Older single men are using surrogacy to purchase children without a background check: report
by Jonathon Van Maren, The Bridgehead:
An incredibly disturbing report in the Mail on Sunday reveals, once again, the dangers of surrogacy and the social chaos that results from the commodification of children and the redefinition of the family.
According to the Daily Mail:
Almost 300 men aged over 50 have applied to become the legal father of a surrogate child over the past five years – and 43 of them are over 60, new figures reveal. And a total of 95 single men applied to become a parent, reflecting a growing trend in men, especially older men, having babies alone with the help of surrogates. Since the law changed in 2019 to give single people the same surrogacy rights as couple, there have been 2,162 applications from intended parents in England. A total of 293 would-be fathers are over 50, both solo and in couples, according to figures released following a Freedom of Information Act application from The Mail on Sunday.
Think about that hard for a moment: single, middle-aged men are renting women to gestate the children they have purchased and then becoming the legal, single parents of those children. As chair of the Women’s Policy Centre Paola Diana stated in response to the news:
Single men over 60 are increasingly applying to have children with help from surrogates since law change. This should be highly concerning. Who is checking that those men are not paedophiles? No one. That’s one of the many problems of surrogacy.
The LGBT movement has long fought for the right to utilize IVF and surrogacy in order to acquire the children that they cannot conceive naturally – organizations such as the high profile activist group “Men Having Babies,” which states on its website:
Central to our fight for more equitable access to parenting options is what we know from our combined experiences: The anguish and yearning that same-sex couples and singles feel due to their inability to reproduce without medical intervention is equal to the anguish of heterosexual couples who suffer from “medical infertility.”
The first time I covered the group “Men Having Babies” which, among other things, seeks to redefine “infertility” as not a medical condition but merely the state of childlessness, I missed that very significant phrase: “and singles.”
The LGBT movement has successfully won the battle for public opinion on the issue of same-sex couples raising children (either motherless or fatherless) – but I suspect that many folks would be uncomfortable with the idea of middle-aged, single men being able to acquire children without background checks (which are required for adoption or foster care) or any real hoops whatsoever beyond the ability to write a big enough cheque.