The dark reality of surrogacy

I was a twin when I was born, but this was in the days before decent scans and proper neonatal intensive care, and we were more than two months premature, so not long afterwards, my twin died. As a child, I thought nothing of it. It simply wasn’t relevant. But when I was drifting around America in my early twenties, the subject came up one day in conversation. A Texan friend asked me: ‘Do you miss your twin?’ I turned to her, meaning to laugh at the daft question, but instead, embarrassingly, I cried. And I’ve known ever since, whether I like it or not – and I really don’t, actually, because it sounds so sappy – that we form emotional ties in the womb, and that when they’re severed, we feelthe loss. And I’m afraid this makes me completely, icily determined that we should not just casually relax the laws around surrogacy, as the Law Commission proposes, and the government seems set to do.

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I don’t mean that no one should ever carry a child for anyone else. We allow altruistic surrogacy here, and the payment of limited expenses to the birth mother. But the proposals – presented as a long-overdue overhaul of a cruel and outdated system – would put Britain on the road to American-style commercial surrogacy. ‘Commissioning parents’ would be able to pay more, and so the agencies would emerge, summoned by the smell of cash, trawling through Eastern Europe in search of cheap wombs to rent. This is actually the aim – there’s increasing demand for surrogate babies, says the Law Commission, and it’s a disgrace that supply falls short.