Rebel Wilson and the problem with surrogacy

When the Australian actor Rebel Wilson announced the birth of her daughter Royce Lillian, she added the small detail that she had been born by a ‘gorgeous‘ surrogate. Wilson expressed her gratitude to the woman who had carried the child for nine months before giving birth to her:

'Thank you for helping me start my own family, it’s an amazing gift. The BEST gift!!'

A child is a human being, and obviously not a ‘present’ – although Big Fertility would have us think differently. Wilson, who had tried IVF three times without success, said that her desire to have her own baby was ‘overwhelming‘.

So overwhelming that she thought borrowing another woman’s womb was perfectly acceptable.

How does a ‘commissioning parent’ think it feels for the birth mother to give up the baby they have gestated? The assumption is of course that the birth mother is completely detached from what is growing in her womb because she knows she’s going to have to give it away afterwards.

But that’s not how it works. I have interviewed women who entered into surrogacy arrangements only to be devastated and traumatised at having to give the baby up. When the embryo is the egg of another woman the birth mother has no genetic attachment to the baby. But the idea that she is not physically connected to the baby is ludicrous.

Rebel Wilson is rich enough to outsource her pregnancy, but actually, it is possible to exploit a woman in the global market, start to finish, for the price of a new car. These women are often desperate, pimped into surrogacy by abusive husbands.

Exploitation is not only evident in poorer nations, however. Some surrogates are struggling single mothers in the US, including those who have escaped domestic abuse and are living on trailer parks without any other income. Commercial surrogacy, in operation in California and other states across the US, allows advertising for egg donors and surrogates on public transport, billboards, and social media.

I’ve long argued that convincing people of the exploitation involved in surrogacy – whether altruistic or commercial – is harder than persuading them that prostitution is inherently abusive. With surrogacy, there is always an apparent happy ending, with a pink cheeked baby (they’re almost always white babies) being handed over to ecstatic-looking ‘commissioning parents’ by the birth mother, otherwise known as ‘the surrogate’, who simply looks happy and content to have done something wonderful, generous and selfless.

My research, conducted in several countries including India, Ukraine, the USA, Israel, and here in the UK has uncovered endemic exploitation, with babies becoming commodified and the women bearing them viewed as nothing but ‘carriers’, as per the common parlance used by surrogacy trade profiteers. Make no mistake – even with ‘not for profit’ surrogacy organisations and altruistic arrangements, there is money to be made. Here in the UK, it is considered absolutely fine to pay a surrogate mother up to £15,000 of expenses – which amounts to a salary for many low-paid and part-time working women. To suggest that the money isn’t the incentive even in cases of so-called ‘altruistic’ surrogacy is bonkers.

And then you have the third party brokers, who are profiteers set up as some kind of advice agency to signpost commissioning parents (I would rather call them baby buyers) to the two countries in which there is full and legal commercial surrogacy – and of course, charge healthy fees alongside a kickback at the profits end from the clinics.

No one has the right to their own biological child, and it is not homophobic to condemn gay male couples for seeking to rent the womb of a desperate woman. Yes, some people are infertile, and that includes men. This is a fact of life – not an illness or medical condition. It is also perfectly natural for pregnancy to become an impossibility for women once they hit their mid-forties and beyond. This is because childbearing is neither particularly healthy nor advisable for middle-aged and older women.

Tell that to 73-year-old TV journalist Jon Snow who, together with his 48-year-old wife, commissioned a baby through surrogacy. We are supposed to feel happy about this, blinded by child-induced sentimentality.

Supporting surrogacy is inconsistent with feminist and human rights principles. In renting the womb of a woman, her reproductive rights are removed.

It seems there is no part of a female body that cannot be turned to profit. There is trade in human milk in countries such as Cambodia; there is trade in human hair, particularly in villages in Ukraine and some parts of India; there is prostitution, and there is of course the rent-a-womb business.

Facebook recently ran an ad from the London Egg Bank urging women to ‘Freeze Your Eggs for Free‘. The deal is that women aged 35 and under (egg quality begins to decline at that age) ‘donate’ half of the eggs harvested – and the rest are frozen for her own later use.

The inside of a woman's body it's not a suitable workplace. Outsourcing pregnancy is exploitation, whether for expenses or a commercial rate. The fastest growing demographic of baby buyers are single men, but often women who consider pregnancy to be an inconvenience also use this exploitative method. We need to stigmatise the commercialisation of pregnancy and refuse to let sentimentality get in the way of women's human rights.