by Josephine Bartosch, The Critic
It cruelly commodifies female fertility
Are you a progressive, open-minded person? Do you believe in a future where everyone who wants a child should have one? Then the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology (POST) would like to hear from you about proposals to overhaul “outdated” laws on surrogacy. If you have qualms about making “access to surrogacy” easier, don’t bother: your kind of evidence probably isn’t welcome.
That message underpins POST’s latest call for evidence on surrogacy. POST bills itself as “an impartial research and knowledge exchange service,” feeding parliamentarians with “cutting-edge research evidence” on emerging science and social issues. Technology certainly supplies conundrums for academics and legislators to chew over, but the underlying moral questions remain exactly where they always were.
Nonetheless, it is understandable that surrogacy has captured politicians’ attention: Big Fertility has trickled down from the stretchmark-averse celebrity set to ordinary couples unable (or sometimes unwilling) to bear the inconvenience of pregnancy. A steady gush of heart-warming features showcases the winners of this brave new market — gay couples gifted “miracle babies” by altruistic sisters, or beaming straight “commissioning parents” extolling the virtues of the Mexican woman they’ve wrenched a newborn from. Yet for all the PR, some campaigners remain unmoved by the idea of reducing women to “gestational carriers” or severing the primal bond between a mother and her child.