The Queensland Bligh government intends to “reform” surrogacy laws – their philosophy being, apparently, that a baby is a toy — that anybody who wants one has a “right” to one.

A different attitude might be to put the “rights” of the child first.

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Should not the state always do everything possible to try to give every child at least the chance to start life with the love and care of their real mother and father?

Isn’t it wrong to separate a child, in cold blood, from his birth mother — and then falsify his birth certificate to make it “legal”?

Dumping a child, without his consent, into complex, unnatural relationships, expecting him to like it or to lump it?

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Remember the baby in the Mary Beth Whitehead surrogacy case (USA, 1986). The child she bore was confiscated by police. During subsequent “access” times the baby sought birth-mother Mary Beth’s breast, for both nutrition and comfort. The court-appointed supervisor wouldn’t let her nurse, “lest it create a mother-child bond”!  

Too late, mate — and very stupid.

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What is it like to be a child subjected to surrogacy? The infertility experts don’t know. The social scientists don’t know.

The politicians certainly don’t know. And they certainly don’t want to know.

No one knows except the surrogated people themselves.

Thousands of adult surrogacy-victim Australians are involved in support groups such as Tangled Webs, whose policy is clear:

A child should only be removed from his or her genetic parents in extreme circumstances as a last resort for their safety. The desire to provide children for infertile couples etc. does not override the child’s need for and right to this vital relationship with his or her genetic parents . . . No-one has the right to a child. To claim the right to a child is to treat that child, another human being, as an end to satisfying one’s own desires, as an object and not as a person . . . . (http://www.tangledwebs.org.au/dc.php)

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Yes, to demand the right to a child is to treat children as an item of property, just as slaves were once considered the rightful property of their masters — and women were once regarded as the property of their husbands.

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