Surrogacy-help me explain to my daughter why this is exploiting women

[happydappy2]

Teen daughter thinks surrogacy is fine, as an opportunity for the woman to earn money.
I've explained that only impoverished women do it, not wealthy ones.
It's not fair on the child to be removed from it's natural Mother/protector.
It will be a high risk pregnancy for the surrogate.
Ultimately benefits mens, not women or children.
There have been cases of paedophiles commissioning surrogates
She just doesn't get it though-what else can I ask her to think about to get her to understand how exploitative this is?
I asked her, would it be ok for me to buy a 10 yr old child? No of course not, so why is it ok for wealthy people to buy babies?

She's nearly 18, I really need to help her critical thinking on this....thanks

@JustanotherMNSlapperTwat yes I don’t disagree with you at all. I just wanted to counter the idea that it’s always about wealthy people exploiting poor women. It often is but it’s surprising how far some will go for a blue tick on Instagram. I won’t name accounts but there are a few.

Surely with a pregnancy you are risking your life.
You also will probably suffer permanent after effects, ranging from stretch marks, inability to have further children, temporary or permanent incontinence etc etc etc

It's baby farming.

No more to it than that. I used to be absolutely fine with it and now that I'm older, I literally wonder what the fuck was going on in my head.

That's not what baby farming means. Baby farming was basically the opposite; it was a way of quietly getting rid of unwanted children, not bringing extra ones in to the world.

There is a documentary on YouTube about surrogacy in Georgia. It's Hearst breaking seeing "the natural mum" after birth not allowed to hold the baby crying a lot and the baby was going to be for 2 months without being hold just briefly until the parents for China could come.. extremely sad.. also they show how a women did around 20 times surrogacy.. basically paying for children..

I have a friend who will be a surrogate for her sister (unable to carry a pregnancy). They are already part way into it. I genuinely have no issue. Both are bright, well employed women earning £100k + there is no financial incentive / pressures.

A friend of a friend was surrogate for their gay brother and his partner. Two very loving parents who are besotted with their baby. No financial gain involved.

I do think genuinely compassionate surrogacy exists but also agree it can be horribly exploitative. Just like many things, I think it has to be evaluated case by case and there isn't a blanket answer. Take wigs as a non sexualized example - I donated 10" of my hair to make wigs for children with cancer. I think that's a reasonable thing to do. But women in poorer countries are being coerced and at times even forcibly assaulted by family into selling their hair due to extreme poverty. Same outcome, very different motivations and methods.

That's how I'd approach a conversation with your daughter, balanced but also being clear about all aspects.

Even in “genuinely compassionate” surrogacy there are still issues. The baby is removed from its mother. It’s a separation trauma. And there is no way of knowing what family dynamics have led to the agreement. It may be pure love, but it may be guilt, coercion, domineering family member and so on. It may appear loving and giving on the surface, but how often is that the case generally in humans when the reality is something different? A woman who is a surrogate for a loved one is probably less likely to say “actually it was shit, I cried giving up the baby, my body is ruined and I resent the entire process” because of the implications that has on maintaining a relationship.

To donate a kidney to a family member requires extensive psychological assessment. In surrogacy, no such assessment takes place.

Because no one can ever be sure, the best solution is to never allow it under any circumstances.

May helps to know that the famously liberal (or formerly famously liberal) Netherlands makes international surrogacy nigh on impossible as it recognises the birth mother as the mother. Bringing a baby into the country without its mother isn't possible. International adoptions are also virtually impossible too btw.

Also she should look at Cambodia, Ukraine and now Georgia. The latter took on the surrogacy market of Ukraine after Russia's invasion and as of 1 Jan new laws came into place to essentially stop it. Why would a country do that?

The arguments for/against are primarily focussed on the adults involved. The baby is the central character.

Get her to look into the trauma of babies removed at birth from mothers. Even if they're quickly adopted into a loving, caring family, they can have very deep-rooted problems that trouble them their entire life.

In order to understand it from the baby's perspective she needs to understand inutero development and baby development and how attachment works.

