Here you go. You claim that there are reasons for being opposed to surrogacy which aren’t “being stated in this discussion”. Here are all the reasons which have been stated in this discussion, which you seem to have overlooked despite a PP bringing them to your attention.
“Exploitation. 99.9% of surrogacy around the world is rich westerners paying poor women a a relative pittance to carry a baby for them with the knowledge that if it goes wrong they’ll just walk away and try someone or somewhere else. Ukraine has traditionally been the most popular place. Covid and the war has left countless women with babies that were ordered and there are now Romanian style orphanages with hundreds of abandoned babies as a result. The BBC has covered this. You’ll never see a Kardashian offer infertile Olga from Kyiv to carry a baby for her, will you?
Women as a commodity. No one should be able to buy or hire the right to use a woman’s body for any reason.
Babies as a commodity. No one should be able to buy a baby. We have banned the buying of children who are 15 years old, 10, 5 etc. Why can people buy a newborn?
Anyone who knows anything about babies and attachment knows that babies should be kept with their mothers whenever possible. Their mother is the woman who gave birth to them. That is why even if a mother is deemed unfit, a judge usually decides a baby is to be removed, because it’s a huge decision that cannot be taken lightly.
it is not possible for any legal, moral, or ethical framework to exist that protects all three parties equally. Someone has to give up rights. Should all the rights be with the mother? Then the intended parents get nothing. Should all the rights be with the intended parents? Then you get awful scenarios, like the example of where a woman was told that should she enter a vegetative state, the intended parents would have the final say on withdrawal of life support. How do you prevent this sort of thing? Whose rights do you prioritise? What about the baby’s rights?
It is impossible, within such speculative framework to cover all the possibilities of things that can go wrong. Ergo with enough surrogacy cases there will always be legal messes to clean up.
Even if it’s “altruistic”, how do you determine free choice? How do you know that a sister isn’t doing it out of immense guilt rather than love? Or someone is being coerced? Or that there isn’t money involved somewhere? When someone donates a kidney to a loved one or relative they have to undergo extensive assessment to make sure they understand the implications of what they’re doing. No such checks exist.
I have personally seen the emotional impact of a woman who thought she could give up the baby, but was left sobbing to herself in her own room suppressing her milk with midwives checking on her while the happy couple were all smiles and giggles bottle feeding the baby a few doors down. I saw midwives swear they’d never be involved again after that.
Even if you can be sure it’s a true altruistic arrangement, and even if everything during pregnancy goes through without issue (12 week scan normal, 20 week scan normal etc) and even if the mother comes through relatively unscathed (pregnancy has a 100% complication rate) and has no qualms about giving up the baby, and the intended parents go home, it’s still not a successful surrogacy. No one has any idea if the child will grow up wondering, yearning, for their mother and it could take decades for that to manifest. Ask anyone who’s never known a parent, and they’ll all tell you they wonder. There’s a child at my DC’s school who has two dads. She knows her mum is in India and she says she’s going to go and see her “one day”. It’s heartbreaking ❤️🩹. “