Mick Hartley

Victoria Smith in the Telegraph:

According to Meghan Trainor, surrogacy “is not something to whisper about or judge”. Then again, she would say that. The singer has just announced the arrival of a third child, Mikey Moon, born via surrogate. An Instagram post shows Trainor in a hospital bed, tears of joy in her eyes as she clutches her recent purchase. 

Somewhere out of shot is another woman, unphotogenically awaiting the trials of the post-partum stage. 

Newsweek reports that Trainor has faced “an onslaught of hate” following her announcement. The language here, and in other pieces decrying the “loaded discourse” of critics, hints at something irrational, if not downright mean.…

One of the oddities of today’s politics is the way in which rich people renting the wombs and buying the babies of the poor has been coded as progressive, while any criticism is cast as mean-spirited and unempathetic. 

Those who judge posh white ladies for hiring cleaners, and respond to any safeguarding concern with the retort that children are not property, tend to be at home with this extreme manifestation of privilege and reduction of humans to purchasable commodities. 

Yet as the sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman argues: “we have in every every pregnant woman the living proof that individuals do not enter the world as autonomous, atomistic, isolated beings, but begin socially, begin connected”. This is not a connection that can be bought or sold. 

The surrogacy process is by its very nature dehumanising, no matter how pretty the “commissioning parent” looks on Instagram. In her 1998 piece on the Baby M case, Katha Pollitt noted that when the woman involved “signed her contract, she was promising something it is not in anyone’s power to promise: not to fall in love with her baby”. 

Surrogates are encouraged to switch off feelings, to view their pregnancies as “extreme babysitting” and to “think of their wombs as carriers, bags, suitcases, something external to themselves”. 

“Extreme babysitting”. Good lord. It’s human trafficking: the buying and selling of babies.