Janice Turner on Surrogacy

[Igneococcus]

I can't see Janice Turner's comment about surrogacy in yesterday's Times shared anywhere. Sharetokens don't work for me at the moment and I can't get archive to work either. I hope someone else can. It's a very depressing read.

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/why-allow-mother-of-all-abuse-8kz9sk572

I am, of course, ‘entitled’ to feel however I want and while I accept that the adoptive parents are not surrogates I find that situation -just like that of surrogacy- to have ‘obligations’ not to a legal definition of ‘genuine surrogacy’ but rather to a moral standard where economically empowered people do not seek to remove the babies of the poor or vulnerable.

In countries like the US where poverty bites harder than the UK and accommodations for mothers are fewer newborn adoption, rather like surrogacy is an industry which profits at the expense of the birth mothers.

What’s the alternative though?

Birth mother presumably doesn’t want the baby as otherwise she’d not be signing the parental order, particularly surrogate mothers in the far flung bits of former soviet territories.

Give baby up for adoption when there are 2 people who are genetically related to the baby, and otherwise sound as parents?

There isn’t really any outcome that’s in the best interests of the child, assuming there is a willing British individual who wants the child, to strike down a parental order due to expenses. The closest they’ve gotten (publicly) was the 70 something parents who commissioned a baby from the US.

I understand the broader point you're making about poverty, vulnerability and whether a woman’s choice can ever be completely free when she has so few alternatives. But I think there is still a fairly significant leap between that and saying that economically empowered adoptive parents have a moral obligation not to “remove the babies of the poor or vulnerable”.

The adoptive parents didn't make you poor or vulnerable, and they didn't create the circumstances that led you to place your baby for adoption. Unless they coerced, pressured or otherwise exploited you, I'm not sure it follows that accepting a baby who needed a home makes them morally responsible for the inequalities surrounding your decision.

You can look back now and feel that you needed more support, or that adoption wasn't what you emotionally understood yourself to be doing at the time. Those feelings deserve to be taken seriously. But that doesn't necessarily mean the people who adopted your baby wronged you.

I also think there's a difference between saying “vulnerable women need better support and genuine alternatives” and saying “therefore people who adopt from vulnerable women are participating in exploitation.” The first doesn't automatically establish the second.

Ultimately, if your understanding of the pregnancy as “surrogacy” was a way of making sense of relinquishing your baby, I can understand why that framework felt meaningful to you. But it doesn't create obligations on the adoptive parents that they never agreed to and, presumably, didn't know existed.

What would the authorities do if a couple had purchased a baby abroad who was not genetically linked to either of them? If it's illegal but there's no enforcement, then illegal activity is being enabled.

I’m not a family law expert, but a parental order is not possible with no genetic link, so it becomes adoption.

I suspect it comes back to what is in the best interests of the child. If the commissioning parent(s) are otherwise acceptable as parents then it would be hard to argue that adoption to a third set of strangers is a better outcome.

It’s not a criminal offence to pay commercially for surrogacy as an individual but it is a criminal offence for an agency to profit from arranging a surrogacy.

Simply that my donor-conceived child, who has no legal rights to know their biological maternal line, will now, most likely be able to get there due to DNA being available easily and cheaply to the general public. But the idea that my genetic material could have transferred to them is amazing. Wish I could remember the term. I always believed my duty to them and care of them was to ensure their environment was sound. As back then there was no belief that I could share my genetic material. Science moves on.

Did you even think through this scenario before trying to plop it down as some kind of whataboutery?

A drug addicted mother will have likely had a child with significant health issues that become quickly life threatening. The mother will also have serious medical health issues that need to be immediately addressed. Do you think that the child is being removed for punishment ?

Obviously, the mother will also have to be assessed as to whether she will be able to care for that child at all immediately. I would expect that the sole focus of any authority separating a child from its mother who as that significant a drug addiction, is on the child.

And who decides that a baby is going to be removed? It’s always a Family Court judge, because it’s considered such a significant thing to do because of the inevitable trauma it will cause, that the decision to do it is entrusted to the most senior expert in child safety available.

It does show how weak the arguments are though. And the barrel scraping that has to happen to defend the practice.

Oh… whatabout when an infant is given life saving treatment to assist its body cope with either a drug addiction derived through the placenta and/or other outcomes coming from a mother’s drug addiction that require immediate action? And don’t forget the mother also is likely to need immediate care for drug induced health issues.. Removal of the baby is obviously done just because ‘no reason’ and no thought for the baby’s safety and survival has been given to that removal…..

It is remarkable the lengths some people will go to defend the transacting of children.

It's a criminal offense to buy a baby outside of a surrogacy arrangement.
In Italy it's banned and the commissioning parents face up to 2 years in prison.

So according to that article there's a debate in the commons coming up at the behest of that designer couple.

It's going to be interesting to see how the parties/ factions of parties split. Esp to compare and contrast on how say Stella Creasy et al who voted on female body autonomy for abortion decriminalisation view this with an eye on their LGBTQ ally cred