A couple of weeks ago, a controversy broke out on twitter over Benjamin Cohen, CEO of Pink News, expressing his intention and desire to a rent a womb and how “oh so oppressed he is” because the NHS doesn’t provide gay male couples with free tests alongside free female bodies. Many feminists responded to the tweets with anger.
His vehement defence and eagerness to engage in this sex-specific form of bodily exploitation also called into question how much credibility his supposed belief that “Trans Women are Women” really held.
To explain why many feminists took offence to this, let’s take a look at what surrogacy actually entails. The majority of surrogacy that takes place is commercial. This is an industry worth $5.5 billion based on the exploitation of female reproductive functions.
Benjamin let us know that commercial surrogacy is illegal in the UK. It is true that you cannot legally pay a woman for surrogacy in the UK. You can however travel to poorer countries such as Ukraine and exploit women in desperate situations there. This is true for Ireland too. In fact, Ukraine, where the industry is largely unregulated, is the most popular destination for Irish couples.
Commercial surrogacy is when a woman, usually an impoverished woman, is paid to carry out a pregnancy. She must follow rules such as aborting the foetus should it fail to fit the buyer’s desires and forfeiting any legal entitlement to her baby once it is born. Unless of course the baby is born with an undesirable issue. Then it’s all on her to either raise the child she obviously cannot afford, hence why she applied for surrogacy in the first place, or to leave them to an orphanage.
There have been reports of severe maltreatment and abuse of surrogate mothers in Ukraine and the first ever probe into Russia’s legal commercial surrogacy industry saw 8 people arrested and charged with human trafficking.
Both India and Thailand have banned the availability of commercial surrogacy to foreigners due to the severe exploitation of the women and violation of the babies’ rights. This followed reports of the UN declaring that surrogacy usually amounts the sale of children. Unfortunately, many Indian surrogacy companies have found loopholes to get around this and due to COVID related job loss, Indian women are resorting to surrogacy and egg donation to survive.
This is a process that reduces women to their wombs and then commodifies them. Pregnancy becomes a service and babies are degraded to purchasable products. So yes. Quite understandably, feminists are against this.
Benjamin then attempted to make out that all surrogacy that takes place in Britain is ethical and based on long term friendships. This is laughable. Perhaps he should try telling that to this woman who was left with PTSD due to the ordeal and says this of her friends
“After the birth I was more or less completely abandoned by the intended parents…I was used for my uterus, and then discarded when I was no longer needed.”
Altruistic (unpaid) surrogacy is not only unethical by virtue of the fact that this ‘Handmaid’s Tale’-esque view and treatment of women is inherently dehumanising but also due to the health complications caused to both mother and child.
Surrogate mothers face increased risks of pregnancy complications. Some of these complications come with carrying multiple embryos, which is routinely done to surrogate mothers to increase the chances of success. The health risks faced by these women include ovarian torsion, reproductive cancers, stroke, premature menopause, placental abruption, death, the list goes on.
“Surrogacy babies” also face health risks such as low birth weight, prematurity and miscarriage.
The emotional toll on mother and child is significant too. The bond between mother and baby begins long before birth. A 2014 study found that surrogate mothers experience significant emotional attachment to the baby. It is odd that people who are clearly devastated that they cannot conceive of a child are so content to put another woman through the depression and grief that comes with carrying and growing a baby for 9 months only to have them stripped from you immediately upon birth.
For newborns, being separated from their mother causes intense stress. The stress experienced by the baby is heightened the longer they are separated and can lead to issues for the baby in the future. This is why the importance of skin-to-skin is so heavily emphasised. The baby has already bonded and become attached to the birth mother through hearing smell and touch. Hence why the companies involved in profiting from this violation of children’s rights advise the buyer’s to give the baby something with the mother’s scent, a “transitional item”. An attempt to quell the dysregulation and stress.
In what world can unnecessarily risking the health of women and children like this be considered ethical? In what world can this psychological abuse of newborn babies be regarded as an adult’s legal right?
Ultimately, there are very few women in the world who actually want to go through a pregnancy, with all its risks only to be left with no baby. That’s why so long as surrogacy demand continues to grow, poor, socially disadvantaged women will always account for the majority of women exploited.
Unfortunately, due to Benjamin’s inability to perceive women and babies as living breathing human beings, he deduced that the reason people are angry at his belief that he is entitled to use a woman’s body as an object must be because they’re homophobic bigots.
Every time feminists stand up in opposition against the oppression of women our motivations are always questioned. We couldn’t possibly oppose pornography because we care about the women abused in the making of it. We couldn’t possibly oppose self identification laws because of the violations of women’s sex-based rights. We couldn’t possibly oppose surrogacy because we care about the well being of women and children and don’t believe either should be commodified and traumatised.
No. Who could care about any of that? Obviously we’re really just jealous, transphobic or in this case homophobic.
In reality, accusing women of being homophobic for their opposition to surrogacy has only exposed Benjamin for his own narcissism. He truly thinks this all about him. Well, let’s put it very simply for him and all those who share his mindset.
Regardless of your sexuality, exploiting impoverished women, reducing them to mere conduits for babies and financially coercing them into undergoing this physically and emotionally distressing process is not a human right. Commodifying and child trafficking the baby back to your home country is not a human right. Using a woman as an incubator, putting her and the child at risk of serious health issues and then traumatising the newborn by stripping them from their mother at birth is not a human right.
It is a human rights violation. Women and children being the victims.
Student, 25, Radical Feminist. If you enjoyed her work, donate to this writer.