Another potential celebrity baby purchase 🙄.

[AnAlpacaForChristmasPleaseSanta]

Today I've been hanging around waiting for an appointment with a dwindling phone battery and the only reading materials on offer being last weekends newspapers. I was having a flick through the Mail on Sunday 😳 and saw this story by someone called Louise Thompson, who casually mentions that she and her partner would like to have another child "but would have to use a surrogate'.

I have to admit I'd never heard of her but a bit of nosy googling revealed that she's from Made in Chelsea and during the birth of her first child she suffered a major hemorrhage and months of PTSD afterwards. Something she seemingly has no qualms about potentially putting another woman through. I just despair.

The link to the article is behind a paywall but hopefully this will work.

Fair enough being against surrogacy, but I’m sure their motivations are just like anyone else who wants to start a family. They’ve said here that they could have had a happy life without but there was just something missing. Just like many people who become parents the usual way, surely?

I think picking apart their words in this way just serves to stigmatise the children on no real basis. Their words about wanting to become parents aren’t the issue surely?

But their words are the illustrators of what is wrong with surrogacy.

The motivation to 'become parents in the usual way' does not involve all the negatives which have been stated here and elsewhere :
the medical and psychological risks to the mother, the psychological effects on the babies, the commercialisation, the financial pressures on the mother, the exploitation of poorer societies; and the denial of the child's basic rights to his or her identity, etc.

There's a huge difference between a couple saying 'there's something missing, let's become parents in the usual way', and a couple saying 'there's something missing, let's buy a baby from a Ukrainian woman - who is presumably a refugee from the war in her country - in North Cyprus which is conveniently lax on regulations about this kind of thing - and take the baby away from his/her mother to a foreign country as soon after birth as possible.'

The words in this case surprised me, because usually the reason given for using a surrogate mother is an irresistible urge to have a child, which infertility frustrates, and therefore the couple is 'obliged' to turn to surrogacy.

In this case, it was a bit of a 'will we/won't we', they were perfectly happy as they were, but on balance - yeah on balance let's organise a Ukrainian woman in North Cyprus etc etc.

Expecting pregnancy leave echos the dismissive part the birth mother has in the physical growing the baby as there is adoption leave which if qualified is paid for social funded leave

It's because the usual rhetoric for defending surrogacy is 'you can't understand the devastation of infertility so you're not allowed to judge me' and 'I'd have killed myself if I couldn't have a child'. These people aren't saying that they're saying 'meh, it was a nice to have'. Emotional blackmail about the purchasers' desperation is usual, and is used to justify the harms caused. So purchasers not saying those things stand out.