By Stefanie Bode, This article was adapted from the speech Stefanie gave at #FiLiA2021 during the UNsynced Panel.

The Latest Moves to Regulate “Surrogacy” on a Global Level

As feminists, we reject the idea that women can lease their bodies for a pregnancy; and that women can consent to the trafficking of their babies. No matter if this practice has the label of “altruistic” or “commercial” surrogacy.

It’s always harmful. It harms our health, it exploits our bodies; it’s dependent on global inequalities and makes them worse; it violates our dignity, our physical integrity and many others of our human rights. It is a form of slavery (of women and children), and obviously it’s violence against women and children. It makes babies into commodities. It’s very cruel and inhumane to women and babies to separate a baby from its mother.

So we want to stop the practice, worldwide. And this is also what the Declaration on Women’s Sex Based Rights is saying. Everything else is whitewashing of a highly abusive practice.

Around 10 years ago, some academics and lawyers who were involved before in the area of intercountry adoption started to claim that we need to create an international agreement that regulates “surrogacy”; but they didn’t mean a convention that says, the practice should be stopped, but a convention that delivers concepts of “surrogacy” being done in a good way. They think about a convention that is “neutral” towards the practice. But being neutral allows the industry to become more established.

In March 2021, the International Social Service, which is a global network that claims to protect children, launched an instrument to promote these ideas: the Verona Principles. And this is an example of what this camp has in mind when asking for an international agreement.

The Verona Principles claim to approach the issue from the perspective of the child. The authors have close ties to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, the intergovernmental organisation The Hague Conference on Private International Law, and the former UN Special Rapporteur on the Sale and Sexual Exploitation of Children, who was actually one of the driving forces behind this.

The Verona Principles embrace the view that “surrogacy” is not exploitive, if done in a specific way; for example, if not done in exchange of much money - a little bit is okay, but then it depends on how it is declared and when it is paid - and if the mother gives her “free consent”. They involve “safeguards” like:

-       criminal background checks of commissioning couples and the exploited women

-       psychological assessment and ongoing counseling for both parties (to check if the woman is resilient enough to survive the abuse)

-       and if the mother wants to keep her baby after it is born, she can go to a court which decides what is “in the best interest of the child”

People are being gaslighted into accepting the idea of “surrogacy” by such “safeguarding” rules.

Another means is to bring health professionals into the picture. For example, in Belgian fertility clinics, women being abused as “altruistic surrogates” are “supported” by a psychologist who talks to them. But having a psychologist holding your hand while you are being abused, doesn’t make the abuse any better. In fact, I think it even makes this system worse; it whitewashes it; it makes the gaslighting for the women involved even stronger.

Unfortunately, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child supports these Verona Principles. UNICEF recommends them in their new Child Protection Strategy. And the UN Population Fund even openly promoted the idea of “free choice” in “surrogacy” lately.

These regulation people say, the problems of “surrogacy” are:

-       commissioning couples changing their minds

-       exploited women changing their minds

-       differing legislations around the world (makes it all much more complicated for the buyers)

-       baby farms and other “abusive practices of surrogacy”

-       lack of screening of baby buyers or

-       lack of consent of the exploited women.

We say, “surrogacy” itself is the abuse. And you can solve all the other problems when you ban it, worldwide. States must send babies back to their first mothers. People who want to buy babies must be punished - harshly. And still pay for the living costs of these children. States must ban baby fairs and other advertisement of the industry. They must start educating the public.

And the UN - has to stop collaborating with this criminal industry and get in touch with real feminists.

Stefanie Bode is a radical feminist who graduated as a psychologist at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen Nuremberg in 2009, after having studied for two years at the University of Amsterdam. She trained as a cognitive behavioural psychologist at the Psychologische Hochschule Berlin and has been working for several years in the clinical field and in industry. She is currently writing a Master's thesis on 'surrogacy' in political science at the Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg. Stefanie is involved with WDI Germany. In her activism, she focuses on advocating against gender identity legislation and the practice of 'surrogacy'.