Worth too looking at how people feel when they're told they were adopted later in childhood, because finding out you were bought (and perhaps, as happens, an earlier baby sibling was not collected because they were the wrong sex/had a disability) is not going to have a better psychological impact.

Get her to look at the websites of agencies who organise surrogacy - big business, slick websites, or charity type websites?

At her age I'd have been all for it, especially for gay men, because I thought the world was potentially just full of kind people and we needed to give everybody a chance and think the best of them. Parents were too cynical. So don't be too cynical, but plant seeds with 3rd party information and then let them grow. Life will water them enough, because she's female.

I used to have a similar position to your daughter when I was a similar age, largely because I'd swallowed the idea that if a woman chooses to do something then it would be very unfeminist to question that. That would be saying a woman isn't capable of making her own choices and if it's right for her who are we to say otherwise. Like many young women at that time this was the feminism light, individualistic feminism that now I'm older and more well-rounded in feminist thinking I realise was a very patriarchal-friendly brand of feminism.

What made a difference to me wasn't looking at each individual issue on its own, but listening to women and discussing the idea of choice. Once someone encouraged me to look at who benefits from certain choices, who loses out/is harmed by certain choices, and to look at how many of those choices were made by poorer or vulnerable women with fewer resources and less power than the group who benefits I changed my mind on a lot of topics.

It might be more than an 18 year old can grasp.

Two things for me: from the baby's p.o.v. being separated from it's birth mother. Mother and baby exchange DNA in the womb, even with surrogate babies and babies instinctively crave the one who grew them all those months. You're creating a trauma here.

Yes babies are separated from their mother's every day with social services interventions or adoption, but why deliberately manufacture this?

Second, pregnancy is still a risky business. Myself, I had pregnancy condition that resulted in major bleeds and surgery twice. If I hadn't been in hospital for the births... I also had diabetes in pregnancy which means I have more of a chance of getting it in later life.

Was all this worth it for my own family? Of course with no single doubt. Would it have been worth it for someone else? No. A surrogate could inhibit her own family plans which is not a small thing, it's huge.

Really?

An 18 year old cant grasp it?

I'd be pretty depressed at having a kid that daft.

Could it be that she just disagrees and sees no ethical issues with it (at this moment, might change an opinion later)? To me it sounds like you're teaching her critical thinking so she will share your opinion, not teaching critical thinking so she can form her own opinion. The reason why surrogacy is a controversial issue is that there are people with different opinions so daughter is not unique in this.

We're shaped by our lives, many pp have said how their positions shifted with life experience.

I don't automatically expect an 18 year old to appreciate the perspective of older women but from the other side all of us have known what it's like to be 18.

It's lovely you have a dialogue with your daughter, I have sons, they will never understand me the way a woman would but we live and learn and keep the lines of communication open.

Really interesting thread. Children are a gift not a right, and parenting is relentless not a hobby. Some thought provoking perspectives here, thank you.

Well I was once a daft, no nothing 18 year old like many young adults!

If I'm honest I think I could only understand health/family ramifications after I'd started a family and experienced it myself.

I was naive at 18. But not daft.

There were awful news reports from Ukraine of babies left behind after their commissioning parents didn’t come to collect them once the war started. Presumably some of the babies were not picked up. What happens to those uncollected children?
In a war situation, how many domestic or foreign adopters are going to be looking in Ukraine? We can’t underestimate the precariousness and trauma of this for children.

It's not necessarily a question of not "grasping" things. It's about "agreeing/disagreeing" with them.

I have concerns about commercial surrogacy, esp when the regulations are weak or don't put sufficient emphasis on the gestational mother's rights over the pregnancy and her right to change her mind etc.

But I don't agree with all of what you said in your post, and I'm in my 40s with two kids.

There's no real evidence of the "primal wound" stuff; the children of surrogacy seem to be turning out about the same as other children of similar socio economic backgrounds. There are lot of other very obvious reasons why adopted children have higher rates of behavioral disorders and generally going off the rails.

I had two uncomplicated pregnancies, so would have been a good candidate for being a gestational mother (as it is, I was 40 when I had my last and the country I live in bans surrogacy anyway). Limiting surrogacy to similar low-risk cases would keep the risks very low; probably lower than "regular" pregnancies, which occur in kinds of women with all kinds of different risk profiles.

