Times article on surrogacy

[nythbran2]

Article which ignores the child and the mother to focus on the feelings of the genetic parents. Comments so far very clear in pointing this out. https://www.thetimes.com/article/189228bf-ce0a-49cd-8aef-531bd8e00496?shareToken=63aee5180a9db8e1006cc58f062ac795

Thanks for the share- can't read comments unfortunately. The irony of opening with a call to empathy then dehumanising the woman at the centre of his story. I just can't understand why anyone would still want to remove a baby when the birth mother (not 'gestational carrier') has changed her mind. Yes it'd be extremely disappointing, devastating even, but yes mate- you'd just have to accept it. It's not just about genetics- their blood and heartbeats have been intertwined. We say 'blood relative', not 'genetic relative'. He's speaking as if woman and baby are strangers to each other. Bonding has begun even pre birth, they've been with each other every second, but he's acting as if tagging along for a few scans outweighs that. What empathy.

It needs banned.

Something else that apparently only affects a 'tiny number', so just shut up and #BeKind.

It will reduce all women to just incubators on legs. How long before it turns into women 'must' be willing to incubate a couples progeny in order to be thought kindly of, to it's 'your duty to' incubate for your betters.

Sorry the share token doesn't give access to the comments. They're the best bit. Very robustly against surrogacy as human trafficking, child abuse, exploitation. Good to see public opinion on this is not swayed by the 'gift of life' rhetoric.

It takes a long time but you eventually find a surrogate via Facebook — a 33-year-old mum of four.
This person is happy for the life of a (theoretical) mother of 4 children to be put at risk? For their selfish desires?!
It's time to stop all this and respect women, children and families.

Definitely a dogwhistle for classism too: 'she's a mum of 4 already at 33, who knows how many more babies she'll fire out- decent middle class people may as well benefit from her fecklessless'

There was a thread the other day on egg donation:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5358298-bbc-scotland-recruiting-young-women-as-egg-donors?

Wow @nythbran2 that article is enraging! I'm very glad he had his arse handed to him in the comments. The "wrong" parents indeed. The fucking entitlement of it!!

The phrase 'your baby' was what got to me -
But within hours of the birth — out of the blue — the surrogate tells you she has changed her mind and wants to keep your infant. Soon after, she leaves the hospital with your child and, eight agonising months later, your case is finally heard by a judge who rules that the surrogate is allowed to keep your baby. For ever.

It makes the woman who carried and gave birth to the baby sound like a shoplifter😡

I also note the sense of entitlement in
you’ll have to go down the surrogacy route where someone else compassionately carries your baby for you.

Obviously it is tragic if a woman who wants to have a baby can't because she has had ovarian cancer, which is 'in remission in this case'. But there are choices to be made and surrogacy is only one of them. There's no 'have to' involved.

I'm so glad the mother and baby stayed together.

'if I may, I’d like to tap into your sympathy '

Can't answer that without getting very sweary, mate.

It's interesting that he mentions Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments at the start of the article. So he isn't entirely unaware that there are such things as moral considerations.

Highest rated comment so far:
"At no point in this article is the surrogate treated as anything other than a vessel to carry someone else’s baby. There is just one mention of her which uses a term for a human - as a mum to her biological children. Everywhere else, she is referred to as a surrogate, effectively a substitute rather than a person, or even worse a gestational carrier, a kind of bag to carry someone else’s property.

The risks and burdens to the woman’s health, her emotions about the child growing within, & the effects of this upon her family are not given a moment’s consideration. The risk that the baby is abandoned by the commissioning would have been parents, perhaps because of disability, is not mentioned. Nor is any thought given to the child. A child knows the voice of its mother. Her voice will calm & sooth the child like no one else’s because of their bond together. The mother’s milk will come in, but the child is denied it.

I’ve come to the view that we should ban surrogacy. It exploits women who have few alternative choices to gain an income. It demands too great sacrifices of the mother and the child. However desperately people might want biological offspring, it is not a right which others should have to deliver."

I noticed this article at the bottom of the one in the OP. I thought that the face in the thumbnail looked familiar...

https://archive.ph/c0Wbk

I do notice that these articles always seem to present the highly emotive case of a woman who cannot conceive for medical reasons, rather than some of the other situations in which surrogacy might be used. The case in his article seems to be fictional I think?

