Technology has transformed the desire for a child into a project, destroying an entire world of feelings, emotions, thoughts and relationships. Planning for a child, determined by technological possibilities and market supply, is now governed by a single cold language developed by technicians. So-called ‘surrogate motherhood’ or gestation for others, and in general all assisted reproduction techniques, are not simply ways of having a child. They are part of the techno-scientific paradigm and are based on the breakdown and fragmentation of the process of procreation. The fragmentation of this process leads to the removal of an egg from one woman and its implantation in another, as if it were something interchangeable, and to placing part of the process in the hands of technicians, which no longer takes place inside the woman’s body, but on a slide and in a test tube. The moment of fertilisation becomes a technical laboratory operation and procreation becomes the ‘production’ of life. The consequences are for women, for the child who will be born, for society as a whole in the way procreation will be viewed and in making the commodification, eugenic selection and technical reproducibility of human beings ethically acceptable.
Crime against women
The geography of so-called ‘surrogate motherhood’ can only be perceived at an international level, with legislation changing over time and possible new destinations for reproductive tourism. For example, in Greece, in order to prevent international trafficking, legislation required that both the commissioning parents and the surrogate mothers be resident in Greece, but this restriction was abolished in 2014, making Greece a popular destination due to its low costs, one of the main destinations in Europe along with Ukraine and Georgia.
In the United States, surrogacy is available almost everywhere. With the gradual closure of the Indian, Nepalese, Cambodian and Thai markets, agencies and clinics have gradually moved, some of them to Mexico, which offers relatively low prices.
As in any market, there are more luxurious and cheaper offers, discounts, standard and economy packages, VIP packages with satisfaction or money-back guarantees and all-inclusive packages including accommodation for the commissioning parents.
In 2015, there was a lot of hype about an Australian couple who went to Thailand for surrogate motherhood and abandoned a baby to the mother because he had Down syndrome, while taking home his healthy twin sister. But this case, which caused such a stir, is not exceptional and can be provided for in the contracts.
Surrogate motherhood is divided into commercial and altruistic, but so-called altruistic surrogate motherhood does not exist. There is always a payment, the compensation in altruistic cases is called ‘reimbursement’, and there is always a contract that the woman must sign. The contract even stipulates what the mother must eat, what medication she must take, and that she will be obliged to have an abortion if the child she is carrying has a disability. Contracts may include clauses allowing abortion in the event of foetal abnormalities and so-called ‘foetal reduction’ in the event of multiple pregnancies. The product must not have any defects or be in excess, in which case it can be discarded.
The mother cannot change her mind: when she gives birth, she must hand over her child to the commissioning parents. None of the mothers who refused to hand over their babies, regardless of the country’s legislation, were able to keep them. The mother has no choice but to satisfy the commissioning parents, who are protected by the contract, the clinic and their lawyers.
Some contracts require the woman to consent to the commissioning parents making medical decisions, including the number of embryos to be inseminated and their selection, the conditions for termination of the contract, possible abortion and the manner and date of delivery. The birth may take place on a set date by caesarean section, with the baby being taken from the mother’s arms and handed over to the commissioning parents on the appointed day.
The contract clearly states that the mother is informed of the risk of dying during pregnancy or following childbirth and that she accepts that, should this happen, her beneficiaries will not demand anything more than the payment initially agreed.
For women who have already been surrogate mothers, the payment is higher because they have what professionals in the field call a ‘proven womb’ and have also demonstrated that they will honour the agreement to hand over the baby.
American women in surrogacy clinics show their smiling faces, talk about pure love and altruism, marketing agencies show videos with happy pictures of the commissioning parents holding the baby in their arms next to the mother still in the bed where she gave birth, The commissioning parents declare that this woman will be part of their family and show rooms with photographs hanging on the walls that the various commissioning parents would send to these women to show the children growing up, all testifying to the relationship between the commissioning parents and the surrogate mother. The reality is quite different.
In assisted fertilisation clinics, psychologists and other specialists advise women not to touch their bellies or listen to the foetus kicking because they must dissociate themselves from the child growing inside them.
‘We have to prepare ourselves psychologically not to feel maternal love,’ confides a woman expecting two children conceived with another woman’s eggs at BioTexCom in Kiev, concluding, ‘I know that when I see them, they won’t look like me, they’ll have the features of two people who are strangers to me, and that’s why I won’t miss them.’ A split from themselves and their child, a profound alienation. For nine months, these mothers will have to force themselves to adapt to emotional indifference, remaining strangers to what is happening in their bodies and to the child growing inside them.
