Crisis in UK’s rent-a-womb sector

Although there is a law in Britain which prevents people from actually paying a woman for the use of her womb they are able to pay her “expenses” upto around 10,000 pounds.

There are two types of surrogates. In one type the surrogate mother, carries a child that is not genetically hers.

She is implanted with an embryo usually from the intended parents’ egg and sperm.

In the more usual type the surrogate mother inseminates herself with the intended father’s sperm, so the child she carries and then gives up is half her own.

Childlessness Overcome Through Surrogacy (COTS), a voluntary organisation that arranges surrogate parenthood, says that there have been around 200 successful cases of surrogacy in the last few years and that they have a 97 per cent success rate: i.e. 7 per cent women who act as surrogate mothers have carried the child to full term and handed it over to the parents for whom they carried the child. Only last week a 41-year-old woman handed over triplets to a couple for whom she had played surrogate mother. The recent crisis, however, follows the case of one surrogate mother, who only weeks into the pregnancy has decided that she will not be giving up the baby to the couple she is carrying the baby for. She is within her rights, since in UK, the surrogate mother is the “legal” mother, whether or not the child is her’s genetically. Karen Roche, a British nurse was paid 12,000 pounds to carry a child for a Dutch Surrogate motherÃ?couple, Sonja and Clemens Peters. Somewhere along the way, Roche, who is married with two children, decided that the Peters were unfit to be parents.

So she announced that she had terminated the pregnancy, which ended her contract with them. In the face of condemnation in Britain’s tabloid press, Roche admitted that she had not terminated the pregnancy, but that she intended to keep the child. Under British laws she is within her rights and Peters, who is the natural father of the child, has none. In fact, Roche’s husband is the child’s legal father.

Following this case the demand for “tighter regulation’ of surrogacy has grown. However, the larger problem of “how money will pay for child” does not appear to be adequately addressed. Couples pay large sums of money for various types of fertility treatment in order to have a child. With the development of new techniques it is now possible for would-be parents to choose the sex of their child or to have identical twins.

While less than 20 per cent of IVF treatments are successful people still spend thousands of pounds in order to have their “own” child. The case of women in their 50s who have had children through such treatments, and of a woman who carried eight foetuses, none of which survived, have focused attention on the extent to which women are willing to go to have children.

And while Britain has comparatively strict regulations, there is nothing that can prevent women from going abroad to receive treatments that they would not receive here. Advances in medical science, it appears, have only assisted the traditional beliefs which treat childlessness as a tragedy, and lays great emphasis on “natural motherhood”. Adoption, as an alternative to childlessness, hardly figures in the debate over the ethics of surrogacy, and different forms of fertility treatments. But, in societies so dominated by the right to buy this is no surprise.