In GENERAL terms, all forms of surrogacy, altruistic included, is problematic

[NotBadConsidering]

And requires a woman - adult human female.

MNHQ have made it clear both here and on Twitter that this can be discussed in general terms, with no names being mentioned, even when a person with thousands of followers tweets about it in the public domain.

So please, adhere to the rules and discuss generally why it is an issue. Personally, regardless of the sexuality of the intended parents, even the most altruistic surrogacy arrangement - as in UK law, providing it doesn’t change - is drought with problems. Someone always gives up rights regardless. It’s inevitable. Either the intended parents do during pregnancy, and the mother and child certainly do regardless.

We have strict laws that mean a soon to be born child cannot be removed from a mother unless there are serious concerns for that baby’s welfare, yet in surrogacy, that is always the intention. This is not changed regardless of it being an altruistic arrangement. Nor is the risk to the mother.

And it requires a firm grasp on biological reality to make this happen. Two gametes are required, from one of each of the two sexes. The female sex - which exists despite recent attempts to deny its existence - does all the work and takes the greatest risk in surrogacy, even the most altruistic arrangements. It is therefore baffling how anyone could deny the existence of biological sex knowing this.

So, keeping it general, and not discussing names, please add your thoughts and experiences.

And in advance to those who have previously gone to the effort to discuss their experiences only to see them disappear.

I'm not sure that it is totally impossible to regulate surrogacy in a safe way, just that it is very difficult.

We do manage other forms of altruistic medical donation safely and without exploitation. The most significant are probably kidney or liver donation from a living donor (typically a family member). Kidney/liver donations are major operations for the donor and carry both major risks and an extensive recovery period. This kind of donation has the potential to be harmful and exploitative (and indeed is in other countries), but in the UK is largely managed safely, to ensure that the donor is not being coerced or receiving financial remuneration.

At least at the level of the surrogacy donor, I don't think that it is impossible for strict regulation to enable safe, non-coercive surrogacy (like rorosemary and other posters have mentioned).

However, it's clear that surrogacy as it currently exists both in the UK and abroad does not have appropriate checks at all. There also seems to be a very strong push to cast surrogacy in a contractual, legalistic framework that is shockingly dehumanizing to the woman / women involved in providing the egg and carrying the baby.

There is an Australian case where the baby was born with a disability - Down syndrome or similar - and the "commissioning parents" rejected it.

Third time in 24 hrs I'm posting this.

Pregnancy and childbirth are deadly even in medically advanced countries in the 21st century. Earlier this year a surrogate died in childbirth in the US leaving behind her own young children. That is an abomination.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/20/us/surrogate-mom-dies-trnd/index.html

No two pregnancies are the same, even for the same woman. You have no idea how your body will react until it is too late. I've heard stories on here of women who sailed through their first pregnancy and had severe HG with their second. Ditto for childbirth. My MIL was fine first time round and hemorrhaged with her second - she was close to death and was advised never to have more children. And that was in a private hospital with a private doctor.

If you are asking another woman to put her own health and life at risk so you have a mini-me to play with you are no champion of human rights.

Once money is on the table - and £15k for "expenses" in a country with free healthcare is a fee by any other name - you are outrightly exploiting women.

I hear you InvisibleDragon, but I disagree. Because human organs are not human beings in their own rights. In my opinion, the better comparison is to slavery or prostitution where ownership over a human being or their body parts is granted either permanently or temporarily to another human being.

You cannot regulate slavery so that it isn't a human rights violation. It's not possible. You cannot regulate prostitution so that it isn't a human rights violation. It's not possible. Because the concept is in and of itself a human rights violation.

In the context of surrogacy, even if the mother agrees out of love for the infertile person/s, the human rights of the child are still being violated. Surrogacy turns a human being - the child - into a product that is created solely to either be gifted to another human being or traded to another human being. From the outset, this is a trade in humans. A modern form of human trafficking. No matter the intentions of the adults involved.

@InvisibleDragon

I'm not sure that it is totally impossible to regulate surrogacy in a safe way, just that it is very difficult.

