{"id":242689,"date":"2021-04-04T15:22:21","date_gmt":"2021-04-04T20:22:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=242689"},"modified":"2021-04-02T12:29:30","modified_gmt":"2021-04-02T17:29:30","slug":"experts-condemn-gestational-surrogacy-harmful-exploitative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/experts-condemn-gestational-surrogacy-harmful-exploitative\/","title":{"rendered":"Experts condemn gestational surrogacy as harmful to children, exploitative to women"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;\" class=\"sharethis-inline-share-buttons\" ><\/div><p>(<a href=\"https:\/\/c-fam.org\/friday_fax\/experts-condemn-gestational-surrogacy-as-harmful-to-children-exploitative-to-women\/\">WASHINGTON, D.C., C-Fam<\/a>) The state of New York quietly <a href=\"https:\/\/www.passblue.com\/2021\/03\/15\/surrogate-motherhood-as-a-business-new-york-state-defies-a-global-trend\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">adopted<\/a> a measure to make commercial surrogacy legal, raising objections by women\u2019s rights and anti-trafficking groups.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Russia\u2019s parliament is moving to <a href=\"http:\/\/economist.com\/europe\/2021\/03\/18\/russias-liberal-surrogacy-rules-are-under-threat\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">restrict<\/a> its own booming surrogacy industry.\u00a0 In a recent <a href=\"https:\/\/c-fam.org\/event\/surrogacy-and-vulnerable-women-in-developing-countries\/\">webinar<\/a> hosted by C-Fam, experts in international surrogacy raised concerns about its harms to women and children and positioned the ongoing debate in the context of international human rights standards.<\/p>\n<p>Surrogacy is a global, multi-billion-dollar industry, and while only a handful of countries explicitly allow commercial surrogacy, its legal status in other countries is ambiguous or exists in a legal vacuum.<\/p>\n<p>According to scholar and Marie Curie Fellow Daniela Bandelli, surrogacy couples and individuals who want children, and are willing to pay a considerable cost to have them, and women who need money.\u00a0 \u201cIt is quite a risky activity,\u201d said Bandelli, both for the mother, who is at higher risks of pregnancy and birth complications than those who conceive naturally, and for the child, who is deprived of physical contact, including breastfeeding, \u201cwith this person we usually call the mother.\u201d\u00a0 The key question, says Bandelli, is \u201care women aware of all the risks they face in participating in the surrogacy industry?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Jennifer Lahl, president of the Center for Bioethics and Culture, is an advocate for surrogacy abolition and creator of several documentary films highlighting the abuses that occur in the fertility industry.\u00a0 She contrasted the positions of those who, like her, believe there is no way that surrogacy can be practiced safely and ethically, and those who believe that it is better that surrogacy be legalized and regulated.<\/p>\n<p>Lahl spoke about the harms experienced by surrogate mothers in the United States, including three who died from complications of the process.\u00a0 \u201cWe never want to forget that there\u2019s real human beings behind what can seem like a philosophical conversation about helping people build families.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>READ:\u00a0<em><a href=\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/surrogacy-nothing-protect-children-bridget-ukraine\/\">Surrogacy does nothing to protect children. Little Bridget in Ukraine is proof.<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>If such tragedies are occurring in the comparatively wealthy U.S. the plight of surrogates in the developing world is even more troubling.\u00a0 Emmanuele di Leo, president of the Steadfast Foundation, has documented the growing \u201creproduction-for-hire\u201d industry in Nigeria, where young women and girls are recruited\u2014by the same methods used to recruit women into prostitution\u2014in poor villages and housed in \u201cbaby-factories.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In all of these cases, the demand for surrogates often originates abroad, and arrangements are conducted through private surrogacy agencies.\u00a0 While few international organizations have taken a stand against the practice, including the European Parliament, most have either remained silent or, in the case of a growing number of UN experts, appeared to favor taking a more liberal approach.<\/p>\n<p>A <a href=\"https:\/\/c-fam.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/Raising-Awareness-on-Gestational-Surrogacy-3.16.21.pdf\">joint paper<\/a> presented by C-Fam, Steadfast, and Bandelli\u2019s project WoMoGeS points out that any defense of surrogacy would require watering down the right of the child to know and be cared for by his or own parents, as enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.\u00a0 C-Fam\u2019s Director of Legal Studies, Stefano Gennarini, argued that this violates established standards for interpreting human rights obligations.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs any human rights lawyer knows, human rights must be read as broadly as possible, and they must be restricted as little as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><i>Editor&#8217;s Note: Rebecca Oas, Ph.D. writes for C-Fam. <a href=\"https:\/\/c-fam.org\/friday_fax\/experts-condemn-gestational-surrogacy-as-harmful-to-children-exploitative-to-women\/\">This article<\/a> first appeared in the Friday Fax, an internet report published weekly by C-Fam (Center for Family &amp; Human Rights), a New York and Washington DC-based research institute (<\/i><a href=\"https:\/\/c-fam.org\/\"><i>https:\/\/c-fam.org\/<\/i><\/a><i>). This article appears with permission.<\/i><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><strong><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/liveactionnewsonline\/?ref=br_rs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cLike\u201d Live Action News on Facebook<\/a> for more pro-life news and commentary!<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(WASHINGTON, D.C., C-Fam) The state of New York quietly adopted a measure to make commercial surrogacy legal, raising objections by women\u2019s rights and anti-trafficking groups.\u00a0 Meanwhile, Russia\u2019s parliament is moving to restrict its own booming surrogacy industry.\u00a0 In a recent webinar hosted by C-Fam, experts in international surrogacy raised concerns about its harms to women [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":715,"featured_media":231555,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false},"categories":[7077,5,4],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Experts condemn gestational surrogacy as harmful to children, exploitative to women<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"\u201cWe never want to forget that there\u2019s real human beings behind what can seem like a philosophical conversation about helping people build families.\u201d ~J Lahl\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/experts-condemn-gestational-surrogacy-harmful-exploitative\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" 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