New feminist campaign "Stop Surrogacy Now"

[RabbitOfCaerbannog]

A new feminist campaign has been set up against the commodification of babies and women's wombs for rent - Stop Surrogacy Now. Looks like an important cause to get behind. From Stop Surrogacy Now's home page:

Surrogacy is the social practice where a woman is ‘used’ for her body, her fertility and reproductive capacity to grow and birth a baby without the intention of being a mother to that child and giving that baby away, or ‘gifting’ that child to ‘Intended Parents’.
We see Surrogacy is the sale of a child where any profit is made. No amount of pretending its ‘gestational service’ changes the reality. Commissioning parents want a baby not a service, the baby is the ‘end product’.
Surrogacy as a practice developed from the demand of wealthy, infertile people to have exclusive parenthood of a biological child.

1. exploiting women as baby making machines does not advance women’s rights
2. The child’s right to have a relationship with all its parents are disregarded
3. It perpetuates that same old structural injustice where poor/ vulnerable women are used for the benefit of the wealthy – the power imbalance in surrogacy is a key argument ‘Using a surrogate’ means replacing the only mother a child has ever known. “People who seek a surrogate have a very specific desire…it is not only a desire to raise a child, but also a demand that the mother be absent.” ~ Kajsa Ekis Ekman “Being and Being Bought”

This is the website:

stopsurrogacynowuk.org/2021/04/22/welcome-to-stop-surrogacy-now-uk/

PlanDeRaccordement:

You may not need surrogacy, but others do.
......
No they don't! They want a child at all costs, need has nothing to do with it. Nobody has the right to have a child.

I am an adopted child by the way.

[quote FannyCann]Can't remember if I have previously posted this link but her it is, a woman who had a disastrous experience of surrogacy.

nordicmodelnow.org/2020/01/29/i-was-an-altruistic-surrogate-and-am-now-against-all-surrogacy/[/quote]
I've read that article before, Fanny. It really is horrendous and I'm glad the woman wrote about her experience as a surrogate. Hopefully it will put people off in the future. Though obviously most pregnancies and births go far more smoothly than that one.

Aargh. So many typos. Apologies.

Yes twin pregnancies are much more problematic Maggie. Who knows. Perhaps if she had just had the one baby things wouldn't have been so bad and she might have been less traumatised. The commissioning parents (her good friends) pushes for twins with the father saying "twins would be the icing on the cake". But she didn't feel able to disappoint her friends and back out by then.

Women are not walking wombs.
We do not exist to provide young for those that cannot.
We are not farming stock.

Children are not possessions to be bought and sold. They are human beings.

This needs to be repeated.

Yes, it's as simple as that Timestablesaretables

@Maggiesfarm

PlanDeRaccordement: You may not need surrogacy, but others do. ...... No they don't! They want a child at all costs, need has nothing to do with it. Nobody has the right to have a child.

I am an adopted child by the way.

Of course, no one has the right to have a child. If it were a right, then the government would be forcing women to be surrogates. It would be Gilead and Handmaids Tale.

The right in question here is whether women have the right to consent to being a surrogate. Banning surrogacy means, no, women do not have the right to choose to be surrogate. Women will be fined and imprisoned if they deliberately get pregnant with the intent of the child being adopted by pre-identified parents. Is that what you want? To criminalise surrogacy?

I'd like it to stop. I don't want to see some poor woman go to prison, of course not.

If it was made illegal, it would stop, at least in this country. Anybody already pregnant as a result of surrogacy could be protected but people would be wary of undertaking that 'duty' in future if the law did not allow it.

@Maggiesfarm
If it was made illegal, it would stop, at least in this country.

It really wouldn’t. It’s banned here in France but it still goes on. It’s just black market and there is no safeguards or protections from exploitation for any of the women who want to be surrogate mothers. Currently anyone facilitating a surrogate pregnancy faces a maximum of five years in prison and a €75,000 fine if convicted.

No one ever needs surrogacy. It is not a requirement for life. Many countries ban the selling of organs despite people needing them to live. We ban the selling of organs because of ethical concerns. If a woman wants a right to sell her kidney, we don't let her. If a woman wants to sell her body to commissioning parents, we shouldn't let her. (If a country bans surrogacy, I am opposed to any criminalization or penalties on the surrogate mother).

This isn't forcing women to live someone's religious beliefs, it's a careful examination of the ethical problems of surrogacy being too great to allow its normalization and loosening of restrictions.

