“Surrogacy Should Be Banned” Mary Harrington ~ Chris Williamson

surrogacy industry

[laughs] I think it should be banned, all of it

Banned?

Yeah. Across the board. I don't think surrogacy should be a thing.

Why?

Little ba- little babies need their mothers. Um, and, and mothers are not int- uh, um, no, no wom- a, a woman is not a factory. You know, gestation is not a process of manufacturing to the f- to produce a product which can then be handed over willy-nilly to, to another, another carer. Um, pregnancy doesn't just create a baby, pregnancy creates a mother. Um, it, it- pregnancy rewires your brain. It, it transforms you through a series of, you know, b- you know, you, you get sort of ho- hormone bathed for, for nine months over the, you know, and over the course of that your body changes, your, your, your breasts change. Ev- everything about you changes in a... And, and you, it, it completely reorients you towards-

Ready to receive-

Yeah, re- ready to receive-

... baby

... and, and to, to receive baby and to prioritize the care of baby. So in, in a se- your, your, uh, and this is, this is not just true across the human species, it's true across countless animal species. You're primed for attachment and you're primed for atten- attunement-

Mm

... to your child. Um, and, uh, uh, of course, this is not to say that, th- th- this is not to say that adoptive parents don't do a brilliant job, and there are countless adoptive parents who do wonderful jobs and, and do, and care for, and, and care wonderfully for their adopted children. However, um, everybody, everybody accepts that a motherless child is in a, i- is off to a weaker start than, than, than the, uh, than a child born into a loving home where, where, where with, with their mother and father, and there's a reason for that. And it's because the, the attune- uh, attunement that, that, that come the, that, that basic biological level of attunement and attachment that's primed through the process of pregnancy, um, is, is essential from birth onwards to, to laying the absolute foundations of what it means to be an integrated person. Um, and, and to say... And, and I, I think it's just profoundly morally wrong to say we should, we should create a, you know, a new life with the, with the express intention of severing that bond at birth because somebody, just for the sake of adult desires. I think that's profoundly inverting the duty of care that we owe to dependent infants. You know, we should be prioritizing their needs, not ours.

Did you see the episode I did with Dr. Anna Machin about Life of Dad, and about how... Yeah, so this, I'll send it to you. It's so good. So she looked at the role of fathers kind of throughout all of a child's upbringing to they leave the home, and talked about how, I think that one of her pregnancies was, uh, particularly difficult and, um, th- then she and the child had been taken away after the birth, which was successful and, and she was okay. Uh, and the dad was just left in there, and no one even came up to him. And he just thought that, like, mom could be dead, daughter could-

Yeah

... uh, child could be dead. Uh, and no one ev- ever spoke to him about it. You know, all of the pre-child classes, I don't know what they're called, um,