The “Parentage in the context of surrogacy” project is coming to an end.
At this last meeting of the Working Group, ICAMS, the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogacy, with its fifty member organisations on three continents, would like to address you one last time.
In its early stages, the draft convention you are working on was based on a biased survey that focused exclusively on the commissioning people and economic actors of what the HCCH itself recognises as a globalised market. The ‘persons primarily concerned’, i.e. women and children, were neglected and the organisations representing them were ignored.
Whether or not it is ratified by states, this convention, once finalised, will legitimise and boost a market that is inherently harmful to women and the children born of them.
Today, surrogacy is presented to the public in several misleading ways:
- The medical aura that falsely surrounds it. While only IVF and artificial insemination are medical practices of assisted reproduction, surrogacy, is wrongly listed among them.
- The supposed generosity and altruism of women. This tired stereotype is revived to facilitate the exploitation of women for the benefit of others.
- The myth of free and informed consent. Can we really consent to our own dehumanisation: to be reduced from a human being to a mere container; to be robbed of motherhood and then discarded after use? What kind of informed consent can there be when some of the drugs given to pregnant women are off-label (such as Lupron), and there are no scientific studies of their effects on women’s health?
- The intentional confusion about the roles involved in surrogacy. The biological process of pregnancy is carried out by the pregnant woman, who is therefore the biological mother. The commissioning parents who “donate” the sperm have only a genetic link to the newborn. As a complete external party to the pregnancy, they should never be called the biological parents.
- The deception, the intellectual fraud, that the child born to the surrogate mother is not her own and is not being sold or bought in the sense of the 1993 HCCH Convention on Intercountry Adoption, which makes a very clear distinction between adoption and the sale of children. The sale of children is characterised by the transfer of the future child to a third party before birth, which is indeed the case in surrogacy.
The impact of this misinformation can be seen in the real-life situations we hear about.
- In the middle of the street, a young man approached a young woman and said, “You are ‘re very beautiful. Would you be willing to donate your eggs to me so that I can have children who look like you?
- During a meal with friends, a young woman was approached by two of them who seriously and publicly asked her to be “their” surrogate mother.
It can also be seen in cases that are now before the courts: several former surrogate mothers have contacted our Coalition, seeking support in situations where they have been brutally excluded from the life of the child they gave birth to. These situations are interpreted by the courts as surrogacy and allow judgments exclusively in favour of the commissioning parents. The above cases occur in different national contexts where surrogacy is either altruistic, prohibited, mafia-like or commercial.
To the harmful consequences of this globalised practice must be added the problem of the children born of surrogacy, the often-impossible search for their origins, their complex situation, their conflicting loyalties to the ‘parents’ who raised them. There is also the case of children abandoned by the commissioning parents, which the Ukrainian official in charge of combating human trafficking estimated in 2019 to be “more than 50 per cent of the children entering Ukrainian orphanages each year”.
These examples show that any woman, regardless of her social category, can be considered as a potential surrogate in the service of a third party, in the sense that “women are made to have children and men are made to go to war”, as one pro-surrogacy activist, confidently, put it at a public meeting.
As early as 2015, and every year since then, feminist and human rights organisations united in our 2018 International Coalition have drawn the attention of the members of the expert and working groups, the Permanent Bureau and the member states to the harmful human consequences of the HCCH’s work on this issue. They also set themselves the task of revealing to the public the content of this project, which has been unfolding in total secrecy for more than 10 years.
Today, at the final stage of this long-term project, we renew our call for a better assessment of the impact of this work and its purpose as responsible individuals.
By participating in this draft convention, which aims to guarantee the effects of cross-border surrogacy contracts, you have the choice of siding with the advantaged social categories who resort to surrogacy to obtain a child, or, on the contrary, of courageously choosing the camp of the more vulnerable categories from which the women recruited for this practice are drawn. You can choose whether or not to contribute to the buying and selling of children.
The regulation of parentage, in a practice based on the dehumanisation of women and the transformation of children into objects of contract, does not protect children or women, but undermines the human rights of all for the benefit of the market. Slavery cannot be regulated; it must be abolished. And the cases of contemporary slavery have not led any international organisation to consider regulating it to limit its effects. Work towards the “progressive unification” of the rules of private international law must be done with respect for human dignity, the foundation of human rights, and not in response to a market whose ability to instrumentalise women and children is supported by its intense lobbying.