Laoise de Brún BL, CEO and Founder of The Countess, was invited to speak at The Women’s Policy Centre Parliamentary Roundtable on Surrogacy, hosted in the House of Commons by Sarah Pochin MP on Wednesday 22nd April.
Laoise’s speech focussed on her knowledge of the mother–baby dyad and the impact of surrogacy on both the surrogate mother and the infant. Laoise’s position on this is informed by her work as a lactation consultant, which gave her a deep understanding of the connections between mother and baby, formed in utero and deliberately ruptured by the process of surrogacy.
“Surrogacy demands of clinicians, midwives, doctors and lactation consultants to unlearn and ignore the bedrock of their training with regard to attachment. Attachment is not a ‘nice extra’, it is necessary for survival.”
“Undisturbed skin on skin is now the universal protocol for all babies and their mother immediately after birth. We call this the golden hour. The baby knows the mother’s smell, her voice and her heartbeat. Her nipple tastes like her amniotic fluid. It is the only world that baby has known. That baby views itself and the mother as the same person.”
Laoise argues that an abolition model is the only ethical one, as regulation of the industry is impossible and, in any case, the major harms to mother and child occur regardless of whether the surrogacy is commercial or altruistic.
“Surrogacy is the rupture of the mother–baby dyad to the detriment of that baby.”
“We cannot know what damage a rupture of that environment will do to the wiring of that baby’s brain. These considerations are not left wing or right wing.
These are existential issues with regard to our humanity, the best interests of the child and the dignity and human rights of women especially poorer women.”
When the Assisted Human Reproduction Bill passed through the legislative stages at Dáil Éireann, Laoise was helping in the background draft amendments and gave a parliamentary briefing. Despite the desperate efforts of a handful of activists and the noble advocacy of Senators Mullen and Keogan, the bill was guillotined and rushed through.
“In Ireland, we put forward an amendment to bar men with convictions for sexual offences but it was defeated as it was argued that the oversight mechanism would filter them out. Our amendment to bar single men was defeated too. And so here in the UK we see a threefold increase in single men commissioning babies. This week Netherlands has granted permission to the creation of an embryo out of the cells of two males.”
The media management around surrogacy means is framed as simply another way to have a baby, as if the ones impacted – the baby who cannot consent and the surrogate mother whose body is being bought – do not exist. They are out of frame. In exactly the same way the impact on women and children was ignored in order to allow “the most vulnerable minority in the world”, trans-identified men, to “be who they truly are”.
These vapid slogans are not good enough when it comes to matters of such complexity ethically, legally and socially. Surrogacy is not simply “another way to have a baby”. It has unknown detrimental impacts.
This must all be seen as part of a part of a wider trend which is the complete erosion and denigration of motherhood in culture, law and biology. It is driven by corporate capitalism and big tech: the same men who are investing in transhumanism are investing in reproductive technology. The recurring theme is disassociation, as with porn and prostitution, in surrogacy women are asked to completely dissociate from their bodies for acts they “consent” to and therefore they routinely experience trauma and shame once the gravity and impossibility is revealed.
It is increasingly the norm to put all teenage girls on the contraceptive pill and so they are unaware of the cascade of the 28-day hormone cycle or ovulation. The founders and investors are on the record of hailing the “end of procreative sex”. This sits side by side with another multi-billion-dollar industry, the porn industry. We are seeing a whole generation who are coming up through porn and encouraged to have hook-up sex only. We must be prepared to grapple with this on a meta level and acknowledge the heart of darkness to it all.
The Countess will continue to advocate for women and children in Ireland and across the word, especially where their interests are relegated or ignored in favour of ideologically driven policy.
Other speakers at the roundtable included Lexi Ellingsworth, Founder of Stop Surrogacy Now UK, Gary Powell, Former European Special Consultant for the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network, Annaig Birdy, President and Co-Founder of Not All Gays, Olivia Maurel (via a pre-recorded video contribution), Spokesperson for the Casablanca Declaration and child born from surrogacy.