We do manage other forms of altruistic medical donation safely and without exploitation. The most significant are probably kidney or liver donation from a living donor (typically a family member). Kidney/liver donations are major operations for the donor and carry both major risks and an extensive recovery period. This kind of donation has the potential to be harmful and exploitative (and indeed is in other countries), but in the UK is largely managed safely, to ensure that the donor is not being coerced or receiving financial remuneration.

At least at the level of the surrogacy donor, I don't think that it is impossible for strict regulation to enable safe, non-coercive surrogacy (like rorosemary and other posters have mentioned).

However, it's clear that surrogacy as it currently exists both in the UK and abroad does not have appropriate checks at all. There also seems to be a very strong push to cast surrogacy in a contractual, legalistic framework that is shockingly dehumanizing to the woman / women involved in providing the egg and carrying the baby.

An organ is not a sentient being, unlike a baby.

Society has accepted that buying and selling other human beings is wrong - unless the human in question is a newborn and has been ordered in advance. I cannot see how that is any more ethical than selling a 5 year old.

[quote MsJuniper]@witchesaremysisters

If two prostate-owners who hold such views of women want to have a baby together, I ask:
If a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, why couldn't one of the ejaculators just identify as a woman? If sex is immaterial - a matter of semantics "assigned" by a medic - why not ask a doctor to just "re-assign" the sex of one of the ejaculators and mark it as "female"?
Wouldn't that, by these ejaculators' own logic, solve the issue?

I would imagine that their counter to that would be that not all women are fertile, so trans women come under that category. Presumably a woman who has had a hysterectomy or who is otherwise unable to become pregnant would not be chosen for or offer surrogacy services.

I'm not disagreeing with you, by the way, just imagining the response of people I know who are not gender critical. [/quote]
Either biological sex is immutable and materially relevant to an individual's life, or it isn't.

Let's assume both ejaculators are normally fertile. Neither has any issues with their sperm. What the ejaculators actually need is a female person. Now, sex, of course doesn't actually exist according to them. Nor do female people. It's all nebulous and fluid. So one of the ejaculators, being fully fertile, should volunteer to helpfully be "reassigned" by a doctor to be a "female." We will remember that this is an act these same ejaculators have argued means the male is now really quite indistinguishable from biologically female people in all senses and circumstances. The word "female" in healthcare records, for example, shouldn't refer to anything except some nebulous sense of inner self. Physicality doesn't matter. By the logic these ejaculators have been pushing for, they would then be in a "straight" couple, a man and a "woman," neither of them having medically diagnosable infertility issues... both being perfectly fertile. Yet they still wouldn't be able to reproduce.

Why is that? It would seem a slight paradox, no? Is it because actually what the medic "assigned" at birth actually has some relevance? Should we have some fixed concepts and language to denote this sexed materiality?

Sex matters, or it doesn't. Ejaculators can't decide it's of interest only when they want to exploit women themselves, but verboten to acknowledge when women want to talk about their own needs as a sex class, their healthcare, experiences, spaces, sexuality or specific rights. Reproductive differences, women as a sex, aren't some sort of Schrödinger's thought experiment where we exist but simultaneously don't.

Ejaculators cannot have it all ways.

@CharlieParley

I hear you InvisibleDragon, but I disagree. Because human organs are not human beings in their own rights. In my opinion, the better comparison is to slavery or prostitution where ownership over a human being or their body parts is granted either permanently or temporarily to another human being.

You cannot regulate slavery so that it isn't a human rights violation. It's not possible. You cannot regulate prostitution so that it isn't a human rights violation. It's not possible. Because the concept is in and of itself a human rights violation.

In the context of surrogacy, even if the mother agrees out of love for the infertile person/s, the human rights of the child are still being violated. Surrogacy turns a human being - the child - into a product that is created solely to either be gifted to another human being or traded to another human being. From the outset, this is a trade in humans. A modern form of human trafficking. No matter the intentions of the adults involved.

This.

@NotBadConsidering

Whether something is risky or not has absolutely no bearing on whether it is an altruistic act. If I risked my life to save someone who was dangling from a cliff, I might die but the act is still altruistic.

