
Towards the end of last century, surrogacy—growing a baby in a woman’s body, for love or money, who is then handed over like a loaf of bread to foreigners, the so-called commissioning parents—had come to be widely seen as wrong, and, in its commercial form, abhorrent.
Recently it has started to become acceptable again. Today it is so normalised that not just celebrities like Elton John, Paris Hilton, Nicole Kidman, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian but ‘ordinary people’ appear to believe it is okay to obtain a baby via surrogacy, among them an increasing number of gay male couples and even single men. How has this reversal occurred?
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Let’s be clear. The implicit purpose of surrogacy is to create motherless babies. The body of a woman is used as if it were an empty vessel into which a foreign embryo is implanted. Nine months later, when a baby has been grown from its mother’s blood and bones, the child is lifted out of her womb and given to strange people—in the case of commercial surrogacy, the baby-buyers. This ‘product’ of surrogacy—the child—never consented to be a ‘take-away baby’.
There can be no question that surrogacy profoundly violates the rights of the child. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child prohibits any discrimination against children, and Article 35 stipulates that ‘State Parties shall take all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent the abduction of, the sale of, or traffic in children for any purpose or in any form’ [my emphasis].
Surrogacy also contravenes Article 1 of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, which obligates governments to criminalise the sale of children.
In commercial surrogacy, children are clearly both sold and trafficked.
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Then there are the heartbreaking stories of surrogate mothers who have died during their pregnancies or while giving birth. Nobody tracks their numbers: they will be in the hundreds or even thousands by now.
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The health of egg ‘donors’ is also put at risk. Unlike sperm donation, which is a simple affair, a woman ‘donating’ eggs needs to undergo dangerous stimulation of her ovaries with fertility drugs that can lead to ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which can be life-threatening and/or imperil her own fertility. Repeated ovary stimulations can also result in cancer.
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As an eternal optimist with my feet grounded in the reality of female existence as well as female resistance to such life-endangering ideologies, I take courage from the Italian government’s decision on 16 October 2024 to criminalise all instances of surrogacy, whether altruistic surrogacy at home or commercial surrogacy abroad, with jail terms of up to two years and up to €1 million in fines. I hope many more countries will follow Italy’s example. We need to remember that no one has a ‘right’ to a child, whether in a couple or single, heterosexual or homosexual, and whether by ‘altruistic’ or ‘commercial’ surrogacy. The medical and psychological risks inherent in all surrogacies for the mothers, egg providers and babies are never acceptable. A world in which surrogate motherhood is abolished is possible.
Source: A-listers and baby-makers: the return of surrogacy? – Arena