The recent decriminalisation here in the UK for abortion up to birth was a shocking reminder of how little value is placed on human life in the modern world. That so many MPs and so-called feminists saw this move as a protection of women’s rights simply highlights the appalling lack of care that exists surrounding the lives and rights of children. It is obvious to those with even an ounce of human kindness that allowing the termination of a full-term baby is infanticide, not a matter of women’s rights. But, time and again, we are seeing the protection of babies and children ignored in favour of adults who seek to harm them. When judges fail to jail paedophilic men, and senior politicians vote against the investigation of child rape gangs across the country, it seems obvious where the priorities of such authority figures lie.
And it is against this backdrop that the inhumane practice of surrogacy has been allowed to flourish, and to become a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide, despite the very clear damage that it causes to the children born through it and to the women whose bodies are used to facilitate it. Surrogacy, when a woman’s womb is effectively rented for the purposes of growing a child for someone else, is by its very definition a form of child trafficking. Yet, it is badged as an altruistic act, a simple matter of helping couples who are infertile, or celebrities who do not wish to ruin their bodies by carrying their own child, or gay couples and even single men — more on this later. Across the board, surrogacy is on the increase worldwide, including here in the UK.
After giving birth to my daughter, I remember vividly the overwhelming feelings that I was engulfed by the moment she was placed upon me, and I gazed into her eyes. Our connection was instant, and so fierce that it shocked me. It is the only feeling in the world that fits the phrase ‘true love’. Indeed, it is hard not to view childbirth as a miracle when one learns of the incredible processes that are triggered in the human body of mother and newborn at the precious moment of birth. For example, immediately after birth and during skin-to-skin contact, the mother’s body is flooded with oxytocin, a hormone often dubbed the ‘love hormone’, which has the practical purpose of contracting the uterus, but is also responsible for fostering the deep bond between mother and baby. The newborn baby, too, experiences a range of intense emotions, recognising instantly the voice, smell, and heartbeat of his or her mother, a familiarity that acts to lower the stress hormone cortisol, thus soothing the baby, while simultaneously regulating oxygen saturation and blood glucose levels. Equally fascinating, the mother’s breast adjusts — within minutes of the baby being placed upon it — to the perfect temperature for regulating that of her newborn, reducing risk of neonatal hypothermia. It is a cascade of physiological and magical processes to transition mother and baby into this next crucial phase of life.
Horrifyingly, in surrogacy, the newborn child is most commonly handed not to its birthing mother, but instead to what is termed the ‘commissioning parent’, more accurately described, I would suggest, as the ‘buyer’. Often, the buyer lays in faux post-birth position in a hospital bed, aping the experience of the surrogate, and waiting to be handed a child for which she has not laboured. And, as the child is handed to this person, within whom they have not spent the last nine months, that set of wondrous events described above, so essential for healthy attachment and development, is immediately thwarted. The child is deprived of a fundamental part of his or herself, from the first moments of birth. And the deprivation continues. The buyer’s body is not being flooded by the powerful oxytocin, the influence of which ensures that a mother who has just given birth can endure the intense strain and tiredness wrought by the early days, weeks, and months of motherhood. As such, the buyer may find it difficult to be patient and tender towards the infant during sleepless nights. This is likely, in turn, to cause deep distress to the child, already reeling from the separation from the baby’s birth mother, and now sensing irritability and impatience from the person providing their care.
The trauma infants experience when torn from their mothers is illustrated perfectly by the story of trans influencer couple, JosephRyanWayne, two men who have amassed a following of over 260,000 on TikTok, using videos of the twins they purchased through surrogacy. In this highly disturbing clip, one half of this questionable couple is filmed lying in a hospital bed, while a nurse places a newborn infant onto his bare, hairy chest. He encloses the child in his hands, resplendent with long, fake talons, as the child helplessly wails. The confused newborn desperately moves her little head around, mouth open, in search of her mother’s breast, but instead finds the coarse hirsuteness of this stranger’s chest — and all while being filmed for TikTok content. Personally, I think the child would be better raised by wolves than by this bizarre and grifting pair of oddities. Further content put out by the couple as the children have grown show a distinct lack of attachment between the babies and their so-called caregivers, exacerbated surely by the fact that their every moment is filmed for content.
There is a noticeable lack of research into the emotional and developmental impact of surrogacy on children, which is perhaps not surprising, given the dollar value of the industry. There is surely scant appetite within the industry for funding research that would likely show less than favourable outcomes. In fact, the internet is awash with articles and stories insisting that there is no psychological harm to children born via surrogacy. But the abundance of such apparently reassuring assertions online serves to heighten my suspicions rather than quell them. We know how common it is, after all, for tech giants to conspire with billion-dollar industries to suppress unfavourable information. Covid was a masterclass in exactly this.
