Surrogacy is a huge business – and an exploitative one
Here is some astonishing celebrity news. A beautiful actress has just handed over a gorgeous baby boy to her Mexican housekeeper. The star felt much sympathy for the woman because she was having difficulty conceiving, so offered to become her “gestational carrier”. The embryo from her housekeeper’s eggs was implanted into her body. “It felt like the right thing to do,” said the Oscar-nominated actress. As to the question of how much contact she will have with the child she carried, she declared it a private matter.
Obviously, this is a fantasy, because there is a general understanding that no woman in her right mind would go through pregnancy to give a child away unless there were some reward for doing so. There are exceptions to this surrogacy rule – where sisters carry a child to term for one another, for example – but such cases are rare.
In this country, commercial surrogacy is, thankfully, illegal. It’s still a muddle, however, because what is allowed are “altruistic” arrangements in which the surrogate can receive expenses, and there is no limit on what those may be.
What is clear, though, is that surrogacy more widely is becoming increasingly normalised through the celebrity circuit, with the actress Lily Collins, 35, and her husband, the film director Charlie McDowell, the latest to welcome a child this way.
We all know that infertility is painful, and speculation around Collins’s history of eating disorders meaning she could not conceive naturally is rife.
Still, one wonders why so many stars follow this path. Nicole Kidman, Sarah Jessica Parker, Grimes, Paris Hilton, Naomi Campbell and Rebel Wilson are just some of those who have used surrogates.
Famous gay couples such as Elton John and David Furnish have also done so. I know gay couples myself who had children this way and are fantastic parents, so clearly this is a complex issue. Lately, though, I have reeled at the sight of clips on social media of newborns being snatched away from their mothers – sorry “gestational carriers” – and placed on the bare chests of men who have paid for the children. These men often pose in hospital gowns and hairnets as though they in fact have just given birth.
We understand that newborns need skin-to-skin contact. It is awe-inspiring to see a tiny new creature make its way up to the breast. The body of the mother is what the baby knows before anything else, and many renowned psychotherapists and child development experts describe the first few weeks of an infant’s life as the fourth trimester.
This does not happen in surrogacy. We actually give dogs and cats more time with their offspring before we take them away. Well, say defenders of this practice, adult women make this choice, contracts are made and none of this should be anyone else’s concern. The truth, though, is that surrogacy is a huge business – and an exploitative one. Globally it is estimated to be worth almost $18 billion (£14.5 billion), according to research firm Global Market Insights, and is predicted to rise to $129 billion by 2032.
Between 5,000 to 20,000 babies are thought to be incubated to order annually. In some instances, they come from the most desperate of places and circumstances.
When the war in Ukraine started, some were woken up to the fact that many couples who had been using the conflict-ravaged nation’s women as surrogates were no longer able to pick up their products, sorry, babies. Not to be deterred, surrogacy firms simply moved their operations to nearby Georgia.
There have meanwhile been documented cases of “baby farms” and “factories” in both Thailand and India, among other countries, where women carrying children destined for other people have virtually been kept prisoner while pregnant.
Today, commercial surrogacy is booming in Mexico, Colombia and even parts of the United States.
And in Britain, there are moves led by Ruth Hunt, Baroness Hunt of Waltham Green, the woman who basically took Stonewall down the path of trans rights and self-ID, to liberalise surrogacy laws. It is almost as if she was put on this planet to undermine women’s rights wherever she could.
Put simply, there is no getting away from the fact that, in the end, this is about rich people – including single men – buying babies from poor women. There are even lawyers who specialise in making contracts between the prospective parents and the women whose bodies are being rented.
We live in a world where there is no longer any part of a woman’s body that is not for sale somewhere, somehow.
Some announcements on why this is happening seem dishonest. We know women do not want to screw up their bodies with pregnancy, so they outsource it. I could only find one actress, Lucy Liu, who was upfront about it. “It just seemed like the right option for me because I was working and I didn’t know when I was going to be able to stop,” she said.
And while there are indeed women who are glad to have carried a baby for someone else because of the money they have made, the stories that don’t make the front pages are the countless others who change their minds, or give birth to children with disabilities that the prospective parents reject.
It all begs the question: is it really everyone’s right to be able to have a baby? I often think of my own mother, who was adopted. She was a tiny baby when given up. How much of a choice did her mother have?
I don’t know the answer to that, but having been a “gestational carrier” myself, I have a deep unease about this burgeoning business of selling these seemingly – but really not at all – motherless children.