Surrogacy can absolutely be altruistic, if anything the fact that it comes with risks only furthers the altruism of the act.

We are arguing the same point here. The altruistic intention of some surrogacy situations is not in question but that risks are still part of that. It’s the risks that need to be addressed, not how genuinely altruistic the offer is.

It’s impossible to square the rights and risks of all three parties, legally and morally, and that’s without any profit involved. That’s why laws in the UK are currently unenforceable and that’s why countries overseas with laws lead to horrible circumstances.

And this is all in the setting of how some people, generally, can’t even acknowledge that the only people who can perform this altruistic act are called women.

There are some major differences between the type of altruism where someone risk their life to try and save the life of another person and the sort of altruism where a woman carries a baby for someone else.

The woman is risking her long term health, and in some cases her life to try and make someone else happier

Pregnancy is risky, the risks are downplayed so as not to scare prospective mothers who will go ahead anyway.

Harvesting of eggs for ivf carries both short and long term risks to health.

Carrying a baby created using someone's else's egg results in a higher risk pregnancy than otherwise.

Pregnancies of more than one baby (as is often the case with ivf) are higher risk pregnancies.

However unhappy a person is because they do not have children that they would accept a woman putting her life in danger is an incredibly selfish act.

If the surrogacy involves one woman's eggs and another woman's womb it is increasing the risk to two women.

For something that the procurer believes would make them happier

Society has accepted that buying and selling other human beings is wrong - unless the human in question is a newborn and has been ordered in advance. I cannot see how that is any more ethical than selling a 5 year old.

Absolutely.

Must they be ordered in advance? I’m currently pregnant, could I put my newborn on eBay? Why is that different to buying a child through surrogacy?

Sorry if this has been mentioned, but also no woman knows how they will actually feel when it comes to 'handing over' the baby they have given birth to, therefore they cannot fully consent. They can only agree (and in honesty that's not even taking into account those who don't actually have a choice) based on how they think they might feel. You could argue that about anything, but biologically the hormonal, physical and emotional response is extremely complex.

women as a sex, aren't some sort of Schrödinger's thought experiment where we exist but simultaneously don't

This is brilliant and should be quoted to every male who seeks to exploit female bodies whilst denying their material existence.

Separately, I agree that even altruistic surrogacy is problematic as, even if all parties enter into the agreement freely and without financial incentive, it still fails to prevent unnecessary separation trauma for the infant. By failing to acknowledge this trauma, the basic humanity of the child is ignored, reducing him/her to the level of a commodity, regardless of how noble the original intentions might have been.

@NewlyGranny

There is an Australian case where the baby was born with a disability - Down syndrome or similar - and the "commissioning parents" rejected it.

That case is very disturbing and provides a case study for various aspects that can go wrong.

Rather than spell out some of them which while accurate contain some inconveniemt truths I'll post a link to a news story that reports on some of these

www.abc.net.au/news/2014-09-23/baby-gammy-department-knew-of-farnell-child-abuse-convictions/5764388

In altruistic organ donation donating family members get counselling and are allowed to discretely opt out by 'tests showing they are incompatible'

Being blunt I have a real problem with the term "altruistic surrogacy".

Where's the "altruism"?

It certainly isn't toward the child is it who is surely the most important party.

It also confers the sense that surrogacy can be a "good" thing, a positive thing, a kind thing.

That in and of itself puts pressure on woman "to be kind" and be "altruistic" in offering themselves up to act as a surrogate for friends/family.

The sub text is why would a woman not volunteer to help a loved one unless she is unkind or unfeeling?

Lastly it also provides a validation for commercial surrogacy as the base premise is that surrogacy itself is a positive act.

The fact that there is an underpinning commercial contract does not in and of itself make the act any less "noble" and essentially allows agencies to weaponise
their rhetoric in this regard; specifically by obscuring the nature of fees paid as being in lieu of "expenses" thus retaining the myth that the driving motivation of the surrogate is always compassion for the contracting family and not coercion or desperation.

Surrogacy seems an exercise in control designed by and for the people who want to exert their possession over the creation of an infant, both in influencing the genetic material of the baby and the mother.

