ICAMS calls on the members of the HCCH working group at each session
For the attention of the members of the HCCH Parentage / Surrogacy Project
Working Group
Paris, 4 November 2024
Dear Ladies and Gentlemen
For this 3rd meeting of the Working Group on the Project on Parentage, including that linked to international surrogacy, we come to you again in your capacity as a member of this Group and as a representative of your State.
As at the beginning of your work, we ask you to take into account the human rights of women, especially those who act as surrogate mothers, and the human rights of children, especially those born to surrogate mothers. Surrogacy violates these rights.
No women’s liberation movement has ever called for the legalisation of surrogacy. No movement for children’s rights has ever called for children to be brought into the world under contract, in exchange for money. The only people who want to regulate this violent and dehumanising practice are the entrepreneurs who profit from it – and those profits, as you know, are enormous.
Unfortunately, while the stated intention of the HCCH was not to support the market, the work initiated by the conference has encouraged the development of a globalised market in which the trafficking of women and children is increasing, particularly in connection with or in countries where the practice is legal. Traffickers and their legal advisers openly rely on the HCCH to launder trafficking.
Even today, in Argentina, to satisfy surrogacy clients, pregnant women are taken to Colombia to give birth; mothers who have just given birth are taken to European countries so that the children born under contract can leave the country; adoption contracts are extorted from defenceless young mothers by unscrupulous lawyers; newborn babies are ruthlessly transported across borders in illegal conditions, exposing them to numerous risks. Clinics, agencies, lawyers and notaries (both in Argentina and in the clients’ countries of origin) profit handsomely from all this.
In the United States, clients unhappy with the premature birth of their twins (which they wanted in a multiple pregnancy) ask for them to be allowed to die so as not to risk future health problems; moreover, these clients have contracted two ‘surrogate mothers’ at the same time and are expecting more children. All this is legal. But it’s the sale of children and the right to life and death over vulnerable human beings.
We hope that we can count on your diligence and commitment to human rights to understand that this project promotes a practice that is harmful to women and children, and to the human rights of all.
Yours sincerely.