LAST week the House of Lords debated the adequacy of the law on the regulation of fertility treatments and broadly agreed it wasn’t fit for purpose.
Introduced by crossbench peer Baroness Ruth Deech, former chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), peers examined proposals for reform from two separate sources: the HFEA’s recommendations for updating the Human Fertilisation and Embryology (HFE) Act, and the proposals put forward by the Law Commission of England and Wales and the Scottish Law Commission for reform of surrogacy law.
Many stakeholders in the fertility sector have sought to dovetail these areas of law as part of a single programme of reproductive law reform.
But the distinction matters enormously. For years, organisations with a vested interest in liberalising surrogacy to exploit the market have attempted to present it as another ‘type’ of fertility treatment. The implication is that surrogacy should be considered alongside IVF under a single framework of assisted reproduction and ‘family creation’. This move aimed to pull surrogacy away from other forms of state-sanctioned parenthood, such as adoption and fostering, towards legal parenthood achieved through natural conception.
A straightforward packaging of reform of IVF and surrogacy law into a single legislative project would be the ideal result for many.
The examples of surrogacy arrangements in countries such as Ukraine and Nigeria – now the UK’s most popular surrogacy shopping destinations after America – illustrate how difficult it is to balance the desire for a child with the realities of economic inequality and exploitation.
In 2022, the government increased the maximum storage period for embryos, eggs and sperm from ten years to 55 years, subject to periodic consent renewal. Advocates celebrated this overnight change as expanding reproductive choice, but there was little public discussion regarding the practical consequences.
Up to an estimated 1.2million embryos in the UK may now remain preserved for decades. The physical space required to store them in vast banks of liquid nitrogen containers receives remarkably little attention.
Researchers have produced offspring from two male mice cells through sophisticated cell manipulation. We now see womb transplants in the UK from both living and deceased donors. One Chinese biologist, Dr He Jianku, was imprisoned and fined for breaching international ethics codes through the creation of genetically engineered babies created to avoid the passing on of HIV. He secretly recruited couples where the father had HIV and the mother did not and his experiment led to the birth of twin girls, Lulu and Nana, in 2018. A third anonymous gene-edited baby was born in 2019.
Around the world, a profitable fertility industry connects clinics, lawyers and brokers across international borders to facilitate the wishes of adults to make their ‘dreams come true’, with women reduced to egg providers and ‘gestational carriers’; the children are inevitably the ‘end product’ of a production line. Even the ‘two dad’ mice relied on a female mouse to give birth.
These concerns over surrogacy deserve far greater public attention as motherhood is increasingly being dissected into component parts. But so too are donor-conceived individuals, raising important questions about identity and the psychological consequences of being intentionally separated from your biological origins.
Just because we can does not mean we should.
Source: This iniquitous drive to sanitise surrogacy must be resisted – The Conservative Woman