Kim and Kanye are the latest celebrity couple to have a baby using a surrogate. They join the likes of Nicole Kidman, Tyra Banks, and Elton John and his partner David Furnish, who have all turned to surrogacy to have children.
It’s not just high-profile couples who are using a surrogate to help them start or add to their families. According to Surrogacy UK on average 10 children are born through surrogacy each week.
Source: The Center for Bioethics and Culture
23 NGOs (including The Center for Bioethics and Culture) from eight countries and two international networks (including the #StopSurrogacyNow Coalition) have issued a renewed call to the members of the Experts’ Group of the Hague International Conference.
Specifically, we are asking them to:
1. Renounce working on any instrument which would tend to organize surrogate motherhood internationally or would favor mutual recognition in this domain;
2. Recognize the necessity of a Convention on the Abolition of Surrogacy, similar to what was done against slavery and practices analogous to slavery with the Conventions of 1926 and 1956, and to recommend that the Member States of the Conference engage in this direction within the United Nations, which is the relevant organisation in this respect.
Source: NewsByte
Ukraine is in news again but for reasons apolitical. The European nation has become the go-to place for people wanting to have children via surrogacy.
Despite regional, cultural and bureaucratic barriers, what unites prospective parents and surrogate mothers is desperate need. One party needs a child, the other, money.
Here, we look at how surrogacy is making a few dreams come true in Ukraine.
Source: The Witachee Times
SPOKANE —Surrogate mothers could be paid for carrying a child for another couple under a bill that passed the Senate despite criticism that it could turn babies into “commodities like a bushel of wheat or widgets.”
Source: Grazia
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Finding a surrogate in the UK can be a difficult pursuit, with laws around surrogacy giving the majority of rights to the surrogate. Legal contracts cannot be enforced, and surrogates cannot be paid except for reasonable expenses, which means that upon having the baby the surrogate has full maternal rights to the child even if she has no biological connection to it. With surrogacy legislation so complicated in the UK, many couples choose to go abroad to look for a surrogate.
While surrogacy tourism has been banned in India, Nepal and Thailand – former hotspots for the industry – amidst exploitation claims, other countries have slowly popped up to take their place. One surprising example is Ukraine, where a series of liberal laws has unintentionally created a thriving surrogacy industry.
Source: Buffalow Business First
The Ethics of a Surrogate Mother: What is Surrogacy’s Social Responsibility? Gestational Surrogates earn more than most new teachers in the US — so why call them victims? William Houghton, director of Sensible Surrogacy, presents the pro-surrogacy perspective in a new interview.
Source: The Daily Universe
SALT LAKE CITY — Lawmakers appeared to be swayed by Utah families — many with babes in arms — who urged lawmakers to reject changes to Utah’s surrogate birth laws. SB126, which would repeal protections and requirements for surrogate births in Utah, was stalled in committee on Feb. 7 The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, sponsored legislation passed in 2005 making surrogate birth legal in Utah under certain conditions. Hillyard is sponsoring SB126 to repeal specifications and protections for surrogate births.
Source: Euractiv
Sophia Kuby is the director of EU advocacy at ADF International.
Surrogacy agencies, clinics, lawyers, and medical doctors cash in on the business of selling sperm and egg cells, creating embryos in vitro, implanting them into a woman’s hired womb and providing the “commissioning parents” with a baby.
The Hague Conference on Private International Law, an intergovernmental institution comprising 82 members, including all EU member states and the EU itself, has stepped into the ethical and legal quagmire created by this business.
Source: St George News
With the issue now before the Utah Supreme Court of whether or not gay men should have the right to the same legal protections in surrogate birth arrangements as others have under Utah law, one senator wants to end those protections, at least for now, for all couples in order to keep a promise he made 13 years ago.
Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, is seeking to pass a bill that would end legal protections for surrogate births | Profile photo via senate.utah.gov, St. George News Sen. Lyle Hillyard, R-Logan, is sponsoring a bill, designated SB 126, that would repeal Utah law on gestational agreements, law that came from a bill he sponsored in 2005.