Think of this scenario for organ donation. Most parents would prefer to die in order to give their own heart to save the life of their child. We don't let them do this even though a parent may want to. It's not a religious belief that halts doctors from performing this surgery, ethics have determined that a surgeon can not kill one person to save another. And when a child cannot get a life-saving organ, it is utterly heartbreaking but we still don't allow someone to donate one at their peril.

Risks, coercion, manipulation, unintended consequences...these are (or should be) calculated when determining the ethics of laws and regulations. It's not just about rights to do whatever we want.

[quote PlanDeRaccordement]@Maggiesfarm
If it was made illegal, it would stop, at least in this country.

It really wouldn’t. It’s banned here in France but it still goes on. It’s just black market and there is no safeguards or protections from exploitation for any of the women who want to be surrogate mothers. Currently anyone facilitating a surrogate pregnancy faces a maximum of five years in prison and a €75,000 fine if convicted.[/quote]
I'm not surprised by that.

@PlanDeRaccordement

That's strange, I understood the fine and prison sentence to be far lower, though you refer to maximum fines and sentences.

Has anyone actually gone to prison in France for breaking surrogacy laws? Perhaps there has been a case that has set a legal precedent but with surrogacy agencies more than the commissioning parents maybe?

Women will be fined and imprisoned if they deliberately get pregnant with the intent of the child being adopted by pre-identified parents. Is that what you want? To criminalise surrogacy?

I think as with prostitution (a reasonable comparison within feminist organisations like Nordic Model Now, as a woman's body is a resource or vessel being used by others), I wouldn't want to see the woman being criminalised, but I would like to see consequences for 'punters', the citizens of France, for example, who exploit women in other countries (in Ukraine for example), returning with a baby that they then ask to be granted citizenship for France.

I understand this to be quite a famous case from France, due to the media coverage over the length of time.

www.rfi.fr/en/france/20191004-french-appeals-court-recognises-mennesson-parents-surrogate-twins-after-19-years

The commissioning parents had a lengthy court battle and the children born to a surrogate mother in America, now adults, were granted recognition in France, but I wasn't aware that either of the CPs went to prison or were fined.

Perhaps the laws exist but they aren't applied? I'd be very interested to read about the circumstance where people did go to prison in France.

Saying something is selfish, risky and cruel is a moral judgement based on your belief system that an unborn fetus is a person who suffers as a result of surrogacy.

In France my understanding is that the process of surrogacy was banned on the basis that it is seen as exploitative, so the legal system in France took perhaps a moral position on the principle on behalf of the French.

"In France, surrogacy has been against the law since 1994. Its prohibition is justified by two principles of public policy. On the one hand, there is the principle of inviolability of the human body which means that no part of it can be treated like a property. On the second hand, there is the principle of nonavailability of people’s status which implies that the intended parents and the surrogate mother cannot, by their single individual decision, choose the status of the unborn child."

link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-642-32338-6_102

(I realise this is a study and so could be dismissed as 'woo' but I share for the purpose of exploring the reasons behind the governmental decision to ban surrogacy in France.)

And Primal Wound is not a book with any scientific references by the way...so yes it is woo because all the scientific evidence collected to date, over decades of research indicate that attachment develops after birth, and not before.

I'm looking forward to your book recommendation so I can read about how decades of research prove that babies do not recognise their mothers at birth or form any kind of attachment in the womb, presumably beyond the physical attachment via a placenta.

(I'd rather read a book tbh than any scientific studies that I could dismiss as 'woo'.)

A slight diversion but child labour laws operate in the U.K., for child actors

"Equity recommends that children are paid half the minimum weekly fee of an adult actor. Actors must earn between £450 and £500 depending on the number of performances," said Brown. Most West End contracts request that performers do not talk publicly about their salary, but children playing named characters in Oliver! are thought to be earning between £35 and £60 a performance, while Atkinson is rumoured to be earning several tens of thousands a week."

I noticed this

"Sylvia Young, who runs a stage school and has several pupils in Oliver!, said children are never paid much in the theatre. "Obviously I would love them to be better paid: it is nice for them to have something to put in a bank account for later on. But there is nothing that compares with the experience of being on stage."

