The Observer on Law Commission surrogacy plans for Britain + situation in Ukraine

[ChopinBoard]

Catherine Bennet is spot on in today's Observer:

'It would be a moral and medical disaster if Britain became a surrogacy centre'

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/27/moral-medical-disaster-britain-became-surrogacy-centre

Brilliant work with your DD @SapatSea
So great you filled in a reply to that wretched consultation. It was incredibly time consuming, what with 118 questions.
I'm not as well informed as I'd like to be, or should be - I confess I never read the full 500 pages cover to cover. It's dense stuff a lot of it. I tackled the consultation by looking at the questions and then reading the relevant part of the consultation paper and maybe doing a bit more research around it. Some parts eg the section on payment (18 questions iirc) meant I read the whole chapter. It took a very long time and then Nordic Model Now published their template answers which I found were so much better informed than mine....

My focus has always been the medical side and the NHS, as I was a midwife for some time and still work in the NHS in an unrelated area. I'm appalled at women being put at risk like this, at the use of their bodies, at the implications for the NHS dealing with complex births and entitled commissioning parents assuming rights over a woman's body and the baby they have bought, and the babies who of course have as much right not to be bought and sold as any other human.

Pregnancy and childbirth are an amazing time for any woman, with the changes to her body, the growing bond with the baby, the birth and the special time with the newborn baby afterwards. There may be complications, pain, life changing effects on her body. To have it all reduced to a cold transaction by people who just think women can pop a baby out like a chicken laying an egg, and hand over the baby as if it was a birthday present ordered off Amazon just infuriates me.
I will never accept it as acceptable to expect a woman to go through this for another person, nor that babies should be passed around to whoever ordered their production in this way.

Also re your colleague using a woman from India - something I just never understand is why people could have so little concern about the health of the woman carrying the baby they supposedly desire so much.
I thought everyone knew the best chance of a healthy baby was to have a healthy mother. Women in the west obsess about their diet, vitamins, yoga classes etc. if I was choosing a woman to be a surrogate mother for me I would want a woman between the ages of 25 - 35, healthy, with probably 2 maybe 3 children of her own which should have been totally uncomplicated pregnancies and births. I'd want her to be stress free because there are lots of studies about how stress affects the baby I utero with lifelong health consequences for the baby.
What is the health history of a poor woman in India - or Ukraine or Mexico ? How is her nutrition? Can you trust that the agency have been able to establish her obstetric history? If she is being coached to disassociate from the baby she is carrying how does that affect the baby in utero? What sort of obstetric care will she receive in a place like India? What sort of care is available to the baby if it is born early or otherwise unwell?
So many possibilities for things to go wrong, I can't imagine why anyone would go down this route.

@FannyCann

Also re your colleague using a woman from India - something I just never understand is why people could have so little concern about the health of the woman carrying the baby they supposedly desire so much. I thought everyone knew the best chance of a healthy baby was to have a healthy mother. Women in the west obsess about their diet, vitamins, yoga classes etc. if I was choosing a woman to be a surrogate mother for me I would want a woman between the ages of 25 - 35, healthy, with probably 2 maybe 3 children of her own which should have been totally uncomplicated pregnancies and births. I'd want her to be stress free because there are lots of studies about how stress affects the baby I utero with lifelong health consequences for the baby. What is the health history of a poor woman in India - or Ukraine or Mexico ? How is her nutrition? Can you trust that the agency have been able to establish her obstetric history? If she is being coached to disassociate from the baby she is carrying how does that affect the baby in utero? What sort of obstetric care will she receive in a place like India? What sort of care is available to the baby if it is born early or otherwise unwell? So many possibilities for things to go wrong, I can't imagine why anyone would go down this route.

It's cheap innit?

The women are pliable and compliant, possible coerced by their husbands or motivated to earn money due to low income/poverty. The women see value in their fertility, they can be useful, help their families, maybe pay for their kids to go to school.

The Indian laws (did) allow for parental rights to be easily transferred and history to be rewritten in birth certificates and Why pay more when you can pay less.
(Whose slogan was that...Asda?)

You might also think that your DNA is strong, it doesn't matter what she eats as long as she is fed and doesn't drink. You might trust the agency and think women have babies all the time, there's nothing to it.

I think this is pretty accurate - women aren't storage facilities on legs.

twitter.com/wintersling/status/1495418843136761856?s=21

And speaking of Twitter... it's good to see some groups are working against what seems to be a very low restrictions, pro-surrogacy lobby. mobile.twitter.com/wombsnotforrent/status/1498399465849380868?s=21

I just can't see why some groups seem to care more about commissioning parents than they do about protecting surrogate mothers.