Motherhood cancelled before a child’s first breath!
Parliament has legislated itself into a corner when it comes to promoting marriage. The union that creates children and gives them the best start, tied to their married mother and father, is the one no minister dares promote, for fear of being called discriminatory. The silence is thirteen years old, and children are paying for it.
On Monday 7 September, Parliament debates e-petition 763161, which asks that the commissioning adults in a surrogacy arrangement be recognised as a child’s legal parents from birth. More than 112,000 signatures forced the debate. C4M opposes this petition – see what it asks.
It was started by a male couple whose adopted child was born through surrogacy. Their own words are: “we became dads the moment we held her”. The woman who carried and bore that little girl appears exactly once in the petition – as the legal obstacle. “But under current law”, it complains, “the surrogate is automatically recognised as the legal mother”. That recognition is what they are asking Parliament to remove. The girl was created to be raised with no mother – on purpose, not by tragedy – and the petition now asks Parliament to finish the job by erasing the mother from the birth record itself, before the child’s first breath.
In 2008 Parliament took the child’s “need for a father” out of the welfare test – the law now asks only for “supportive parenting” – and a child’s birth certificate has been able to record two women, and no father, from birth ever since. The father was written out first. The debate on Monday is the mother’s turn. Make the commissioning couple the legal parents from birth and it is their names the register takes. A child’s birth certificate would then show two fathers, at most one of them her own blood, and no mother at all.
Nobody’s rights are missing in Monday’s debate. Rather, what goes missing is the mother. A child’s right to her biological parents – both of them, written on her birth certificate – matters infinitely more than the desires of two men. No amount of state fiction should change that. Not even the Government is asking for this – ministers said in May they had “no current plans to review surrogacy laws” – so an MP who stands up for the child’s own mother on Monday stands on open ground.
Furthermore, the pressure is the other way. Last Friday, The Times carried a column by Janice Turner calling for surrogacy rules to be tightened, not eased. She describes an industry heading for 139 billion dollars by 2032, classified by the European Parliament as human trafficking, whose objective is “to turn a baby into a product created with one stranger’s egg and another’s rented womb: the concept of ‘mother’ erased”. She quotes Mary Warnock, architect of our fertility law – “if babies become commodities, we shall have lost something irreplaceable”.
Marriage is the one institution that binds the two people who make a child to that child, and to each other. The reason children of married parents do best is not a mystery. It is mum and dad, together, bound to the child they made.
But in 2013 Parliament redefined more than marriage. Once marriage means any two people, the words that hang from it – mother and father – come loose too. You can watch it happening. The Government is currently rewriting how a marriage is made in this country, and across its weddings consultation and the three assessments beside it – the family test among them – the word mother never appears. Nor father. The state that once bound parents to their children can no longer bring itself to write the words.
If you want your MP speaking for the child’s own mother in Monday’s debate, write before then, in your own words, at writetothem.com and name e-petition 763161. Just a few minutes, and worth it.
One or two lines are plenty – just tell them that you think the woman who gives birth must remain the legal mother, and that no child’s birth certificate should ever be written with the mother left off.
What I want from Parliament is the sentence it has not said in thirteen years – that children do best with their own married mother and father. Marriage gives every child exactly that.