I am inclined rather to take the word of Olivia Maurel, a woman born via traditional surrogacy, who has spoken out about the very real harm she has suffered directly as a result of the circumstances of her birth. Now a spokesperson of the Declaration of Casablanca, a global network of experts and survivors calling for the abolition of surrogacy, Olivia spoke at a conference in the Czech Republic’s Parliament, and used the analogy of ordering a car from a factory, picking the bits you might like or not, to describe the process of purchasing of babies through surrogacy. Now in her thirties and a mother herself, she goes on to describe the feelings of trauma and abandonment that have dogged her entire life, and which led her onto the path of alcoholism and addiction, and even attempts at taking her own life. Olivia is not alone. I have been corresponding with Olivia, and she has told me that she is in regular contact with men and women across the world who have experienced identical ‘emotional architecture’. They each describe “an early, wordless sense of strangeness, a difficulty with trust and attachment, deep questions of identity, and a grief we carried long before we had a name for it”.
Giving birth to her own children brought Olivia immense joy, but also a “brutal clarity [of] what had been taken” from her. She described in the most beautiful way the moments shared by mother and baby after birth as “biology writing poetry”. To deny a child these moments is an immense cruelty. What becomes obvious through Olivia’s words is that the entire notion of surrogacy ignores the humanity and spirituality present in the bond between a baby and its mother, through pregnancy, and through birth, and through the life of the growing child. Instead, in surrogacy, the woman who carries the child is referred to as a “gestational carrier”, a deliberate removal of the more emotionally connected and humane word “mother”, and that deep spiritual bond is severed at the most critical moment. The selfish desires of grown adults are indulged at the lifelong expense of the child.
In this clip, we see a buyer at the business end of the birth (thank you to @surrogConcern for keeping receipts), the surrogate a mere prop in the background, as she births a perfect newborn, only for it to be taken immediately from between her legs, and handed to a stranger, whose voice, heartbeat, and smell the baby does not know. Shared as an inspirational story, we are in fact witnessing an act of abuse: a primal trauma to the newborn child. The couple in this video appear like children, playing an elaborate game of ‘Mummies and Daddies’, a theatrical production to affirm their delusions of new parenthood. As the ‘mummy’ smiles wistfully at the camera, with makeup perfectly applied and with her ‘babe’ in arms, the poor newborn child is already, in those first moments of life, experiencing panic, confusion, and trauma. And, while ‘daddy’ busies himself uploading the most flattering snaps to social media, the baby’s distress is growing.
It is not just wealthy heterosexual couples and celebrities fulfilling their selfish desires. There are, too, a growing number of gay couples purchasing children through surrogacy, as well as single people — including, very worryingly, many single men, many of whom are in their 50s and 60s. This scenario actively and deliberately subjects the child to a life with no mother at all — not even an adoptive one. The child’s needs are immaterial as far as these men are concerned. Alan White, a representative from pro-surrogacy organisation Surrogacy UK said the quiet part out loud, and somewhat misogynistically, when he asserted that, “As a society, perhaps we’re more used to considering maternal instinct than we are paternal instinct, but the desire to become a parent can be strong whether you’re a man or a woman”. Indeed, Alan, but the needs of the child should always trump those of selfish men who want what they should not be allowed to have.
Of course, questions should be asked about why these men want to be sole caregivers of helpless babies, and one very sinister reason springs easily to mind. In yet another spectacular failure to prioritise the safeguarding of children, evidence is building that this sinister reason is, in more than a few cases, spot on. With zero requirement for background checks, surrogacy provides a means for paedophiles to literally purchase children, who are then trapped legally as the wards of men who pose massive risk to them. Consider the fate of one poor child who was purchased from an Indian surrogate mother by a single Israeli man. As if her situation were not dire enough, it has since been exposed that the man, now a ‘father’ to the poor little girl, had previously served an 18-month prison term for sexual abuse of children under his supervision. Although alarmed by the situation, authorities in Israel and India have no recourse to remove the little girl from his care, because they cannot prove that she has, as yet, suffered any abuse.
This is far from an isolated case. Back in 2014, Australian Peter Truong, along with his American partner, Mark Newton, were convicted of multiple offences relating to the sexual abuse of their young son, who had been purchased as a newborn via surrogacy. The litany of the abuse this poor little boy suffered is hard to read. Not only did the couple sexually abuse the tiny boy, but they flew him around the world to be abused by other vicious paedophiles, and distributed thousands of child abuse images worldwide, essentially running an entire child abuse business.