There was a court case a few years back where a gay couple had found a woman on Facebook and met her once (I think it was at a railway station) before flying her out to Greece to be impregnated at an IVF clinic. It turned out that she had learning difficulties so her ability to fully consent was doubtful. When the baby was born she of course changed her mind and the men brought a court case against the baby’s mother. I remember that the judgement stressed what an utter lack of concern the ‘intended parents’ had shown for her and her family. In the end the baby remained with the mother and her husband, with access granted to the father.

For those who can't read them, the comments are overwhelmingly against surrogacy.

All the comments bar three are against surrogacy, and the three who were not weren't exactly making a case for it.

1. "Some people are clearly not hardwired for empathy, if the posters here are representative? Good grief."
2. "Agree with this article."
3. I've screenshot this one because it's quite rambling.

Here are screenshots of the top comment, another which I thought very to the point, and a third (the rambling one mentioned above).

I’m not completely anti surrogacy, I would never hire a surrogate but I would happily be one to give someone a child. There needs to be more effective rules, psych assessments and legal procedures in place though to protect all parties involved.

and legal procedures in place though to protect all parties involved.

This isn’t possible. As soon as you protect rights for one party, you compromise the rights of the other two parties, no matter which way you order it.

Jesus, one of those comments actually referred to the baby as a "transaction".

No, that's what I had yesterday when I bought a top in Next. People should never be for sale.

it’s time for our regressive legislation to change

It is Rohan, but not in the way you mean.

Babies aren't presents. They are human beings with their own feelings and interests.

If a mother is unable to care for her baby and has to give it up, that is a tragedy and a deep trauma for that baby. Nobody should be engineering this situation on purpose.

And through Facebook. Not an agency that would (as a hedge against legal claims, if nothing else) offer some degree of screening and support for both sides, but fucking Facebook!

"There needs to be more effective rules, psych assessments and legal procedures in place though to protect all parties involved."

Especially the poor babies who have no voice in the matter but their life starts with the worst loss imaginable for a child. Even puppies get more time with their mothers because it's recognised as incredibly important for their emotional and social wellbeing.

I couldn't have children and I adopted.

Adoption rates are way down as people look into surrogacy instead.

Adoption is hard because the children available to adopt in the UK have mostly been removed by the courts, not relinquished, and have many difficulties, often related to foetal alcohol.

Gay couples and even single men are increasingly seeing surrogacy as a fertility treatment they can legitimately use to create a family. There are surrogacy seminars held in this country aimed specifically at men - these men are affluent and well able to afford it. The men buy eggs from elite athletes or supermodels or ivy league students then have embryos implanted into poorer women in say Mexico. They often have two surrogates at once, each carrying the child of each of the men. Or they find a surrogate who will have twins, with the embryos made from sperm from each of them. But also single men are commissioning babies.

Then there are the people in their 60s and even 70s doing it. There have been two recent cases where the courts were asked to grant parental rights to very elderly parents. One case, the "mother" had died, had been in a nursing home previous to that. The father was sending the child to boarding school as soon as possible.

There is so much dodgy business going on. People just dont turn up to collect the baby, change their mind and want the surrogate to have an abortion. They control everything the surrogate does, like what pain relief she can have during labour.

And the baby is treated like a package. We don't take puppies away at birth but babies are OK? Some of these kids will never know birth mum or dna mum. And they will told to be grateful to their parents for cresting them.

Adoption practice changed considerably when the impact of loss on the child was realised. Nowadays most UK adoptions have some kind of ongoing contact with birth family (another reason some people dont want to adopt). But surrogacy ignores this.

I could rant for hours about surrogacy! There are some good anti surrogacy accounts on X - SurrogacyConcern and StopSurrogacyNowUK. The gov has put surrogacy reform on hold for now but there are lots of people lobbying for changes. Ireland recently gave the surrogacy industry everything it wanted, partly driven by a gov minister who has a child born through surrogacy. We have to stay vigilant. There is concern that eg Stonewall will pivot to fertility rights now that they are struggling with trans rights.