Society cannot ignore surrogacy
by Helen Gibson, Artillery Row:
Exploitation and dehumanisation are being normalised to a disturbing degree.
When I talk to people about surrogacy, I am usually met with a rather blank expression. “Oh, I’ve never really thought about that.”
Which begs the question, where do people think celebrities’ children are coming from? When you read yet another headline about a celebrity who has had a child “via surrogate”, do you think about what that means? Do you think about the mother, or the child? Children, as those of us who are parents know, do not grow on trees, nor get delivered by stork. What thought do you give to who the mother might be, and what becomes of her, in the arrangements so popularised by Kim Kardashian, Paris Hilton, Elton John and David Furnish, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas?
Monitoring cases of surrogacy, surrogacy agencies, and accounts which promote the practice, I am used to seeing shocking images every day. Women are referred to as “gestational carriers”; surrogate mothers refer to themselves as “microwaves”, “ovens” and “extreme babysitters”. Notable for their absence is usually any mention of the rights and needs of children, to say nothing of the societal implications for all women if surrogacy can become to be seen as something you can just ask a woman in your social circle to do for you.
Along with other campaigners, I have known for a while of several cases where grooming of the surrogate mother, and downright coercion, came into play in inducing the woman to carry a child for another couple. These instances are in the UK, where we supposedly have an “altruistic” model of surrogacy.
Yesterday, following a week of revelations which included a controversial YouTube influencer revealing he and his partner have had twins with a surrogate mother, I was left lost for words when I read an account in the Guardian’s US edition, about a woman who had embarked on a “surrogacy journey” via the “gracious” help of a friend.
The “help” had not been proffered by the woman in question. She had been put forward by her own husband. Written in the article, in black and white, were the following words: “the woman who graciously became our surrogate had been offered up for duty by her husband, a friend of my husband’s, hastily and without her knowledge.” The commissioning couple would later sell their home to be able to afford the mother’s surrogacy fees.
One does not have to be a specialist in coercive control to understand the dynamics of the situation. A man saw an opportunity to make tens of thousands of dollars, and he took it. To hell with the physical, emotional and mental cost to his wife; he decided, in that moment, that she would do this. What choice would she have had in such a family dynamic, married to such a man, to say no? The comment was made in a feature on the fertility treatment experiences of black women — more than 40 per cent of whom in the US, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, experience intimate partner physical violence in their lifetimes.
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