This is a letter in response to the advertising by The Royal College of Midwives of a webinar under the title “Surrogacy: championing diversity” written by Matriactivista, Lead in Sexual and Reproductive Rights of Women at FiLiA. 

Sometimes when we get lost, we need to get back to the origin. Midwife means with woman. 

The oldest profession in the world despite the misogynistic beliefs is midwifery, but midwifery before being a profession is an act of sisterhood, in Spanish we used to call midwives, “comadrona” from the word comadre, which means “co-mother”.

Women’s freedom is directly proportional to that of their midwives and vice versa.

But midwives under patriarchy have been subjected to a cultural appropriation by the male reinterpretation of our reproductive processes, a subjugation to the “illustrated dogma” over the pragmatism of centuries of illiterate midwives applying the scientific method.

Midwives have lost themselves and their power in birth as much as women. Fast forward to the 21st  century and besides the many crisis midwives are battling they are now having to embrace in the name of progress what to me is the ultimate betrayal to themselves and therefore to us women. 

The push for a further eradication of any politics relating to our sex, by assimilating words such as gestating parent, birthing people or chestfeeding, is not only confusing but detrimental (Karleen  Gribble et al, 2022)

But to read now that on the 22nd of February “Michael and Wes” will give a workshop on surrogacy for the RCM under the subtitle Championing Diversity feels a step too far in how lost midwifery is getting.

Surrogacy is just a sanitized name for reproductive exploitation. Surrogacy is the sugarcoating to hide what privileged people do when using women, buying babies, enslaving the poor, abusing international loopholes in the law, and basically trafficking humans. 

Surrogacy is a pretend intellectualized explanation to justify the abomination of using a woman’s body to carry and birth a baby and then detach that baby from his/her mother with the impact this has for both of them . Something midwives  know perfectly well.

We seem to be overruling yet again our experiential scientific knowledge for a dogma, a dogma that yet again benefits the patriarchal order. 

We refuse to accept a world where my body can be hired, used or sold for the wishes of others. Quite  frankly I don’t care about what for, but when we are talking about surrogacy there is also the  consideration of the baby/babies. Babies who despite all the terminology, celebrity parents performing  a non-existing after labour scenario and videos with piano music are rendered products. Products  purchased cheap or easily or both in countries where women are worth next to nothing legally and  otherwise.

These babies as products purchased that no one claims were for example left behind in Ukraine.

Surrogacy is a dehumanizing practice that constitutes an embarrassment for our society. For  midwives to promote, support or endorse such practice is also anti-woman and to consider it  championing diversity when it is possible thanks to the oppression of women in the intersection of  class and quite often also race, it is just a lie.

The Royal College of Midwives seems lost but they have a pretty easy compass to find their way, all  they need to know is to look at their name, their identity, because our identity as women matters just  as much as anyone else’s.

Signed by:

Further reading, listening and watching

·       Original post from Royal College of Midwives: https://x.com/MidwivesRCM/status/1742879553133920504   

·       FiLiA blogs:

o   The Shocking Reality of Surrogacy

o   Why Surrogacy Should be Banned

o   Don’t buy, adopt (Stop Surrogacy Now)

o   Selling babies should be regarded as a scandal

o   A Thriving Industry of Surrogacy in the Global South Demonstrates its Harms for Women Everywhere

·       FiLiA podcast: Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation - FiLiA Conference 2019

·       Rally against Surrogacy Glasgow at FILIA event 2023 (YouTube)

·       Renate Klein (2017) Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation (available via the FiLiA bookshop)