All entries on Feminist Legal Clinic’s News Digest Blog are extracts from news articles and other publications, with the source available at the link at the bottom. The content is not originally generated by Feminist Legal Clinic and does not necessarily reflect our views.
Surrogacy is a dirty business that has been so expertly marketed that the value of this trade is set to rise to over $200billion (£173billion) globally by 2034.
This degrading trade flourishes thanks to the legal activism of surrogacy agencies commonly founded by lawyers. In 1993 a US legal case assigned ownership rights of the baby to the ‘commissioning parents’ – meaning that the fertilised embryos and the resulting children were the legal property of the buyer. The woman giving birth to the children became no more than a receptacle for rent. All legal right to parenthood or access was removed for these women.
Just two years later, the first US agency providing babies for homosexual men was founded, sparking the ‘gayby boom’. By 2024 five million children belonged to LGBTQ parents in America.
Today, Circle Surrogacy, one of the largest and oldest US surrogacy agencies, serving gay and heterosexual individuals, supplies babies to LGBTQ singles, couples and throuples in 73 countries.
Though commercial surrogacy is illegal in the UK, Canada and Australia, the payment of ‘expenses’ to surrogates means it is permitted in practice.
These laws don’t stop citizens buying babies overseas – which is banned, for example, in India, Russia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Vietnam and Slovakia.
The go-to destination is now the US. Surrogacy is a national disgrace which should shame America as much as transatlantic slavery once did.
The issue is not one of left or right but of right and wrong. It is wrong to price and sell human beings.
Now, to add to an already immoral and dehumanising trade, Sam Altman of OpenAI is promoting the AI-driven gene editing of the unborn. Altman and his ‘husband’ Oliver Mulherin, who bought a baby in February, are now funding a startup whose research promises the creation of designer babies. Brave New World has arrived.
If you think this is a dystopian fantasy, think again. The first AI-edited baby has already been born, with IVF optimised by an algorithm. The parents told Newsweek how a new IVF procedure powered entirely by artificial intelligence made the ‘impossible’ a reality. Altman’s innovation will allow preferences to be precisely selected – as if selecting options on a new car. His technology will ‘refine’ surrogacy into human factory farming.
Each shocking claim about surrogacy reveals an even more horrifying reality. Each shares the same root – the reduction of human life to a consumer transaction.
Source: Surrogacy is the wicked trafficking of babies, so why do we tolerate it? – The Conservative Woman