I don't feel bonded with my child during pregnancies, and based on discussions in my due date club, this is quite common among pregnant women. For some of us, it's the genetic link that's paramount. I personally could never donate eggs as I would be dismayed to think that MY CHILD was out there in the world and I didn't know where they were or what had happened to them. A child I'd gestated? I doubt I'd feel the same or consider them to be my child. Different individuals will of course feel differently about this kind of thing.

I'm still naive about a host of things ( Rumsfeld's unknown unknowns - which he was unfairly mocked for I thought ).

At 18 I had no idea how naive I was and that probably gave me some very daft views.

I'd also say that information gathering was a more labour intensive experience than it is now.

For those who don't know Ukraine has very different laws about surrogacy than the UK - to my knowledge it is the only place where the state will issue an original birth certificate with the names of the commissioning parents / purchasers. The Ukranian women are paid by agencies and are typically married with children trying to earn cash to help support their family. When the war broke out it was not possible for the foreign families to fly in and collect the babies as planned. The pregnant women gave birth in a basement and left the babies behind with the agency. Around 60 babies spent months in a basement cared for to the extent possible but without parents - all have now all been united with their parents.

Newborn babies spent months in a basement without their parents.

That's shocking, especially when you remember the legacy of Romanian orphanages. The developmental issues of non-contact.

Were they united with their surrogates or their birth parents?

Another illustration of why humans should not be purchasable commodities, and particularly not children.

There is no emotional attachment to the child before it is put into your hands (and sometimes not then, you can find plenty of accounts of parents who then found they didn't just magically bond as expected), only to the idea of the child.

There now exist children who were babies wanted in theory by adults who wanted to have a baby, who were not wanted/intended to be the child of the commissioned surrogate, now existing in a world without emotional bonds, unloved, unwanted, in a war zone with limited adult protection because that protection comes largely from a bonded adult heavily invested in that child's survival which is facilitated by a genetic bond. Orphanage babies raised in groups by carers tend to rack up the major attachment/trauma brain damage. Try reading accounts of parents who have adopted children aged 3 or 4 from such a situation and seen that child through to adulthood. And dealt with the rages that trashed the house, the child/teen's self harming and worse, the heavy psychiatric medication, the residential psychiatric stays and the ones who end up in prison almost as soon as they reach adulthood.

Those created children intended to be the adored children of wealthy enough adoptive parents, have a life ahead of them to try and live around all this damage, including the fact of their abandonment by their creators. Because an adult wanted to buy a baby. And the purchase process went a bit wrong.

It's actually wicked.

@Kokeshi123
I also have issues with donating eggs for that reason, though possibly not when I was 18.
I can't imagine sperm donors have the same qualms but I could be wrong.
It does concern me if children don't have full info. on their genetic inheritance, it's important.

I missed the news reports that they had all been collected. Have you got any links? I was horrified to see the footage of the Ukrainian babies crying in rows of cots with one nurse trying to look after them.

also At 18 I had no idea how naive I was this was definitely the case for me. I thought I was more savvy about life than I was and I wouldn’t have liked the idea that for some things, you have to really experience something yourself to fully know about it.

It was enough for me that I cared about things passionately. And I have always cared about women’s rights. Except what we think ‘women’s rights’ is, is time bound and culture bound, and obviously so it changes between generations. Think about that ‘ladette’ phase in the 00s where you were supposedly highly unfeminist for not pole dancing. Or the 70s where domestic labour and childcare were key feminist demands. Obviously I am caricaturing but culture changes and prioritised political ideas can come and go several times.

And now today, in terms of critical thinking we also have social media making everything more complicated for everyone, and who knows where our 18 year olds (and adults!) might be getting their political and moral and social norms from. It’s much more complicated now I think.

Limiting surrogacy to similar low-risk cases would keep the risks very low; probably lower than "regular" pregnancies, which occur in kinds of women with all kinds of different risk profiles.

I'm not sure this is correct. The drugs used to sustain a foreign pregnancy alone and the replacements for the hormones your body isn't producing can have long effects.