The heart-rending words of one of these women reveal a hidden pain that cannot be erased: ‘In front of them, I will pretend to be happy, I am giving them the baby. They will never know that I am giving this child away with pain in my heart. I will pretend to be happy and give the child away.”2. The testimonies of surrogate mothers who have experienced both commercial and altruistic surrogacy always reveal the dark side of regret and heart-wrenching suffering.
Indian women maintain an intimate bond with their children: ‘It may be their embryo, but it’s my blood’, ‘He’s absolutely mine. I went through such a big operation, they gave me so many injections… of course the baby is mine’, ‘Wherever my baby is, protect him, don’t let any harm come to my baby. When I pray, I tell God that I have three children and to protect them wherever they are. Even though I have never met my baby, I am its mother. A mother’s wish will always reach her child’3.
All these pregnancies begin with the administration of dangerous hormonal drugs before the implantation of foreign embryos. The pregnancies are therefore more risky and can lead to serious consequences such as gestational diabetes, very high blood pressure, placenta praevia or pre-eclampsia, which require weeks of bed rest and often emergency operations to remove the baby prematurely from the mother’s womb. A recent study by Dr María Vélez, a doctor in obstetrics and gynaecology, highlights the risks of serious complications for women and their babies, both during pregnancy and after childbirth, and the risks of maternal and neonatal mortality.
Surrogate motherhood is not freedom. It is a crime against women and against the child who will be born. Surrogate motherhood cannot be an expression of free choice unless one asserts that one can freely choose to be reduced to slavery.
What drives a woman to carry a child in her womb and then give it to someone else? Poverty. For these women, having a child for others is a way to provide for their own families. It is a supposed free choice in a situation of poverty for women in certain countries or, for young American or Canadian women, a way to pay for their university studies.
Surrogacy cannot be an expression of free choice unless we affirm that it is possible to freely buy or sell a human being.
The issue is not to discuss safeguards, risks, rights, compensation or types of contract. The issue is to ask what surrogate motherhood is. It is a contractual relationship in an inherently unequal situation that involves the objectification and commodification of a woman’s body, which is transformed into a tool, a container for producing a child for others, in which the very experience of motherhood is erased. It is a contractual relationship in which the ‘object’ of the contract, around which the market for bodies develops, is a child. ‘Surrogate motherhood’ is the buying and selling of a child.
The 1993 Johnson v. Calvert case, which formed the basis of Californian legislation, is significant. In one of the most technologically advanced states in the US, this case destroyed the principle of mater semper certa est, which, from a legal point of view, translates into the principle that the legal mother is the woman who gives birth. Anna Johnson changed her mind, wanted to keep her child and sued the commissioning parents. The California Supreme Court ruled that, since a human being is born from the union of an egg and a sperm, the mother must be the woman who provided the egg. It also highlighted the importance of the ‘intention’ to become parents. This was ahead of its time, in which ‘intention’ and ‘desire’ are becoming rights and transcending reality.
In traditional surrogate motherhood, the egg belongs to the woman who will carry the pregnancy, but in almost all cases the eggs come from other women. This is called gestational surrogacy and is the preferred option for commissioning parents because they can choose the egg according to certain characteristics and because it creates a further separation between the woman who gives birth and the egg that belongs to another woman.
In all the various possibilities and combinations – sperm from the commissioning father or a donor and egg from the surrogate mother, sperm from the commissioning father or a donor and egg from a donor, sperm and egg from the commissioning parents – in vitro fertilisation is performed and, after pre-implantation diagnosis and embryo selection, the embryo is transferred.
Before the spread of in vitro fertilisation, surrogate motherhood was based on the insemination of the surrogate mother, and this woman had a genetic link to the child. The spread of in vitro fertilisation has made it possible to break the genetic link between the mother and the child, and the role required of this woman is to rent her womb.
In effect, a couple or a single person can travel to a country where it is legally permitted to assemble a child by purchasing eggs, sperm and renting a woman’s womb.
In the globalised supermarket of human reproduction, a multi-billion-dollar market for oocytes, sperm and embryos is flourishing. The price of oocytes varies according to the characteristics of the donor, who is in fact a saleswoman paid by assisted reproduction clinics. These clinics have huge egg banks that can be consulted through online catalogues offering a choice of carefully selected suppliers. The questions asked of egg suppliers in their personal profiles range from their sensitivity towards animals and religion to whether they sleep with a soft toy and whether they like the police, characteristics that have absolutely nothing to do with the ‘quality’ of their eggs, but in the reproductive market everything is for sale with a wide range of choices to suit all tastes.
We have an egg supply chain with recruitment agencies for young women, such as in Spain and Greece, which put up posters outside universities.
Egg sellers are mostly students who are also recruited on social media. Selling their eggs is presented as an easy way to make money and help others at the same time. Obviously, the consequences for their physical and psychological health and future fertility are not mentioned. These young women tend to undergo hormone bombardment several times a year and are at high risk of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which can lead to thrombosis, stroke, cancer, reduced fertility and even death. Research by medical anthropologist Diane Tober5, who interviewed hundreds of egg sellers, reveals a constellation of symptoms and chronic conditions such as endometriosis severe enough to cause infertility, autoimmune diseases and premenopausal problems6. Other research has found cases of breast cancer7 and links to uterine cancer8. The testimonies9 of these and other young women highlight the reality of this biomarket.
Surrogate: something that replaces something else, often in an incomplete or imperfect way. The very definition of surrogate motherhood presupposes the erasure of the mother, who becomes a surrogate, a place of transit for the child she carries in her womb. A mother defined as a gestational carrier.
The multiplication of the mother – a mother who rents her womb, a genetic mother who sells her eggs, a commissioning mother – leads to her erasure. The mother is not the woman who sells her eggs, she is not the woman who buys a child by tearing it away from the woman who carried it in her womb for nine months; the mother is the woman who brings you into the world.
The biological link must no longer have any importance, and even the last bond linking the child to its mother and father must be severed, destroying those unique bonds of selfless love that cannot be transferred or commodified.
In the continuity and transmission of generations, human beings come into the world with a history, a provenance, a sense of belonging, a heritage, dimensions that are both close and distant. In surrogate motherhood, the child is uprooted from this human, cultural, social and spiritual continuum and thrown into the alien world of the commissioning parents.
The natural conception of a child within a couple creates the mother-father-child triad, which is dispersed in surrogacy. The father also transmits information to the mother through the foetus, and pregnancy creates a bond between the woman and the man with the child who has 50% of the father’s genetic heritage.
‘Intended parents’, ‘parental project’: the human being ceases to have a history and a provenance, reduced to the eugenic assembly of egg and sperm for a narcissistic and selfish desire for a child at all costs. The process of filiation disappears and is replaced by the process of artificial reproduction.
Surrogate motherhood is also defined as gestation for others, a definition that breaks down and isolates part of the process of procreation, as if gestation were separable from ovulation, fertilisation and childbirth. A manufacturing of children in which each stage of the process is separated, technicised, monitored and optimised in a perfectly transhumanist logic.
Crime against the child
You cannot take a child away from its mother.
You cannot define as an act of love what is in reality a separation between mother and child.
Jessica Kern, born through surrogacy and now an activist for the abolition of this practice, sums up the crux of the matter in a few words: ‘I was bought and sold. All the formulas to sugarcoat the situation will not help’10.
‘They taught me justice and values, and they had neither. They bought me, and they disguised it by calling the price to buy me expenses, gifts, compensation,”11 we hear from another testimony.
Olivia Maurel discovered her story through a DNA test, but she says she always felt she did not belong to her family: ‘I couldn’t connect with my mother. A little more with my father. I knew something was wrong. […] I hope that soon I will be the one to help abolish the atrocity of surrogacy. But I don’t want to blame them, they used an option that was offered to them on a silver platter and didn’t have the strength to resist. I don’t hate them, I love them. Rather, I blame the system that is trying to progressively legalise surrogacy, first for medical reasons such as infertility, then for social reasons and any other reason until we completely accept child trafficking. […] The most important reasons for abolishing this monstrosity are the well-being of the child, their rights and their mental balance. To all those who think that surrogacy should be regulated, I say that if even one child faces the problems I have faced, that should be enough to convince you that there is nothing good in this process that can in any way be made ethical’12.
Can a child be donated? A child, even if no payment is involved, cannot be sold, nor can it be given away. The possibility of selling, buying or donating a particular human being, a child in surrogacy – an embryo or foetus in biotechnological research and in the artificial reproduction market – makes it ethically acceptable that any human being can be sold, bought or given away. The ethical criterion of not being able to dispose of human beings leads to not being able to dispose of any of them. To say that a child – an embryo or a foetus – can be sold, bought or transferred is to deny its intrinsic value.
The child’s existence as a relational being begins well before birth. Mother and child are bound by subtle, deep and embodied ties, of which the child retains the memory.
Communication between mother and child during pregnancy begins right from the start, when the newly formed embryo travels through the Fallopian tube and sends molecular signals to which the mother responds, establishing a molecular dialogue that will continue throughout the nine months of gestation in symbiosis.
Attachment is a biological process, beginning in prenatal life with the attachment of the embryo. The embryo has an intense sensory life; it is a being in relationship, communicating with the mother’s tissues from the fifteenth day onwards, thus initiating a relationship. It is not a mere aggregate of cells or a vegetative being, as it is considered in utilitarian, eugenic and transhumanist logics of arbitrary gradation of the value of human life.
Attachment develops through physiological exchanges that circulate in the umbilical cord and placenta and through affective and relational signals towards the embryo and foetus.
There is a cellular memory, and what is established at the cellular level remains at the psychological level.
By analysing the foetal heart rate, we can see how the foetus recognises its mother’s voice and how a real dialogue develops between mother and child during pregnancy.
Thanks to its sensory memory, the child will be able to recognise its mother’s body from the very first moment after birth. For a child born through surrogacy, the mother who disappears after birth is a mother who dies. This profound suffering will generate a fear of death, a constant anxiety of abandonment, a lack of rootedness in his body, a loss of reference points, a relational laceration, a silent shame, a feeling of alienation from the world, and an existential void. The biologically rooted trauma of this separation will influence the psyche, behaviour and health for decades to come and even beyond13.
The nine-month relationship of pregnancy cannot be erased: the mother is not a mere container, but the other subject of a vital exchange with the child developing in her womb, an exchange on a biological and emotional level that continues even after birth. Endogestation and exogestation refer precisely to the development of the child in the mother’s womb and its development in the months following birth in a continuum torn apart by surrogate motherhood.
The stress of the pregnant woman is reduced thanks to the release of oxytocin, and this hormone allows her to acquire a special ability to understand the needs of her child. An emotional, affective and biological bond is strengthened with birth and breastfeeding. A bond that will be severed with surrogate motherhood, which obviously does not involve breastfeeding.
Hormones have a taste and smell that permeate the amniotic fluid, and a stressed mother does not taste the same as a calm mother. Smells and tastes are recognised and memorised by the foetus, which experiences a multitude of sensations closely interconnected with the mother’s life and emotions.
The dissociation of the surrogate mother, who distances herself from her body, her emotions and the child she is carrying, is transmitted to the child, who will find himself in an emotional and relational desert, separated from his mother from the very first moments of his life.
There is an invisible bond between mother and child. The transmission of genetic information from the mother to the foetus is not one-way; the baby’s cells also transmit and interact with the mother’s cells. This transmission and exchange of cells and genetic information is called foetal microchimerism14. Mother and child are connected by the placenta and umbilical cord. Through this connection, some of the mother’s cells pass into the foetus and some foetal cells pass into the mother’s blood, accumulating in various organs. This relationship between the mother’s and child’s cells does not disappear after birth, and the inclusion of DNA in the other’s body strengthens the mother-child bond throughout life. Cases of microchimerism have also been reported in women who have had spontaneous or induced abortions.
The number of foetal cells found in the mother’s blood samples increases as the pregnancy progresses. Foetal cells can be present in the mother’s organs for decades; foetal cells have even been found in the brain of a 94-year-old woman. Foetal cells contribute to the healing of internal wounds and injuries, improve the immune system, facilitate the development of future pregnancies, reduce the likelihood of cancer, are involved in tissue regeneration, healing from heart and liver diseases, and are even stored in the bone marrow as part of the natural cell reserve. Being younger than maternal cells, they have a great capacity to regenerate a woman’s body.
Mother-child microchimerism is essential for the growth of the child. The usefulness of this exchange for the child is due to the fact that foetal cells are pluripotent with the ability to differentiate into any other type of cell.
The embryo that survives after being implanted in the uterus of the surrogate mother will develop in a place that may retain the memory of other previous embryos that did not survive, a distress of death in the uterus similar to the situation in which a spontaneous or induced abortion previously occurred.
The implanted embryo may have been previously cryopreserved or vitrified, with all that these techniques entail. Suffice it to recall that children born following the implantation of frozen embryos have a higher risk of developing tumours.
A human being coming from liquid nitrogen, cold and glacial silence.
‘These children, adolescents and adults born through surrogacy will in fact be commodified from the beginning of their lives, treated as objects of contract: ordered, manufactured, implanted and finally delivered,”15 writes scholar, psychologist and psychotherapist Anne Shaub-Thomas, highlighting the secret cry of the child born through surrogacy.
Life in vitro. If the life of a human being begins with a technical operation, this will remain imprinted on the body and psyche. In surrogacy, conception is disembodied, outside the encounter of bodies; fertilisation does not take place in the intimate sexual encounter between a man and a woman, but in a Petri dish and outside the mother’s body. The pregnancy develops in the womb of a woman who is a stranger with DNA that is foreign to the conceived child, and at birth, this child is torn away from its mother. An embryo in a test tube implanted in a surrogate mother, and a child separated forever from the person who carried it in her womb for nine months. All these steps represent fractures, divisions, distortions of the natural process of procreation, of the natural movement of life, of the natural coming into the world. Breaks that separate sexuality from procreation, that break the unity and continuity of the embryo’s development and that destroy the unity and continuity of the relationship between child and mother. Biological and psychological breaks that profoundly alter the memory of what will be the new humanity if artificial reproduction becomes the new way of coming into the world.
A human being shattered from the very first moments of life. How will it be possible to recognise a techno-scientific invasion and genetic manipulation of biological processes and bodies when these will innervate life from its very first moments? What is furthest from life, its indeterminacies, its limits, its unexpected events, will become normal.
In the age of technical reproducibility, human beings become commodities and mere eugenic assemblages from birth, products of the biomarket and artificial reproduction clinics, ready for endless manipulation and endless techno-medical intrusions.
Eugenics
Selection is central to all stages of the artificial reproduction process, including surrogate motherhood. It takes place at several levels: selection of gamete donors, selection of sperm, eggs and finally the embryo. Before implanting the embryo in the uterus of the future mother in surrogate motherhood, as well as for women who have resorted to medically assisted procreation, a pre-implantation diagnosis (PGD) is carried out at the genetic level on some embryos in order to select the best ones. There can be no in vitro fertilisation without pre-implantation diagnosis and the subsequent selection of embryos. It is highly recommended since all in vitro fertilisation techniques can produce abnormalities in the embryo.
Eugenics is implicit and essential to this technique and has always been the driving force behind research into artificial reproduction technologies, first in their development in animals and then in their transfer to humans. Robert Edwards, who delivered Louise Brown – the world’s first ‘test-tube baby’ – believed that it would be legitimate to genetically modify the human species when it became technically possible.
PGD is presented as necessary to prevent serious diseases, but in reality it is opening the door to large-scale eugenics. PGD follows eugenic logic perfectly: if we look at the progressive opening up of national legislation in various European countries, we can see how it began with exceptions to prevent the transmission of ‘serious’ genetic diseases, then moved on to ‘likely’ diseases, and finally, in 2007, the UK authorised the use of PGD to prevent the birth of a child with strabismus.
In the United States, a couple with no fertility problems or genetic diseases can go to an assisted reproduction clinic for the sole purpose of undergoing in vitro fertilisation to select embryos with certain characteristics, such as the sex and eye colour of their future child. At the Fertility Institute in Los Angeles, nearly a thousand fertile parents visit each year to choose their sons and daughters based on eugenic criteria.
In Ukraine, at BioTexCom, it is also possible for those who resort to surrogate motherhood and artificial fertilisation techniques to choose the sex of their unborn child.
Important changes in various legislations and a global view of the driving forces behind the biotechnology world show us how various legislative restrictions have been gradually eroded and highlight the global trend towards artificial reproduction of human beings as the new way of coming into the world.
The road to transhumanism
When procreation becomes a technical operation in the laboratory, it becomes the production of living beings. The embryo becomes a product, and what is a product can be selected, discarded, experimented on and manipulated, following the transhumanist logic of continuous optimisation and implementation of the entire process. Genetic modification is an integral part of the laboratory paradigm. With the new CRISPR/Cas 9 genetic engineering technology, it is possible to genetically modify the germ line. In China, this threshold has already been crossed: in November 2018, two girls genetically modified with CRISPR/Cas9 technology were born. After a brief moment of indignation, the international scientific community declared that guidelines, safety requirements and, above all, social consensus are necessary to derive maximum benefit from germline gene editing. But guidelines always concern the past, and research developments are already ahead of them, paving the way forward.
In 2018, the British Bioethics Committee, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, in its document ‘Genome editing and human reproduction: social and ethical issues’, argued that ‘Modifying the DNA of an embryo to influence the characteristics of a future person (heritable genetic modifications) could be morally permissible’16. The transition to humans was implicit from the beginning, even when they tortured Dolly the sheep.
If an increasing number of people resort to artificial fertilisation techniques and embryo selection and, at a later stage, genetic editing, it will become increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to refuse to do so, as social pressure will be too strong.
In the meantime, the idea is spreading that it is preferable to entrust procreation to technicians and technology and that it will be better to provide the child with a better genetic inheritance than their own gametes could provide. Assisted reproduction techniques have already been redefined as a parental responsibility, and in the not too distant future, parents who do not go to artificial reproduction clinics will be considered criminals rather than irresponsible. Biotechnologists and eugenicists are simply asking themselves when procreation will become entirely artificial and how long it will take for this to become the normal way of coming into the world.
BioTexCom in Kiev is at the forefront of the latest technical developments in artificial reproduction, and it is significant that the owner of this clinic has described biotechnology as the industry of the future, with an eye towards developments in genome editing and ectogenesis.
Artificial Intelligence is converging with assisted reproduction technologies with algorithms that analyse the best embryo to implant and algorithms that monitor embryonic development in real time in anticipation of the creation of an artificial womb. This projects us into a future where being born will no longer be about being pushed into the world or pulled into the world, but about being extracted and separated from a technological support. It will therefore be possible to be separated from the mother’s body without being born. Being born will no longer mean emerging from the mother’s body.
Tracing the origins of the fragmentation of procreation is useful for understanding how we are arriving at the artificial womb, realising that, starting with intrauterine insemination, the inevitable end point is the total artificialisation of procreation.
The control, management and manipulation of the procreative process at every stage of development, the obsession with the creation of life, were already evident at the end of the 19th century in the words of the American biologist Jacques Loeb and the whole world he represented: ‘I wanted to take life in my hands and play with it. I wanted to manipulate it in my laboratory like any other chemical reaction, to start it, stop it, study it under any conditions, direct it at my will.”17 J.B.S. Haldane coined the term ‘ectogenesis’ to refer to the development of a new being outside the mother’s body, considering it an important opportunity for social engineering in a eugenic society where a complete separation of procreation from sex would lead to a ‘liberation of humanity’.
It is in this original meaning and in this context that we must understand how surrogate motherhood, medically assisted procreation, embryo selection, embryo experimentation, genetic modification and artificial wombs are all deeply interconnected aspects of the same eugenic and transhumanist world.
Remaining human
Surrogate motherhood is based on the right to a child. But there is no right to have a child, neither for heterosexual couples, nor for homosexual couples, nor for a single person. This supposed right serves as a pretext for the expropriation of procreation, and in the laboratories of techno-reproduction, every limit can and must be broken and eliminated.
Surrogacy and all artificial reproduction techniques are presented as a medical solution to infertility, but in reality they do not cure it. From the outset, these techniques were never designed or developed as a cure for infertility, but as a means of selecting human beings.
Infertility is on the rise due to the spread and accumulation of multiple harmful factors: pesticides, phthalates, PFAS, electromagnetic waves, mRNA gene therapies, etc., and due to the postponement of pregnancy beyond biological possibilities with the illusion that technology can always offer a solution.
To address the rise in infertility and declining birth rates, no action is being taken to tackle the environmental causes, nor are measures being implemented to help couples in financial difficulty and to support single women in difficulty in continuing their pregnancies. Those families, those women and those births must not exist. The only children promoted and supported are those who come out of the laboratory.
Sterility is the new paradigm. Physical, mental and spiritual sterility. Human beings rendered sterile in their ability to procreate, in their ability to think, in their ability to understand reality and, ultimately, in their ability to defend themselves, to resist, to fight. Humanity will have to be born, live and die in a sterile environment.
