by Tony Rucinski, Right Times
A Westminster Hall debate on Monday will decide whether a birth certificate should record who a child actually came from, or what was merely arranged
At 4:30pm on Monday afternoon, in Westminster Hall, MPs will debate a proposal to remove legal motherhood from the woman who gives birth to her child. Erasing the mother before her daughter’s first breath.
That’s not how it’s being described of course. E-petition 763161 asks that ‘intended parents in surrogacy arrangements are recognised as their child’s legal parents from birth’. More than 113,000 people signed the petition. It’s being framed as an administrative kindness. Families, it says, ‘should not have to go through months of court proceedings and social worker visits, in order to be recognised as the parents of a child they planned and love’. Read those words very carefully. ‘Planned’, ‘love’, ‘recognised’. Each word focuses around the two male adult petitioners, not the woman who was pregnant with the child or the needs of that child.
The thing is, parenthood is not an empty chair that the law leaves waiting. It is always biologically occupied. Section 33 of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 says that the woman who carried the child, ‘and no other woman, is to be treated as the mother of the child’. So there is no way to install someone else at birth without removing her first. The petition is quite open about who is in the way. Throughout the text, the woman who carries and bears the child gets one mention: ‘under current law, the surrogate is automatically recognised as the legal mother … even with no biological connection or intention to parent the child.’
The child’s actual mother – the one who struggle in labour with her – is the problem to be solved.