Source: The Spokesman-Review
Surrogate mothers could be paid for carrying a child for another couple under a bill that passed the Senate despite criticism that it could turn babies into “commodities like a bushel of wheat or widgets.”
Washington law currently allows women to act as surrogate mothers, but not to receive compensation above the cost of medical and other expenses. A proposed change to the Uniform Parentage Act, which covers a wide range of issues involving parental rights and responsibilities, would allow a surrogate to be paid more than that by the couple who have arranged for her to carry a baby for them.
Source: The Salt Lake Tribune
Surprisingly, maddeningly, the Utah Legislature is still fighting gay marriage.
At least one legislator is. Sen. Lyle Hillyard introduced a bill Wednesday to repeal a 2005 law that allowed Utah couples to have children through surrogacy. Hillyard was the sponsor of the 2005 law.
Dozens of Utahns shared their surrogacy stories and asked a legislative committee to block the bill. Lisa Candie Barlow told the committee she is currently 14 weeks pregnant as a surrogate for her brother and her brother’s wife.
Source ITV
A woman from Rotherham who has been a surrogate mother twice – is calling for urgent changes to what they believe to be outdated surrogacy law.
When Kate became pregnant she always intended to give the child to its parents, Tracy and Pete from Portsmouth.
But, under UK law she could have changed her mind at any point and kept the baby as her own, because she gave birth to the child
Source: NDTV.com
New Delhi: Central government’s women employees, whose children are born through surrogacy, will now be entitled to maternity leave, according to an official order of the personnel ministry.
The employees can avail of paid maternity leaves up to 26 weeks (about 180 days).
The ministry has written to all central government departments about a 2015 Delhi High Court order on this issue.
Source: The Salt Lake Tribune
Sen. Lyle Hillyard sat in his chair as Lisa Candie Barlow asked him not to repeal the law that provides her legal protections while she carries her brother’s child.
Barlow is 14 weeks pregnant with a baby that she’ll give back to her brother upon delivery.
She was one of dozens of mothers, fathers and surrogates – including Abby Cox, who is married to Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox – who pleaded with a committee on Wednesday to block Hillyard’s SB126.
Source: Times of India
NEW DELHI: The department of personnel and training (DoPT) has instructed all Central ministries and departments to implement a 2015 order of the Delhi High Court for granting maternity leave to female employees who chooses to have a child by commissioning a surrogacy. Such leave would include both the pre-natal and post-natal period.
Source: New Jersey Law Journal
A committee of the New Jersey Legislature has recommended approval of a bill—identical to one previously vetoed—that would permit legally binding gestational carrier agreements.
Source: Vermont Business Magazine
The Vermont House today gave approval to H.562, a bill pertaining to parentage (link is external). In 2017, the Legislature created a study committee in response to the Vermont Supreme Court’s request to provide legislative recommendations to modernize Vermont’s parentage laws to recognize the changing nature of Vermont families. H.562 is the result of the Parentage Study Committee’s work.
Source: National
Thai nationals eligible to apply for board approval for assisted pregnancies in cases related to medical conditions.
To protect children born via surrogates and prevent problems similar to those that have made recent headlines, authorities have set up strict rules for couples who wished to have a child via surrogacy due to difficulty conceiving a child naturally, and those wishing to provide that service.
Source: Hürriyet Daily News
The number of Turkish women illegally seeking surrogate mothers abroad, especially in countries where the practice is common and legal, such as in Greek Cyprus, Georgia and the United States, or women offering to become surrogates for money has been on the rise, daily Habertürk reported on Feb. 5.
Source: Phnom Penh Post
Just half of an estimated dozen applications by parents trying to prove their DNA link to their baby born via a Cambodian surrogate have so far been approved by the Phnom Penh Municipal court, officials said yesterday.
Following an outright ban on the fraught practice of commercial surrogacy in Cambodia, where hundreds of babies are estimated to have been born to foreign couples, the Kingdom laid out guidelines in July last year, requiring intended parents to get DNA tests, have their paternity status verified by the courts and apply for exit visas through their embassies in order to legally take their babies home.
