Response to the Parti socialiste editorial published in Libération.
We all bear the same scar in the centre of our abdomen. We scarcely notice it; it appears in our anatomy textbooks as a curiosity with no function, a hollow to be pierced or a lump that cosmetic surgery sometimes addresses. Yet this unremarkable mark is the most meaningful on the human body: it is the healed trace of a severed cord, the seal of an event that none of us chose and that we have all endured: having been contained, nourished and formed within a woman’s body, then separated from it. The navel is not an ornament; it is a signature. And it is this signature that the surrogacy industry sets out to erase, in every line of its contracts.
It proceeds through a two-pronged operation that must be named precisely. It reifies the scar by transforming a living relationship into a thing, a mother into a function, and an origin into a service. And it turns the womb into a pouch, reframing it as a detachable pocket, a container to be hired for a set period, as if the woman carrying the child were nothing more than a shopping bag from which one would remove the ‘purchases’ at the agreed time. Surrogacy objectifies the navel and turns the womb into a marsupial pouch. Your opinion piece carries out, in carefully chosen terms, these two acts, and that is why we must respond to it in the flesh.
The Parti socialiste, however, was well aware of this. In 2010, when your party came close to legalising this very practice, a paper by the Terra Nova Foundation – with the unequivocal title ‘Surrogate mothers: an extension of the realm of alienation’ – stood in the way, championed by leading socialist and feminist figures. Their conclusion: there is no such thing as ‘ethical’ surrogacy; regulation is a pipe dream; this fight ‘is not progressive’. Sixteen years on, you are not blazing any new trails. You are resurrecting what your predecessors had deemed unworthy. So let us be clear: on this issue, you are not feminists. One does not become a feminist by using the law to organise the provision of a woman for someone else’s project. And outside the law, we already have a name for those who do this: a pimp. Or, on the scale at which this industry thrives, a human trafficker. What you are proposing is to turn it into a recognised profession.
Here is the ruse that makes your entire text possible. You speak of ‘disposing of one’s body’ as if a woman possessed a body in the same way as a commodity: separable, negotiable, rentable. A woman does not have a body: she is her body. And pregnancy is not a matter of ‘hosting’: in women, the placenta is haemochorial, the most invasive form possible, in which the embryo’s tissues erode the uterine wall until they are bathed in the mother’s blood. For nine months, two organisms do not merely coexist: they merge, exchange cells and negotiate their immune responses. Cells from the child pass into the woman’s body and remain there for decades; science has been measuring this since 1996. The ‘clear separation’ that your contract promotes is a biological fiction. You do not rent a womb: you rent a woman. You do not trade in ‘a body’: you trade in a person. And not just one. Your contract brings three lives into play. The preagnat woman. The egg donor – you know, the other woman, the most invisible one, chosen from a catalogue, put on hormone treatment. And the child, to be delivered upon fulfilment of the agreement, literally the object of the transaction.
You condemn “the surrender of private life to market forces” in the very same opinion piece in which you call for a child to be promised before being conceived. The market you claim to be fleeing is the very one you are proposing. Divorce, contraception and abortion have given every woman power over her own life. Your surrogacy scheme does the opposite: it assigns women to others, and even threatens the very right to abortion that you claim to uphold, by giving commissioning parents contractual power over a woman’s pregnancy. One cannot be the master of one’s own body on a part-time basis: the very sovereignty that underpins the right to abortion prohibits any contract from turning that body into a disposable resource. Do not dare to claim these struggles as your own: you are their exact opposite.
“Decommodified”, you write. The agency is paid. The clinic is paid. The lawyer is paid. The only ones asked to give of themselves are those who provide the oocytes, who give birth and deliver the child. The Left denounces the market everywhere: in healthcare, culture and housing. How is it that, when it comes to women’s bodies, you suddenly become liberals again?
You want the State to be the “third-party guarantor of dignity”. But the State cannot stamp “dignified” on what remains the hiring out of a person: it does not make anything legitimate; it merely lends its authority to the transaction. And look at what your contract makes it guarantee: that a woman will hand over the child, whatever she may feel at the time of giving birth. Consent given even before insemination—regarding something one cannot possibly know one will feel on the day of the birth—is not consent: it is a renunciation extorted in advance. And it demands even more: that the woman distance herself from her pregnancy, that she remain detached from what is developing within her body, that she forbid herself from being the mother of the child she is carrying. In law, however, everything hinges on a distinction: on one side, people, who have rights; on the other, things, over which one has rights. Your contract shifts a woman and a child from the first side to the second; it treats them as property, whereas they are people.
You also boast about providing “support” for the surrogate mother. Let us be clear about what this aims to achieve: to condition a woman not to form an attachment to the child she is carrying. No species of mammal experiences such a planned separation: even the kangaroo, whose joey continues to develop outside the womb, in the pouch, keeps it close to its skin until it is ready. Surrogacy, on the other hand, makes separation a contractual clause, and treats postnatal depression not as just one risk amongst many, but as a structural consequence, programmed by the handover, which is contracted in advance.
Finally, you argue that parentage should be “established in advance by a court order”. But parentage determined before birth, by the sole will of the commissioning parents, is precisely the ‘contractualisation’ of the child that you claim to be fighting against, and it requires the erasure of the woman who gives birth – the mother in the most literal sense (Latin etymology: matrix, uterus, mother…).
You keep saying that the ban “affects children above all”. That is not true, and you know it. The child of a French father is French by blood; the Council of State ruled on this as far back as 2016, and the foreign certificate serves as proof for school and healthcare purposes. No child is a ‘ghost’. What you are demanding under the term ‘exequatur’ is not to protect the child but to record in our registers a parentage that erases the woman who gave birth and deprives the child of knowing their maternal lineage, embodied by the egg donor and the surrogate mother. Yet the child is entitled to the truth: a civil status record listing two fathers, or a ‘mother who did not carry the child’, is a lie certified by the State, which will be held against the child throughout their life. The navel, however, does not lie; the register must not contradict it. And the ECHR, which you keep brandishing, has never asked you to legalise anything: it recognises the right of states to ban surrogacy. Your ‘role models’, Denmark and Canada, mainly regularise ‘commercial’ surrogacy carried out elsewhere. And when you plead that we should not ‘pitch women against women’, it is your contract that places a class of women – the most vulnerable – at the service of another’s desire. And this hierarchy – do you call it sorority?
So let us state what your editorial fails to mention: the organisers are breaking the law. The agreement is null and void (Article 16-7 of the Civil Code), and acting as an intermediary is a criminal offence (Article 227-12). The answer is not to regularise or reward such practices, but to uphold public order and strengthen the ban, as called for by the 2024 European Directive, which classifies the exploitation of surrogacy as a form of human trafficking. The truly progressive path leads towards the abolition that your elders had called for. Securing the nationality of a child already born – yes, without reservation; falsifying their origin – never.
For the navel does not argue; it bears witness. It is the scar we all share, the silent proof that every life begins in a woman’s body and remains there, through the exchanged cells, long after the cord has been cut. For your industry to thrive, we must forget this mark and mistake the sponsors’ desire for the navel of the world, and women’s wombs for a pocket. But the scar resists oblivion just as flesh resists the contract. It re-inscribes the mother where she was meant to be erased, the origin where a service was sold, the bond where a clean break was promised. There is no possible regulation of what biology refuses to dissolve. There is only abolition, and, at the centre of every body, that small knot of flesh which has, since time immemorial, borne its reason.
CIAMS/ICASM, the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood.