by David Shipley, Spectator
Should single men be allowed to buy a baby? Obviously not, you might think. But since 2019 British men have been legally allowed to obtain a child though the surrogacy process.
When a baby is born to a surrogate, they are often taken from their mother shortly afterwards, to prevent infant and mother bonding (in this country it is illegal to take a puppy from its mother before it is eight weeks old). A man can then apply for a ‘parental order’, in which a court will legally make them the child’s parent, without the full checks which an adoption would require. In the UK it is illegal to ‘pay’ a woman to be a surrogate but ‘reasonable expenses’ are typically between £10,000 to £15,000 – and can exceed £20,000.
We know that men are vastly more likely to abuse unrelated children than women are. We know that 91.3 per cent of child sexual abusers are male. And we know that paedophiles relentlessly seek out opportunities to access victims
And this only applies in the UK. Almost three-quarters of parental orders are now granted in relation to babies born abroad. This means that people are going overseas and buying babies via commercial surrogacy, circumventing the British ban on this practice. A British ‘surrogacy agency’, My Surrogacy Journey, now operates in Mexico City, where they arrange for Brits to pay Mexican women around £14,000 to go through pregnancy and birth before selling their baby.
Kay King, My Surrogacy Journey’s ‘head of ethics’, defended this policy to me, saying ‘we operate in Mexico City because [they] have one of the most progressive laws around surrogacy.’ When I asked her what she meant by this, she explained that Mexico City doesn’t even require the equivalent of the UK’s parental orders. Instead, birth certificates are produced which list the surrogate along with ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two’. King clearly thought Mexico City’s lack of even the most cursory legal oversight was a good thing. She did tell me that all the ‘surrogates’ they work with in Mexico ‘are financially, psychologically and clinically screened… we would not work with surrogates who were financially reliant on surrogacy for their financial wellbeing.’
This didn’t convince me. If these women truly longed to ‘purpose their reproductive rights for the benefit of family building’, as King put it, then money wouldn’t need to change hands at all. It reminds me of the ‘happy whore’ narratives, where people try to convince themselves that women aren’t driven to sex work by desperation.