So really it's ok to underpay or exploit children because it's a lovely experience for them, something they will always remember, something to be proud of. This sound very familiar.

www.theguardian.com/stage/2009/jan/18/child-actors-equity-oliver

There is a reason why we have laws around children working.

www.gov.uk/child-employment

Maybe there should be a Workers Union for surrogate mothers, agreed fair pay, pensions and employee benefits. We could have the same for prostitutes, oh no wait...

www.iusw.org/

A slight diversion but child labour laws operate in the U.K., for child actors

Yes of course they do. That was my point?

There are protections for children working but they can consent.

You said children aren't able or considered as being able to consent do you think child acting is forced child labour?

A foetus can't consent to being created, nor can it consent to being given away.

People, including children, have employment contracts and you brought this up on a surrogacy thread so do you consider surrogacy a form of employment?

@Delphinium20

You organ donation scenario is way off. No, we do not allow organ donation that results in certain death. But we do allow organ donation ‘at their peril’ as in with risk of injury and death. For example the surgery to donate a kidney has a 3 in 10,000 death rate for the donor.

That’s three times higher than a U.K. woman’s 1 in 10,000 deaths in childbirth.

So yeah, being a surrogate mother has 1/3rd the risk of death than being a kidney donor.

@OhHolyJesus

There are protections for children working but they can consent.

You said children aren't able or considered as being able to consent do you think child acting is forced child labour?

A foetus can't consent to being created, nor can it consent to being given away.

People, including children, have employment contracts and you brought this up on a surrogacy thread so do you consider surrogacy a form of employment?

No children cannot legally consent to a contract. It’s basic contract law. Look it up.

@OhHolyJesus
you brought this up
No I didn’t. Someone else brought up the fact that a baby is the subject of a contract and conflated that with slavery. I was merely correcting them in that you can be the subject of a contract as a child and it not be slavery.

I don't wish to derail this thread so I look forward to your response to other points made.

Children have their parents consent on their behalf under the age of 16. I did look it up. There are strict working hours and patterns around babies being used in filming for example. Clearly a baby can't consent to being filmed. A baby can't consent to being given away either, through adoption or surrogacy or fostering or abandonment.

Surrogacy contracts are not employment contracts and if they were then it would be a commercial exercise and not altruistic.

Surrogacy has got nothing to do with acting. It was a brief diversion but shall we stay on topic?

I was merely correcting them in that you can be the subject of a contract as a child and it not be slavery.

And I was pointing out that there are laws around this, so to prevent it from being modern slavery.

A person of any age is not a product, but a child can work and be paid with consent from the parents or by themselves aged 16 or school leaving age.

Being the subject of an employment contract doesn't make you a commodity and you would have free will and be able to resign.

There is no comparison.

I would really love to read something from women who have gone through it on here. And from children of surrogates.

@OhHolyJesus

And Primal Wound is not a book with any scientific references by the way...so yes it is woo because all the scientific evidence collected to date, over decades of research indicate that attachment develops after birth, and not before.

I'm looking forward to your book recommendation so I can read about how decades of research prove that babies do not recognise their mothers at birth or form any kind of attachment in the womb, presumably beyond the physical attachment via a placenta.

(I'd rather read a book tbh than any scientific studies that I could dismiss as 'woo'.)

Start with “John Bowlby and Attachment Theory” There is “Secure Base: Clinical Applications of Attachment Theory” Also “Handbook of Attachment” and “Attachment Theory in Practice”

More recent books include
“Bowlby and Ainsworth:What is Attachment Theory?”
“Theories of Development, Concepts and Applications”

@OhHolyJesus

I was merely correcting them in that you can be the subject of a contract as a child and it not be slavery.

And I was pointing out that there are laws around this, so to prevent it from being modern slavery.

A person of any age is not a product, but a child can work and be paid with consent from the parents or by themselves aged 16 or school leaving age.

Being the subject of an employment contract doesn't make you a commodity and you would have free will and be able to resign.

There is no comparison.

Exactly, the fact that surrogacy can be agreed on using a formal contract, isn’t immoral or concerning and certainly not akin to slavery. Which is what the other poster was arguing.

Education around the issues is the first step, speaking about banning never gets a sympathetic ear. Lots of people don't think deeply enough to understand the wider issues or see any problems.

Can you imagine the thought processes a woman goes through - I mean YOU who says it's a contract and it's a choice and it's ok. With such strongly held opinion that it is just a contract, put your money where your mouth is and go make a living for yourself renting out your womb. See how you feel about it for real over the next couple of years and then when you're in a position to report back on why it's fine and dandy. Let us know how your body coped, how your psychological health is going etc.

As scientific development evolves - just because you can, doesn't mean you should