A mere ‘gestational’ mother
Louise Perry on women as flowerpots:
Last month, the Law Commission published its long-awaited report on the legal status of the surrogacy industry. It contained – as expected – one particularly alarming recommendation. Alongside various tweaks to payment and regulation processes, the Commission suggests a crucial change to the parental status of a baby born by surrogacy.
At present, the woman who gives birth to the baby is considered to be that child’s legal parent, and the intended parents are obliged to apply for a parental order following birth. But if the Law Commission gets its way, the situation will be reversed. Although the surrogate will still have the right to object, the default presumption in law will be that she is not the child’s mother. In implementing this recommendation, the UK government would be making a clear statement on the nature not only of surrogacy, but also of motherhood: to put it bluntly, that it is both morally and legally acceptable to deliberately engineer the separation of mother and infant.
But it’s framed as permissible because the “surrogate” and the egg are separate.
Modern so-called ‘gestational’ surrogacy arrangements reduce the legal risk by weakening the surrogate mother’s claim to custody, since the baby is conceived using a separate egg donor, meaning that the woman is not genetically related to the baby she carries and gives birth to. Or as one surrogacy industry website puts it: ‘Gestational surrogates are not biologically related to the babies they carry at all.’
But such surrogacy cannot void the maternal relationship, because what on earth is pregnancy, if not ‘biological’? The child born to a mere ‘gestational’ mother comes into the world composed entirely of matter produced by her body, and craving her touch, voice and smell – the only things a newborn baby knows. It has long been recognised that maternal separation causes stress to newborns, potentially leading to permanent alterations to the brain. This is just as true for babies born via gestational surrogacy.
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When we decide that an egg donor has a better claim to motherhood than a surrogate, we are privileging the male-type relationship over the female-type relationship, much as in Aristotle’s ‘flowerpot theory’ of reproduction, in which the woman does nothing but supply the inert container. But anyone who has experienced pregnancy and motherhood, or observed it up close, will know that it is not merely a physical process. Which is why there is a recognition, even among defenders of the industry, that surrogacy can be emotionally difficult.
Blah blah blah, never mind all that, the man must have his shiny new baby.
In the UK it is illegal for a dog breeder to permanently separate a puppy from its mother if it is under eight weeks old. Yet the surrogacy industry has no such limits placed on it. And this despite the fact that the emotional bond between human mothers and babies is much stronger, by virtue of the fact that babies are much more vulnerable than puppies and so require more devoted maternal care, including – in the era before infant formula – round-the-clock breastfeeding.
Yeah yeah yeah. He ordered a baby, it’s his baby.
From the Louise Perry article as cited by OB above:
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From the year dot, sex roles in reproduction have been pretty obvious. Children usually show characteristics of both parents, which has led to pre-Mendelian ‘blending’ theories of inheritance; though Aristotle with his ‘flowerpot’ theory must have been a cranky and perverse old bugger.
For some Australian Aboriginal clans, the father’s role was minimal: merely ‘opening the way’ for the newborn to emerge from the mother whose role was obvious; on top of her other duties as general hunter-gatherer beast of burden; in the absence of any domesticable native animals such as donkeys..
Anyway, I have read Louise Perry’s original article in its entirety, but I am damned if I can see a way in for anti-TERF biological males to get involved in the surrogacy process in a way that allows them to be declared as the biological mothers of the infant/s so produced.
But no doubt they are working on it.
The genetic mother is giving a single cell from her body to the task of creating a new child, the surrogate mother is giving her entire body for nine months. It’s ludicrous that she is not the presumed mother.