I see very little generosity, good-will or altruism from the "intended parents;" only a deep and overriding concern to satisfy their own urges. From such a vantage point, it looks narcissistic.

Another way of asking is the question is, how is surrogacy beneficial for women as a sex class? We're the ones taking all the medical risks, dying, our lives & bodies getting contractually controlled & restricted, undergoing invasive procedures/operations/traumatic experiences, seeing laws created where some mothers might get fewer automatic legal rights over their offspring, getting commoditised so children become products and female bodies nothing but wombs and ovaries. We're being indoctrinated that it's a great thing that some mothers shouldn't see themselves as mothers. That women should sacrifice bodies and babies to the "intended parents" if told we should - because it's a human (or financial?) right for those "intended parents" to have a child. Our whole notion of motherhood is being destabilised. What is good in it for women? What's good in it for children?

That some poorer women might get some money and some richer women might be able to buy a baby? That a tiny handful of women might be told by their loved ones that they're being virtuous? That these "intended parents" get what they say they want?

On balance, is it all really worth it?

I agree that there is no moral justification for surrogacy, and 'altruistic' surrogacy is far too open to coercion and exploitation. It should be banned entirely and there should be penalties for people who go overseas to do it.

Can you imagine growing up to be told that the woman who carried you for 9 months and gave birth to you, your birth mother, was just performing a contracted service? The implication that she probably needed the money and didn't have other, more dignified ways of earning it? That she may be from a developing country where the laxer regulatory environment allowed your 'parents' to buy her, and you, more cheaply, and to enforce contractual terms which suited them better (like being able to 'cancel' at will or turn you down if you were born disabled, i.e. damaged goods)? I think we all appreciate the sacrifices our own mothers made for us to be born... How can that be compared to parents who 'buy' their child?

I haven't yet had children. Perhaps it is not my place to judge this (yet) but I really think that people who can't naturally have their own children (by which I mean the mother carries and births the child) are extremely selfish if they are willing to go the surrogacy route instead of adopting.

Surrogacy is always wrong.

It's wrong to pay a poor woman to gestate and birth a baby and then surrender it to you, and it's wrong to emotionally pressure a female relative into doing the same, for free.

To ask a woman to go through pregnancy and birth and then surrender the resulting child - this is just not a request that you should ever make of another person.

If it becomes a normal or semi-normal request to make of a sister, mother, aunt, this opens up a whole world of pressure that will be brought to bear on older women particularly. I'm thinking of the post-menopausal US woman who gestated and birthed a baby for her gay son and his husband. It was portrayed in the media as a heart-warming family story and perhaps it was. Perhaps this woman really was thrilled to go through pregnancy and birth in her 60s so her son could fulfil his wish to be a father. Perhaps she found the whole process physically and emotionally traumatic, but of course, she would never let on - what would be the point?

Regardless of the particulars of this case, consider a society in which women in their 60s can be asked by their children (in most cases their sons) to gestate and birth their own grandchildren, at a time when women ought to have been long finished with the arduous and dangerous labour of pregnancy and birth. Consider the emotional pressure that will be brought to bear on those women as they see their sons (and occasionally their daughters) desperately long for a child, with society prepared to pay for and endorse their sole route to parenthood, while only the selfishness of their mother stands in their way.

Consider how many women will agree to become surrogate mothers, out of a combo of social pressure, passive or overt family bullying and guilt - the same hidden forces that operate in the 'free and consensual' living organ donor system, which results in thousands of people (disproportionately female) agreeing to give up a kidney or part of their liver to a relative, even though they do not really want to. And in the case of living organ donation, that at least has the merit of being genuinely life-saving, whereas nobody will die if they can't have their own genetically related child.

I never quite understood surrogacy. Basically, a person or a couple are allowed to buy, bully, blackmail or take advantage of a woman so that’s she can deliver their product to them. She does all the hard work and they deliver the funds? I feel sorry for the child born as a result of the transaction.

That’s a good article posted up thread. It also draws on some themes around childlessness that resonate with me

it must be accepted that childlessness is sufficiently harmful to justify any risk to the gestational mother or child and no other remedy for that harm exists.

