Mick Hartley

Janice Turner in the Times:

At a trade fair called the Modern Family Show in a luxury London hotel I paid £32 to hear a PowerPoint presentation on how to buy a baby abroad. If you have $150,000 for a full “concierge service”, I was told, you send your embryos to be incubated by a stranger in America. But for a better “price point”, the hot new surrogacy destination, where UK agencies now have shiny clinics, is Mexico.

It is basic economics: GDP per capita in Mexico is $14,000, in the United States $82,000. The two Mexican states that in 2021 liberalised commercial surrogacy are dirt poor and one, Tabasco, has many migrants and indigenous people. In the outer favelas of sprawling Mexico City, millions of mothers struggle to raise their own children. Many will be tempted by the $4,000 to $8,000 offered to carry a westerner’s child — a bargain for the “commissioning parents”, who’d have to pay up to $60,000 to an American woman….

Commercial surrogacy is a dirty business. When I planned to visit Mexico to report on surrogate recruitment, many on the ground warned me of its links to violent human traffickers. Last year, in Argentina, prosecutors reported that “vulnerable women in conditions of economic deprivation” had been recruited on social media by criminal gangs, denied treatment for pregnancy complications and not paid, while the babies born for German couples were in poor health.

All pregnancies imperil the mother and, according to research by Queen’s University, Canada, gestational surrogacy involving heavy hormone treatment and embryo transfer trebles the risk of complications such as sepsis and pre-eclampsia. Surrogates are also offered bonuses to have riskier caesareans, even if medically unnecessary, for the convenience of western couples booking flights for the birth. Then there is the trauma of surrendering, while brimming with birth hormones, the baby you have carried, often within minutes.

Strange that the same liberals who worry about veal calves or if their coffee is ethically sourced see commercial surrogacy as the next progressive frontier. Gay men, who filled the Modern Family event, increasingly demand the “right” to have genetic children but, inconveniently, this still requires a woman who also has rights.

Is surrogacy perhaps the next battle for women, after the gender cult? Here's a hint:

Stonewall’s former chief executive Baroness (Ruth) Hunt has pledged to liberalise surrogacy law and lobbying is being conducted along the same lines as attempts to introduce gender self-ID: in behind-doors meetings with government officials, far from legislative scrutiny or public debate. In Mexico City, British clinic bosses have repeatedly met the British embassy in a bid to expedite UK passports for babies born there.

A political battle looms over a Law Commission report — which mainly consulted the surrogacy industry and would-be parents, while sidelining women’s groups — whose recommendations for legal reform came with an oven-ready white paper. The Tories rejected the lot. But in November, the women’s health minister Baroness Merron met the Law Commission, although she has so far declined meetings with women’s groups. So will Labour proceed?

For feminists, the report’s most worrying proposal is removing careful maternal protections inserted in law by the late Mary Warnock that make a surrogate the legal mother until a parental order is obtained. Reformers want those paying for the pregnancy to be default parents from the start, with the mother having six weeks — when she is probably recovering from the birth — in which to launch a legal bid to keep the baby.

The report also proposes unfettered advertising to recruit surrogates, lowering the minimum age to 21 and removing the important condition to protect a woman’s physical and mental wellbeing that she must already have her own child.

If more British surrogates are recruited, goes its slippery logic, fewer foreign women will be exploited. Working-class women will, as usual, be political collateral. Moreover, the report also wants to make it easier for foreign-born surrogate babies to be imported, by allowing would-be parents to start immigration paperwork pre-birth.

The global market in commercial surrogacy grows every year: from $14 billion in 2022 to $17.9 billion in 2023, to a projected $129 billion by 2032. At its centre lie two competing notions of rights. The liberal argument for surrogacy — as with assisted dying or prostitution — is that a woman can do with her body what she wishes. But surrogacy is freighted with power and privilege: did any wealthy woman ever birth a child for a poorer family? Whether from Mexico’s favelas or Manchester’s council estates, women are not gestational vessels for the rich.

Added on X:

At the Modern Family Show surrogacy expo, mentioned above, I was struck by how the women (vital to the whole process obv) were barely mentioned Except to say they were all health checked & told to stay off recreational drugs etc. ie good breeding stock. Pure Handmaid’s Tale