Why is the Guardian promoting surrogacy?

[ThedaBara]

Have seen 3 or 4 articles in the Guardian this week about how easy and positive surrogacy is and how the government should change laws to make it easier for people to do in the UK. They are one of the news sites without comments under their articles so I'm curious what might have prompted this.
One of the pieces had a chart showing where most surrogacies take place, and top of it was the US, where the price was 250,000, followed by a lot of developing countries.
The UK law requires the biological parents to apply for parental rights, which is apparently annoying and time consuming. Am really shocked by the biased reporting on this

The Morning Star article is good, but even that doesn't spell out the fact that commissioning a baby to be born and then removed from its mother is essentially deliberately commissioning an act of child abuse.

I find it fascinating / terrifying how little is still understood by the wider public about trauma.

Organisations such as BACP and UKCP ought to be at the forefront of the drive to abolish all surrogacy. Because they KNOW about trauma and abuse. They regulate the counsellors and therapists whose very first questions will be about you or your child's experience of pregnancy, birth and infancy.

I feel like the silence of the organisations who know but keep quiet (for fuck knows what vested interests) is a real factor behind general ignorance. Too many people are swayed by the altruism angle, who would be horrified if they understood more about infancy and trauma.

It will be interesting to see how it pans out for these children. One would hope they’re much wanted, and will be loved by the people who raise them, but it will be curious to see how they compare to the children who were the adoptees in the cohort of forced adoptions .

Perhaps the Guardian feels that it ties into gay rights as it is a way for same sex couples to ‘acquire’ a child.
They don’t care about the babies rights, as they don’t when a man ‘breastfeed’s’ a child, and they don’t care about women’s rights as they don’t when a male rapist is put into a female prison.

This article is from a few years ago and features US gay men, but it's an interesting read, as it explains their demands and expectations to be given access to whatever it takes for them to become biological parents.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/oct/01/how-gay-parenthood-through-surrogacy-became-a-battleground

Agree and thank you for raising this point. I imagine that being removed from your mother at birth would be high on the list of Adverse Childhood Experiences that cause longterm emotional trauma.

Darkly cynical/ dystopian but perhaps those professional bodies you mention want to ensure a steady stream of clients for the next few decades.

The surrogacy industry ignores all the experience of the adoption world. In adoption, the trauma to the child of being removed from birth mum and everything the child has known is wellcaccepted. So are identity issues. Adopters are expected to honour the child's background and often have some form of obgoing contact with birth family. In England there is a fund specifically for the specialist therapy required - there is an understanding that many therapists don't properly get the issues and can make matters worse.

Yet surrogacy is happening and being promoted by a national newspaper as if the baby is a component, an ingredient even, in creating a happy family.

Adoption practice centres the child. Surrogacy put the child last after everyone else has got what they want.

And in terms of prostitution - they believe in the man's right to have sex.

The Primal Wound by Nancy Verrier looked at exactly this

Thanks for explaining this so well.

Thank you for this perspective! Apparently there are around 500 surrogate births per year Vs 3500 adoptions. Tiny numbers. If adoptees can have ongoing psychological support so should surrogate babies

Yes all of this. Additionally adopted children get priority when schools are oversubscribed.

Contrast this with the surrogate child whose story, as far as it is told, is couched in euphemism; growing up with the same trauma but no words to express it, no story to make sense of it, no adults committed to helping them heal.

Because middle/upper class couples need babies. And the Guardian, despite its protestations, is fairly elitist.

I also wondered why there was a flurry of articles on the subject in the Graun. Couldn’t bring myself to read them them though. The Graun rages me.