Kill The Mother part 2: Babies to Order

The NGOcracy wants to abolish motherhood. Raze it to the ground

The Law Commission announced this week that they’re recommending changes to British surrogacy law, with the effect of attenuating motherhood as a given, natural relationship and replacing it with “parenthood” as a legal, opt-in one.

Legal commentator Joshua Rozenberg reports on the new proposals, which he describes as aiming to keep commercial surrogacy arrangements off the table in the UK, but setting out a new presumption that the commissioning “parents” of a baby born in a surrogacy arrangement will have responsibility for the baby from birth. At present there’s a waiting period of around two months, and sometimes longer, as fitness for adoption is assessed after the baby is born on a case by case basis. The report proposes replacing this by a pre-conception assessment by dedicated evaluation bodies before surrogacy can proceed, and the idea is to tilt the presumption of parental responsibility away from a birth mother and toward the commissioning parents.

In effect, then, the Law Commission’s proposal amounts to abolishing the legal recognition of natural motherhood as a given relationship, along with the presumption that in all but the most exceptional circumstances the best place for a newborn baby is with the woman who gestated and gave birth to him or her.

This longstanding legal presumption is rooted in basic facts of our mammal nature. For while there are of course unfortunate situations where a mother isn’t able to care for her newborn baby, in in the normal course of things pregnancy doesn’t just create a baby, it creates a mother. Intricate mirroring physiological changes occur in both the developing baby and his or her mother, over the course of gestation, that primes both to remain profoundly interdependent long after birth and makes the natal mother almost always the person most attuned to the newborn baby, and best able to care for him or her.

This embodied and emotional dialectic of attunement and bonding is a core adaptive process that helps further the survival and healthy development of human infants, during their most vulnerable years. Saying so isn’t ideology, or sexism, or even homophobia; it’s acknowledging our nature as mammals. It mirrors the physiological norm across a great many mammal species, and is rightly (at least at present) recognised as a central fact of childbearing, and duly accorded weight in the law.

The current constrained provision for surrogacy arrangement in the United Kingdom forbids the pursuit of surrogacy as a commercial undertaking, and permits the transfer of parental authority only as a legal process post-birth. During this window the natural mother still has time to change her mind about handing over the baby. The presumption of motherhood remains with her. In a genuinely altruistic arrangement, we would assume her willing to relinquish this title. Even so, in my view this relatively careful provision takes the fundamental bond of natural motherhood too lightly.

We should be sceptical in the extreme of any proposal that suggests it might ever be “in the child’s best interests” to be conceived and gestated with the express intention of severing him or her from his natal mother. And yet here we are. The Law Commission has clearly already made up its mind on the matter.

Rozenberg publishes a comment from Nick Hopkins, family law commissioner at the Law Commission, who states that surrogacy agreements are growing more prevalent while the laws governing them are “outdated” and “not fit for purpose”. Rozenberg also describes the proposal as “unusually advanced”, including a press release, a summary and full report, a draft bill, and other supporting documents.

Clearly the Law Commission doesn’t intend this to be a recommendation so much as an oven-ready proposal to be rubber-stamped by Parliament. It has the strong whiff of fait accompli: a box-ticking exercise, to buttress a foregone legislative conclusion in favour of liberalisation. It’s not as though the physiological aspects of gestation, birth and maternal attachment have changed since this law was formulated. Nonetheless, the legal recognition of those physiological aspects is now regarded as “outdated”. Women’s bodies, and specifically our reproductive role and realities, must somehow be modernised away. And this follows a wearily familiar trajectory. As I’ve argued in Feminism Against Progress, when you try and liquefy an enduring, irreducible aspect of human nature in the name of freedom the result isn’t just more freedom. It’s also more trade, as more of human nature gets re-ordered to the exploitative, transactional domain of the market.

And the NGOs that make up our unelected simulacrum of “civil society” are almost all on board with this process. Just how rigged the game has been is evident in the way, as feminist campaigning group Nordic Model Now points out, that the consultation was heavily promoted among groups supportive of the proposed liberalisation, and not at all among women’s groups. NMW’s critique notes that the consultation itself acknowledged the large number of feminist consultation responses, most of which were wholly opposed to the proposals and wanted a complete ban on surrogacy. The Law Commission simply chose to ignore these, and listen instead to the voices of pro-liberalisation NGOs.

If that sounds like the way “self-ID” has been promoted by Stonewall and other unaccountable NGOs, over the heads of ordinary women, that’s because it’s the same picture. Hundreds of women wrote to the Law Commission with concerns about exploitation of women’s unique reproductive role by rich baby-buyers. We were ignored, because the permanent NGOcracy is wholly committed to “liberating” post-sex “humans” from the constraints of our bodies, even down to the source of life itself.

Sure, you can point to proposed “safeguards”, in this case in the form of a new pre-approval bureaucracy for surrogacy, as evidence of efforts to balance competing interests. But you can bet your bottom dollar that, just as with the medical gatekeeping provisions on Gender Recognition Certificates, it will be a scant few years before this bureaucracy is itself decried as “outdated” and the target of “modernisation”. Or, more likely, before the surrogacy regulation body simply becomes a target for capture by the same people who captured so many feminist institutions: people who simply do not see a problem with commissioning babies to order, like designer handbags.

It’s no use trying to stand still. Whether we’re talking about the normalisation of for-profit rape as “sex work”, the normalisation of for-profit baby-farming as “surrogacy” or the normalisation of for-profit human vivisection as “gender affirmative care”, it’s the same battle. A defence of women, as sexed, embodied beings; but also of the human as such, against the blind hunger of the machine.

We don’t have to abolish every technology, or try and realise a world without any form of buying and selling. But we have to leave behind the mute passivity of tech determinism, and its claim that human nature is a problem to be solved. We have to shake off the neoliberal conviction that There Is No Alternative to “free markets”. We have to re-discipline these phenomena according to human nature and human flourishing. And we can’t do this unless we find a way to gut the permanent NGOcracy currently hard at work ratcheting us down the slippery slope, in blithe disregard of the great many voices raised in urgent protest.