On Mother’s Day we celebrate our own mothers and our children celebrate us. It is a day to acknowledge the sheer hard work of raising children, how we come to have them and family units in different sizes and forms, but the focus is on mothers.

Only women can be mothers. Only women can become pregnant, give birth and breastfeed and ‘mother’ is both a social term and a legal one. The legal definition was in response to scientific developments in IVF, where egg donor conceived pregnancies created the question of what a mother is. Subsequently, two sub-categories or ‘gestational’ and ‘traditional’ surrogacy were also created. Prior to this there was no confusion about the meaning of the word ‘mother’.

The 1990 Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act (Section 27) defines ‘mother’ as

“the woman who is carrying or has carried a child as a result of the placing in her of an embryo or of sperm and eggs, and no other woman, is to be treated as the mother of the child”.

In other words, the woman who gives birth has legal rights and responsibilities and the woman who provides the egg for that embryo does not. Before this law, the word mother had one meaning which everyone understood. The only deviation and subsequent sub-subcategory was when legal rights and responsibilities were transferred from a birth mother to an adopting mother. IVF of this nature created an additional sub-category; genetic mother.

The definition of the noun ‘surrogate’ is:

a substitute, especially a person deputising for another in a specific role or office

For me, in surrogacy, the person deputising or standing in for the mother is the commissioning parent; an adult – male or female – who not only commissioned the child into being but is the social parent caring for and raising the child, as a result of an arranged pregnancy, with or without a contract. This person – as single people can obtain a child through surrogacy in the UK – or couple, later become the legal parent/s when a parental order is granted by the family court. A parental order cannot be applied for, under the current law, before the newborn reaches 6 weeks old. So these people are not the legal parents from birth and there is always (as with adoption) a birth mother, regardless of how invisible they might want her to be.

Proposed law reform would see a seismic shift with the introduction of a ‘new pathway’. This would allow for parental rights for the commissioning couple to be transferred during the pregnancy, with a pre-birth order (like that seen in commercial surrogacy arrangements, a model we are told is rejected by the Law Commission and pro-surrogacy lobbyists). That’s right, whilst the woman is still pregnant, the baby inside her doesn’t belong to her and in fact someone else has legal parental rights to the child she has not yet given birth to.

The idea that a child you have within your body belongs to someone else has lead to what I consider to be dangerous and deceptive discourse around surrogacy. Euphemistic language begins with ‘surrogate’, where the word mother doesn’t feature at all, (or worse ‘gestational carrier’) and ends with the claim that the mother is ‘giving the baby back’. Back to where, where the original order was made? The baby is not returning to the place they began. With IVF that would mean taking the child to a lab where they were conceived. No, this claim refers to handing the baby over to the strangers they may or may not be related to. (Under current UK law and reform proposals, the requirement for one commissioning parent to be genetically related to the child remains.)

The dominating theory here is that the genetics are equal to ownership and that pregnancy and birth are minor details. This denies the reality of how babies are made, with or without a Petri dish. It dismisses the mother baby bond, something agencies and proponents of surrogacy, denies exist. Academics will downplay the sharing of cells in the womb as “a mere fantasy of romanticism”.

Some supporters of surrogacy prefer to dehumanise the woman, reducing her to an electrical appliance, calling women ‘ovens’ and the baby a ‘bun’. Or they consider having a baby for others to be ‘extreme babysitting’ – like Ultra Marathons or Free Solo climbing. Something that is impressive in the danger and fraught with risk. (I’m not convinced that the medical risks are fully explained to surrogacy candidates prior to conception or implantation.) Saying a pregnant woman is simply ‘babysitting’ is an insult to motherhood and it seeks to separate the mother and baby and reduce pregnancy to a bodily function or a paid role. There may be more truth in this than was intended.

In surrogate motherhood, a genetic is unimportant, whilst the genetic link between the baby and the commissioning parent/s is paramount. In surrogacy, the natural maternal bond is dismissed as emotional and romantic and known science of maternal-foetal microchimerism is waved away, but the legal definition remains – even if a woman becomes pregnant with an embryo made from another woman’s egg, she, “and no other woman”, is the mother.

We wish every mother, whether she wants to be thought as one or not, a Happy Mother’s Day.