by Julie Bindel, Spectator
Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, 57, is the man responsible for normalising gay male couples having babies via surrogacy. He is very keen on designer babies and last year it was revealed that he had paid a Miami model £50,000 to be the egg donor for his husband, Scott Hutchinson, 32, ‘to stop our baby being ugly’.
Scott used to be the boyfriend of his daughter Saffron, but the gay couple now also have children together. Between them, they have a number of children born via surrogacy. Both men have now been charged with human trafficking for sexual exploitation, rape, and sexual assault. They have strenuously denied the charges.
I debated Drewitt-Barlow on Woman’s Hour back in 2011; the subject of the debate was surrogacy. I am a staunch critic of what I refer to as ‘Big Fertility’. He, with his then partner Tony, had set up the British Surrogacy Centre that same year. It was a debate that left the famously unflappable late Jenni Murray ‘open mouthed’ – Drewitt-Barlow told a story about how, when someone had praised his children for their good looks, he had replied: ‘Well, you get what you pay for!’
The Drewitt-Barlows launched the British Surrogacy Centre to ‘advise and guide other same-sex and infertile couples through the process’ – signposting them to countries such as Mexico and the US, where commercial surrogacy is legal. When Elton John and David Furnish had their surrogate children, he gushed, ‘the more high profile the people using surrogacy to start their families, the more mainstream it becomes.’