Were they just a couple of bad apples? Sadly not. Jo Erik Brøyn, a Norwegian psychiatrist, purchased two baby boys from an Indian surrogate, and he was later convicted for possessing 200,000 pictures and 4,000 hours of video of children being sexually abused.
And what about Logan Riley and Brandon Mitchell, a gay couple from Pennsylvania, who have purchased a baby boy via surrogacy, despite the fact that Mitchell is a convicted sex offender?
The list goes on. While it seems obvious to rationally-minded people that single men who seek to buy babies might have worse than fatherly intentions, the industry seems not to care. Dispensing of the mothers who give birth to these babies allows predatory men free rein.
As if the situation was not bad enough, yet another deeply troubling safeguarding issue now exists around surrogacy, and it has to do with the change to the abortion laws that we touched upon in the introduction. Surrogacy is legal in the UK, but it is illegal to profit from it, and as such, surrogacy contracts are not enforceable by courts. While the possibility of the birthing mother changing her mind on handing over the baby has always existed in cases of surrogacy, what happens if those who have commissioned the pregnancy change their minds? In the UK now, there is a very real possibility that a woman acting as a surrogate and faced with the financial responsibility of keeping a baby that she was intending to hand to someone else may utilise the horrific protection offered by the decriminalisation of aborting a baby right up until term.
It is truly hard to fathom how such an important life and death issue can be so precariously regulated. We do not allow puppies and kittens to be removed from their birth mothers until they are eight weeks old, and yet it is deemed ethical for a newborn human child to be exposed to one of the most traumatising events possible for a baby under the false pretence of kindness.
Children are not accessories, and to have one is not an inherent human right. The business of surrogacy is just one more step in the dehumanisation of the process of pregnancy and birth. Many, I’m sure, who have less than savoury motives for wishing to obtain a child (see above), would wish that the need for other humans to be involved in the process could be eliminated altogether. Frighteningly, this wish may, if the mad scientists who pursue this exact agenda are not stopped, come true.
In 2022, two students from the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel created something close to a human embryo “without eggs, sperm, or a womb”. Hailed as a major breakthrough for research on “genetic disorders and the biological causes of recurrent miscarriage”, it could instead, one might argue, be viewed as a leap towards a dystopian nightmare. Current legislation in the UK prevents the continuation of experiments on embryos beyond 14 days, a limit enshrined in law by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990. The 14-day rule within this act was adopted by most countries around the world where human embryo research is carried out. But laws can be changed, bent to the will of those with the power to do so. Hence, we have the hideous abortion law amendment of recent times.
And now, with current embryonic research so limited, we are already seeing pressure by those mad scientists to enact a change to this 14-day restriction, in favour of extending it so that human embryos, life itself, you might say, can be experimented upon. Of course, as with all detestable proposals put forward by scientists and politicians — think the Assisted Dying Bill — the extension to the 14-day rule is being presented as an altruistic move to “gain a better understanding of healthy development and miscarriages”.
But in the same way that Kim Leadbeater and Co. ran rough shod over safeguards that were originally built into the Assisted Dying Bill, it is no stretch to imagine that the same slippery slope would come into play within the field of embryonic research. Danielle Hamm, Director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, states that the “advanced state of science and changing social norms [emphasis added]”, are reasons they can now consider extending the 14-day rule. The not-so-gentle nudging towards transhumanism has been obvious for some time now. We have been bombarded by talk of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and robots, transgender ideology, and babies born by surrogacy, all working towards ebbing away at the sanctity of human life. And so, social norms, they hope, now dictate that human embryos are fair game for the monstrous ideas that swill around the brains of mad scientists and corporations who see dollar signs instead of human beings. How long until all restrictions are removed, and babies are grown to order in labs, sold to whoever has the money to pay?
Surrogacy, despite its horror, does at least require the involvement of a woman to supply an egg and carry the child, and a man to supply the sperm. But surrogacy has acted as a gateway, shifting public perception about the acceptability of babies being traded as a commodity, and therefore making palatable the possibility of this new, clinical, and profitable stream of supply. The growing of babies without the need for eggs, sperm, or wombs removes the essence and spirituality of procreation, and turns it instead into a factory process; a production line. In short, we are edging ever further to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
Just because something can be done does not mean it should be done. We are truly in the realms of science fiction horror, and we must wake the world up to the dangers that transhumanism poses. We can start with ending surrogacy. Transactions, contracts, and invoices should have no place in the process of pregnancy and birth.
In Part 2, I will look at another disturbing element of surrogacy: the exploitation of the women whose wombs are rented to fulfil the desires of those who can pay them. We will look at the increased risk to the women’s health, and the demographics of those who are targeted: often the poor and vulnerable. And we will examine the lack of any safeguarding as young women are targeted by direct advertising, promising high sums for harvesting their eggs.