"Lily Collins welcomes her first baby, while her husband shuts down haters criticising surrogacy journey." I didn't know who Lily Collins is either, but this week's headline in Cosmopolitan suggests that she is someone famous.
And she and Charlie were delighted with their bundle of joy. Their Instagram message read: "Welcome to the center of our world Tove Jane McDowell. Words will never express our endless gratitude for our incredible surrogate and everyone who helped us along the way. We love you to the moon and back again."
That's the argument for surrogacy in a fluffy pink nutshell. The parents are over the moon; the surrogate is happy; a baby has loving parents; critics are haters. What's not to like?
Nothing, says The Economist, also in the past week. It profiled a couple who had hired a surrogate mother and commented: "Acts of kindness, such as hers, ought to be celebrated; in their own small way they each increase the sum of joy in the world by incubating children for families that, for various reasons, can't do so themselves."
As usual, The Economist - like most supporters of legalising surrogacy - did not inquire into the rights of the child. In this case, the commissioning couple was gay, so the child will grow up without a mother. It will never know the history of its biological parents. It will not know nothing about its medical background.
Nor did it inquire into the background of the surrogate mother. Why did she sell her body? Did she mind being excluded from the life of the child she bore for nine months?
The need for children is great, says The Economist: "According to one study published in 2006, there were around 1m parents in America who wanted to adopt a child, yet only 51,000 children were placed with agencies for adoption each year." That's obviously because about 950,000 American babies are aborted each year. If none of them had been aborted, perhaps all those parents would have been able to adopt a child.
The surrogacy industry is growing at a fearsome rate. According to Global Market Insights, a forecasting firm, it was valued at US$14 billion in 2022. But 2023, it will grow to US$129 billion. This suggests that the sum of surrogacy joy in the world has been eclipsed by the sum of surrogacy dollars.
Already surrogacy has led to incredibly corrupt and perverse practices. Also this week, perhaps too late for The Economist to take into account, Thai police and Interpol uncovered a human-eggharvesting scheme which kept three young Thai women in virtual slavery.
The facts in stories spanning continents and languages are difficult to corroborate. But Pavena Hongsakula, founder of the Pavena Foundation for Children and Women, claimed in a press conference in Bangkok that the three women were trafficked to Georgia, where surrogacy is legal, by a Chinese gang. They were told that they would be surrogate mothers. Instead, their eggs were harvested for month after month. The eggs were sold in other countries for use in IVF, Ms Pavena said.
The rescued women reported that a hundred other Thai women were living in four houses at an "egg farm".
This sounds too awful to be true, but in Georgia, where surrogacy is legal, the practice has led to incredible situations. Christina Ozturk and her 22 children, 21 of them from surrogate mothers, lives in the Black Sea resort city of Batumi. She posts regularly on Instagram (in Russian) about her family. She and her husband Galip originally planned to have 105 children, but apparently this was derailed by his arrest for involvement in a murder back in his native Turkey.
Better documented is a recent feature in Bloomberg.com about a poor, lower-caste 13-year-old Indian girl who wanted to buy a mobile phone. Her neighbour told her about an easy way to make some cash - sell her eggs. So she lied to her mother and the doctors and earned US$180. The clinic to which she sold the eggs was associated with one of India's largest fertility groups and was backed by a leading American investment firm.
"An act of kindness" - or an act of desperation?
The fact is that the surrogacy industry - which includes markets for eggs and sperm - inevitably dehumanises and exploits women and children. Italy's prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, has the right idea. Her government has declared that surrogacy is a "universal crime" and cannot be tolerated under any circumstances. "Human life is priceless and is not a commodity," she tweeted.