As for homosexual couples or single women, surrogacy and artificial reproduction techniques are promoted with the rhetoric of non-discrimination. But the essential point is missed, which is that children need both parental figures, mother and father, woman and man, and these cannot be replaced and remodelled in endless combinations and bricolage. ‘It is in the necessary complementarity of parenthood that human beings recognise both their difference and their mutual dependence. […] The sexual diversity of parents is a fundamental, universal, ethical and biological value. Attempting to neutralise the very principle of the dual origin of man would have serious ethical and cultural consequences,’ writes Sylviane Agacinski19.
Techno-sciences are not neutral, not only in what they set out to achieve, whether or not they achieve it, but already upstream, in their idea of redesigning the world to make all bodies available, dismemberable and modifiable. Everything that is technically possible becomes ethically acceptable, and what was unthinkable and unacceptable until recently gradually becomes normal. Procreation, sexual roots, humanity in its distinctive dimensions and reality itself are the final frontiers of transhumanism for a radical ontological and anthropological transformation of the human being.
Procreation is a central issue. Regulating surrogate motherhood and artificial fertilisation techniques is tantamount to spreading and normalising them. No regulation is possible; the line of discourse must be drawn first. We must keep in mind those inviolable and non-negotiable boundaries, that which will never be ethically acceptable. There are issues around which no discussion, no bargaining, no retreat is possible, issues that cannot be subject to relativisation and the criterion of utility. The dimension of procreation is not available, bodies are not available, the living is not available.
Notes:
1 http://www.uteroinaffitto.com/dossier-di-rai-2-maternita-surrogata-presso-biotexcom/
2Anne Schaub-Thomas, Un cri secret d’enfant: Attachement mère-enfant, mémoires précoces, séparation-abandon, Les Acteurs du savoir, 2017, Italian translation, Il grido segreto di un bambino. Maternità surrogata e il diritto di chi nasce, Lindau, 2024.
3Globalization and Transnational Surrogacy in India: Outsourcing Life, cited in Daniela Danna, Fare un figlio per altri è giusto? Falso, Laterza, 2017.
4María Vélez, Grave morbilità materna e neonatale tra le portatrici gestazionali, in Annals of Internal Medicine, Vol. 177, No. 11, September 2024, https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M24-0417
5Diane Tober, Eggonomics: The Global Market in Human Eggs and the Donors Who Supply The Egg, Routledge, 2024.
6Rina Raphael, The ‘Wild, Wild West’ of the American Egg Donor Industry, https://www.thefp.com/p/fertility-industry-preys-on-female-egg-donors
7https://indd.adobe.com/view/5e2442b5-7d8b-4e45-85ec-7ce08e30a659
8https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4106369/pdf/nihms605211.pdf
9https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/nov/07/
10Tèmoignage: Je suis un produit de la gestation pour autrui, https://www.juristespourlenfance.com/2015/06/02/temoignage-je-suis-un-produit-de-la-gestation-pour-autrui/
11 Anne Shaub-Thomas, op.cit.
12 Olivia Maurel, Born from a surrogate mother, https://feministpost.it/insights-reflections/nata-da-madre-in-affitto/, https://www.instagram.com/reel/C0J8jwgoBff/
13 Anne Shaub-Thomas, op.cit.
14Laura Isabel Gómez García, Microchimerismo: Il legame madre-figlio che non si può comprare, in Per l’abolizione della maternità surrogata, AA.VV., Ortica edizioni, 2023; in ¿Gestación subrogada?un enfoque feminista abolicionista de la explotación reproductiva, Ciudad Real. España, 2023.
15Anne Schaub-Thomas, op. cit.
16 Nuffield Council on Bioethics. Genome editing and human reproduction: Social and ethical issues. <http://nuffieldbioethics.org/wp-content/uploads/Genome-editing-and-human-reproduction-short-guide-website.pdf>
17Silvia Guerini, Costantino Ragusa, (eds.), I figli della macchina. Biotecnologie, riproduzione artificiale, eugenetica (Children of the Machine: Biotechnology, Artificial Reproduction, Eugenics), Asterios edizioni, 2024.
18J.B.S. Haldane, Daedalus, or Science and the Future, Cambridge, 1923.
19Sylviane Agacinski, Politique des sexes, Seuil, 1998.