Surrogacy: Our reproductive system is not a pick and mix for rich people to plunder

Screenshot from The Scotsman 11 November

This article was first published in the Scotsman on Saturday 11 November #BuyAPaper

Robbie Williams’ wife Adya has been uncharacteristically shy recently. She took to Instagram to tell her fans that her husband’s tell-all Netflix documentary – which aired on last Wednesday - made her feel “incredibly vulnerable”. “It feels like everyone’s kind of looking through my knicker drawer, Rob’s knicker drawer,” she said.

Williams is less reticent. Indeed, he spends much of the documentary in his underpants. And he is very open about the addiction and fragile mental health that has dogged him throughout his 30-year career. The film also takes an intimate look at his family life. He and his wife have four children, ranging in age from ten to three years old. The two youngest are surrogate babies.

“I ran out of juice,” William explained earlier this year with his typical frankness . “We had sperm and eggs frozen because we wanted to have more after our first two wonderful children…the surrogate was a very special woman, one of the most amazing people I have ever met in my life. We are forever grateful to her.

To paraphrase F Scott Fitzgerald, global celebrities like Williams are different from me and you. Buying a baby – buying two babies – is no different to buying a central London house for £17.5 million. Elton John and his partner David Furnish bought their two sons. Like Robbie Williams, Kim Kardashian used a surrogate for her third and fourth child. And a few months ago, Olympic diver Tom Daley and his husband announced the arrival of their second son in a national newspaper. The notice read: “Black-Daley on 28th March to Thomas Robert Daley and Dustin Lance Black, a son, Phoenix Rose.” No mention of the woman who had carried Phoenix Rose for nine months, before enduring childbirth simply to hand over her precious bundle to the celebrity couple.

Surrogacy is legal in Scotland, and the rest of the UK and is becoming more popular with each passing year. And there was a recent attempt to liberalise the rules governing it even further. In March, the Scottish Law Commission and the Law Commission for England and Wales published the outcome of their 2019 consultation ‘Building Families Through Surrogacy’, which set out a proposed programme of reform, including a draft bill.  Central to its changes is a recommendation to give the ‘commissioning’ parents legal parenthood from the point of birth, only giving the birth mother six weeks to change her mind.

The current Conservative government has just written to the Law Commission to say it won’t be taking forward their reforms, and any future government which attempts to turn the draft bill into law has a fight on its hands. Energised by the success of the grassroots campaign to stop gender self ID, women’s groups across Scotland are gearing up for their next battle.

One group Glasgow Tactical Feminists (GTF) has already started. They held a protest in Glasgow last month, which attracted hundreds of women, and they are now contacting Scottish MPs to raise the issue.  According to GTF, some elected representatives are apparently unaware that surrogacy law is reserved to Westminster.

Their spokeswoman, Julie McGee, holds no punches when describing surrogacy.
“It’s incompatible with human rights in the same way that countries all over the world recognise the sale of a kidney to be. It is an exploitative and dangerous practice for women with significant risks to health.    

“Surrogacy is modern day slavery. It commodifies both women and children, allowing them to be effectively sold through the exchange of money. Most women across the world who become surrogate mothers are poor.  Surrogacy is a form of human trafficking. It’s an exploitative practice and illegal in most countries.”

And just like the movement that grew up around opposition to self ID, so the campaign against surrogacy is an informal coalition of women’s organisations from across Scotland and the rest of the UK, as Julie explains, “We’re aware we have a long road ahead but stand united with other Scottish women’s grassroots feminist groups and with national groups including Surrogacy Concern and Stop Surrogacy Now UK.”

And it is not just surrogacy that feminists object to. Last week the Scottish government unveiled a slick PR campaign to persuade women, as young as eighteen years old, to donate their eggs. “Your egg…donation has the power to give the gift of becoming parents to those who need help to conceive,” coos one of the voiceovers on a social media ad, before the most unlikely government URL pops up: “Visit ‘eggsandsperm.scot’ to find out more”.

Helen Gibson, founder of Surrogacy Concern has written to Health Secretary Michael Mathieson, calling on him to ditch the campaign. As she explains. “These adverts are extremely concerning and represent a frankly dystopian misstep by the Scottish Government.

“Egg donation can be fatal and should not be being aggressively pursued through adverts by any organisation, let alone by a national government. The Scottish Government has, in its own words, identified a supply and demand problem for egg donors, which they are cynically turning to young women to fix. We have written to the Scottish Government and are calling on them to abandon this campaign immediately. We urge young women not to donate their eggs unless for their own planned future use...”

If Michael Mathieson survives the scandal of his recent £11,000 mobile phone bill, he might want to think again about the message the ‘egg donor’ campaign sends out to young women, because the message from women is clear: our bodies are not for sale. Our reproductive system is not a pick and mix. Our wombs should not be for hire.

Politicians may have been slow to realise that a powerful, self-confident women’s rights movement had emerged in Scotland in recent years.  But women who had never protested before are now on the verge of winning a major political battle over self ID. And they won’t stop there. Surrogacy. Egg harvesting. Prostitution. Violence against women and girls. The pay gap. The battle has just begun.