Miriam Cates is right about surrogacy
by Helen Gibson, Artillery Row:
It is a fundamentally dishonest and exploitative practice.
Much ado in Westminster this week, following the revelation by Miriam Cates MP, in a wide ranging interview in The House Magazine, that, like Pope Francis, she supports a ban on surrogacy.
“Anger as top Tory MP and mum of three Miriam Cates calls for surrogate baby ban”, screamed a Daily Mail headline. And yet, looking at the responses to Ms Cates’ mild assertion that “to deliberately bring a child into the world in order to separate it from its mother at birth … is just ethically not acceptable” I didn’t see much anger, more indifference, if anything.
If this all seems a bit left field, or you’re coming to the issue of surrogacy afresh you would be forgiven for wondering why Ms Cates is exercised by it, or why it’s suddenly loomed in to focus in the media in recent weeks.
Surrogacy is illegal in most countries in the world, in all forms. Commercial surrogacy, where a woman is paid for surrogacy and adverts can be placed for surrogate mothers, is banned in the UK in favour of a so-called “altruistic” model. Surrogacy is only legal in a handful of US states and countries such as Mexico, Colombia, Georgia and Ukraine. It’s certainly not a standard global practice to which everyone concurs with the view of it being “just another way to have a family”, whatever its champions may tell themselves.
Responding to Ms Cates in the Daily Mail, Chairman of the surrogacy agency Surrogacy UK, Alan White, said “surrogates don’t see themselves as mothers, they see themselves as extreme baby-sitters or looking after someone’s baby and doing that wonderful thing of doing the part of having children women or gay men can’t do for themselves.”
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