs. If another woman's eggs are used then the babies really are not hers and she has no right to them

The woman who gives birth is the legal mother in this country. If the egg and sperm donors are not happy with this, they should go to a less regulated country where it’s easier to rent wombs and purchase babies.

Please remember that women MAKE babies from their own bodies, from their flesh and blood. The egg and the sperm is only the starting point. The only thing that is familiar to a newborn baby is the smell and sound of the woman who gave birth to her/him.

@GlitchStitch
"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"

So couldn't the same be said about any man then? When I had children with my DP was he putting me through potential emotional trauma to fulfill his desires to have children?
Would you say to someone's husband whose wife has had a miscarriage that its not about him, its not allowed to be about him as its the woman that suffers?
The article clearly states that one of the men is the biological father. He has as much right as any parent to be happy/sad/heartbroken about the outcome of any of the pregnancies.

Surrogate babies show no difference in temperament or behaviour compared to non-surrogate babies

Not knowing one's origins may not affect their temperament or behaviour but I suspect, in fact I know, that it affects them in all manner of ways. There is a pressure on children who don't know a parent/parents and who will never have the opportunity to do so, to pretend that they're okay with it. Mustn't hurt the adults who made those life choices for their own good etc. What does it matter if you're only a half sibling when everyone else is full ? What does it matter if you have siblings you known nothing of, a medical history with gaps, no sense of roots or belonging ? Being wanted, even desperately, isn't enough. Being loved isn't enough. Being rejected, in whatever form it takes, scars most children.

We can't justify it by saying that bio parents often hurt their own kids. Surely the standard has to be higher than that ? Children have the right to be created without baggage already being in place. No one should have the right to set up any child to fail. No child should start their life with the prospect that they will never know if the stranger they pass in the street is their father/mother/sibling. No child should start their life being deliberately deprived of either one of their biological parents.

Being infertile can be distressing but we don't make it better by buying babies or women.