Is there an organised lobby or letter writing campaign?
On September 7, MPs will debate abolishing the last vestige of humanity accorded these women by the UK: the right to change their mind. After appearing on This Morning, fashion entrepreneur Adam Frisby and his partner Jamie Corbett, who had a daughter via an American surrogate, raised over 100,000 signatures for a government petition calling for a surrogate mother’s rights to be removed at birth.
Currently, whether a baby is bought abroad or born after an altruistic surrogacy arrangement in Britain, commissioning parents must apply for a parental order to ensure the surrogate genuinely consented and to allot a social worker to assess the child’s welfare. Checks are far less rigorous than for adoption: these orders are almost always granted. Even so the surrogate’s name appears on the original birth certificate as “mother” and she can assert her rights to the baby for six months after it is born.
We have the late moral philosopher Mary Warnock to thank for preventing surrogates here from being reduced to Handmaid’s Tale vessels. As author of the landmark 1984 report on reproductive ethics, which established the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), she wrote: “Perhaps what I am saying, is motherhood is somehow sacred, as other aspects of nature may be; and if babies become commodities, we shall have lost something irreplaceable.”