It doesn’t have to be tragic to be childless. I am, and I’ve got a really nice life. Having children can be wonderful, but not having them can be, too. I get a bit fed up of the implication that it is just so desperately, life ruiningly awful not to have reproduced that really, anything you want to do to fix that is fair game. Such as recruiting your own mother to carry her grandson, as above.

It’s ok to not have children. It really is. Gay, straight, married, single, whatever.

@SophocIestheFox

That’s a good article posted up thread. It also draws on some themes around childlessness that resonate with me

it must be accepted that childlessness is sufficiently harmful to justify any risk to the gestational mother or child and no other remedy for that harm exists.

It doesn’t have to be tragic to be childless. I am, and I’ve got a really nice life. Having children can be wonderful, but not having them can be, too. I get a bit fed up of the implication that it is just so desperately, life ruiningly awful not to have reproduced that really, anything you want to do to fix that is fair game. Such as recruiting your own mother to carry her grandson, as above.

It’s ok to not have children. It really is. Gay, straight, married, single, whatever.

👏🏽👏🏽

Perhaps this woman really was thrilled to go through pregnancy and birth in her 60s so her son could fulfil his wish to be a father. Perhaps she found the whole process physically and emotionally traumatic, but of course, she would never let on - what would be the point?

Medics are usually worried about pregnancy in over 35s. Age can land you in the high risk category. Thats not to say 35/40 is too old to have a baby or that you won't experience the same complications at 23 , but its insanity to ignore the risks in someone at an age where ordinarily they would be done having children or even done menstruating. I had my babies at 26 and 30 and even at that age the toll on my body 4 years later was far greater and thats just at 30.

Now I know again that many many 60 year olds could quite easily out run me. Who are far fitter and healthier than me. But health can be absolutely fine. Until pregnancy. We just aren't meant to have babies at that age our bodies aren't made to have babies at that age and I think uts nothing more than an ethically dubious experiment to implant someone else's embryo into a woman of that age thinking that as the egg came from a younger person that you somehow circumnavigate the potential complications.

As with the story above , what is a 60 year old meant to do witg a disabled rejected baby who needs lifelong care who could well be dead long before the child is independent enough to live by themselves.

Surrogacy in general is problematic.

But I am in favour of altruistic surrogacy done in a way that reimburses the surrogate for her expenses including loss of income, minimises any/all risks to her and is done in a formal legal contract. To me it is a type of adoption agreement with the only difference being that the pregnancy is planned instead of unplanned.

To me a contract doesn’t dehumanise, it actually underlines the surrogates full person hood. It wasn’t that long ago that women were deemed not mentally capable of being a signatory party to any contract. The right to contract is an equal right that we fought long and hard to obtain. The right to bodily autonomy is also one we have fought for and I think it morally wrong for any of us to tell a woman she cannot volunteer as a surrogate if she so wishes. In addition, any baby that woman has is her responsibility and she can abort it, keep it, or adopt it out either prearranged as a surrogate or not prearranged and as a result of an unplanned pregnancy.

Of course you can consent to something that carries risk of injury or death. Of course you can consent to something without knowing exactly what might happen. We consent to things all the time that carry such risks and without knowing the future.

I find it incredibly unnerving how men are so easily able to shut-down women, discussing an issue which specifically affects only women, which the men have explicitly put in the public domain for discussion, on a parenting forum's Feminist discussion board.

That's all.

I don't really see the problem. I guess I should rtft to see what I'm missing.

But I am in favour of altruistic surrogacy done in a way that reimburses the surrogate for her expenses including loss of income, minimises any/all risks to her and is done in a formal legal contract

How do you minimise the risks?

I mean besides perhaps you make sure yourexploited woman your surrogate isn't someone who's overweight, diabetic, has a bleeding disorder etc

You cannot minimise the risks of ttts or placental abruption, pre eclampsia, gestational diabetes, mirror syndrome, etc there is no amount of money and fuck all in a contract that will ever make a woman left incontinent or infertile due to infection feel adequately protected or compensated.