Following the Royal College of Midwives webinar on Surrogacy last week, a Midwife got in touch with us to share her experience and her concerns about what the promotion of surrogacy in midwifery means for her. To protect her identity we share the following without sharing her name.

As an RCM member for the past 28 years, I’ve always felt my union has had my best interests at heart. I’ve felt confident of their support and on the very few occasions I’ve needed their assistance, they haven’t let me down. But now I feel things may be starting to change, and I’m deeply concerned.

I attended their webinar last week which was advertised online as a discussion on surrogacy and how we, as midwives can support parents of babies born of surrogate mothers. The subject of surrogacy troubles me but the content shocked me.

Since I was a teenager at the start of my training, it is embedded into the heart of what it is to be a Midwife and that is to be ‘with mother’. Our role is to be her closest carer and her biggest advocate – yet here we were being told in this new way, she is not a mother, but a ‘carrier of a baby’. A baby who is to be given away at birth, and not only that, our care as midwives should be transferred over to these ‘intended parents’. 

It was very clear as soon as the webinar started that this was not a discussion or a debate on surrogacy, but well thought-out propaganda on the wonders of surrogacy, with stories from a surrogate mother and two parents of children born through surrogacy. 

There are no official stats on how many children are born through surrogacy in the UK. There is no disclosure on prospective parents and we know just by reading the news, that people from the UK are traveling abroad to buy babies. Although women in the UK are not paid for their ‘reproductive service’ there are incentives and ‘independant journeys’ (private arrangements) are being made online. If you’re lucky you get an Apple Watch and Ann Summers vouchers among other goodies from an agency. When someone in the chat questioned the ethics of this, they were told by the owners (two men) that it’s nice for the surrogate to have the Ann Summers vouchers to spice things up with her partner as she can’t have penetrative sex when pregnant. Oh how we laughed, does anyone want to tell them? Questions that criticised this controversial practice largely went unanswered.

The surrogate mother and CEO of another agency, Surrogacy UK, told her story of carrying 5 babies for other people, some her own eggs, some not and once during COVID. She was asked if she was concerned for her own health and well-being due to the risks of the amount of IVF pregnancies she’d put her body through. She said she made fully informed decisions by speaking to her obstetrician and was aware of the risks and happy to take them. It’s worth noting that the long term implications cannot be known but that multiple cycles of IVF have been shown to increase the risk of ovarian and uterine cancers. Not to mention the risk of vaginal/rectal/cervical prolapse in later years following so many pregnancies. Along with her other children this woman had a total of 8 pregnancies and births including 2 c sections.

The two men who were advocates for surrogacy having had two children by arranged births and egg donation and they have their own agency and have recently expanded into Mexico City. Promoting surrogacy and offering the incentives discussed, they talked about the horrendous experience they had of the surrogate being called the mother by a Midwife and that their name could not appear on the ID band of the baby in hospital. It’s worth noting that unless a couple have the same surname, the baby will always have the mother’s name on the ID band. This is not to offend or irritate but for the basic security and safeguarding of the baby in case of a mix up or kidnapping. They were quite proud to announce that the health board crumbled at their request and they got to put their names on the ID band. Who cares about safeguarding for babies anyway eh?

My biggest concern is the long term implications for the birth mother and the baby. A baby who has known nothing but their mother’s heartbeat, her voice, her body for 40 weeks, only to be taken away and placed with strangers. And for the mother, who needs her child close to her for both their wellbeing, to regulate temperature and heart rate, to stimulate feeding instincts, to contract the womb, minimise bleeding and to release oxytocin to reduce the risk of postnatal depression and complications. 

I know there are instances where this is unavoidable, but we shouldn’t as midwives, be promoting this as the norm. I don’t provide postnatal care to adoptive parents or to foster parents, so why am I being asked to treat these ‘intended parents’ as if they are the ones who have given birth? That is not my role as a midwife.These people are not my patients.

I am heartened by the fact that the student midwives I’ve spoken to feel that surrogacy is a problem in modern society. This seems to be due to the boom in celebrity surrogacy where it is clear the rich and famous are exploiting poor and vulnerable women, using them as a ‘vessel’ to carry a baby to avoid putting their own bodies through the trauma of childbirth. And the grotesque fad of lying on a hospital bed, as through they have just given birth themselves, is doing nothing to convince our new recruits that this transaction is anything other than a horrendous experience for the mother who has just given birth, and for the baby who has been removed from his or her mother literally seconds after being born. Sickeningly, there are numerous photos of babies still attached to the umbilical cord with the placenta still inside the womb, as the smiling commissioning parents hold this newly delivered baby that is crying out for their mother.

I have been taught a research-based approach throughout my career and to apply critical thinking whenever there is discussion or debate. Yet there was no other side to this webinar and the questions examining the other side were ignored. No known long term implications to the child born of surrogacy were discussed, no evidence of a long term follow up for women who have given their bodies and their babies to others. And no matter if surrogacy is commercial or altruistic, arranged on facebook or through an agency, if the mother uses her own egg or if the embryo has been conceived with a donor’s eggs, the social and moral outcome is the same. 

A baby has been taken from his or her mother at birth.