Janice Turner on the fun new way to exploit and harm women:

At a trade fair called the Modern Family Show in a luxury London hotel I paid £32 to hear a PowerPoint presentation on how to buy a baby abroad. If you have $150,000 for a full “concierge service”, I was told, you send your embryos to be incubated by a stranger in America. But for a better “price point”, the hot new surrogacy destination, where UK agencies now have shiny clinics, is Mexico.

Oh dear god. Can you imagine it? For a luxury rent-a-woman go to the US, for a cheaper one go south of the border. Ugly enough yet?

Mexico has replaced India, which banned foreign surrogacy after village women were corralled into “baby farms”, and Thailand, which followed suit after the infamous case of baby Gammy, a boy with Down’s syndrome rejected by an Australian couple when their Buddhist surrogate refused to abort him. (They took his “normal” twin sister home.)

Ugly enough now?

…underlying our law is an important principle: paying women to gestate another’s child is inherently exploitative. France, Finland, Germany, Iceland and, last year, Italy have banned even altruistic surrogacy for this reason. So why do we still permit babies born of commercial deals between rich couples (plus, increasingly, single men) and impoverished Mexican women to be brought into Britain?

Probably because it’s only women who are harmed. Meh.

The global market in commercial surrogacy grows every year: from $14 billion in 2022 to $17.9 billion in 2023, to a projected $129 billion by 2032. At its centre lie two competing notions of rights. The liberal argument for surrogacy — as with assisted dying or prostitution — is that a woman can do with her body what she wishes. But surrogacy is freighted with power and privilege: did any wealthy woman ever birth a child for a poorer family? Whether from Mexico’s favelas or Manchester’s council estates, women are not gestational vessels for the rich.

Any more than they’re holes for sale to men.