Why I changed my mind about surrogacy

But not once in all that time did I ever doubt that surrogacy, especially between sisters, was perfectly fine. Not once. But conversations this week with three women have changed my once firm convictions.

In this country, commercial surrogacy is banned. In other words, you can do it as an act of altruism - but not for profit. Clearly there are some who believe that should change. The Australian Law Reform Commission was asked to inquire into surrogacy laws in Australia under the chairmanship of Justice Mordy Bromberg. It will submit its report to the Attorney-General in July this year.

But if I was a gambling woman - and I'm not - I'd put my money on a report which says surrogacy laws should be loosened across the country. And I'd put my money on a report which suggests that we unnecessarily "prohibit the extent to which surrogates can be reimbursed".

Last week, I'd have said, yeah yeah. I'd have said that it is every woman's right to have a baby if she wants one. Now I know I was wrong. Sure, you can try to create a family - but there is no right to a baby.

Patricia Harper, one of the early founders of the National Council for Single Mothers And Their Children and still deeply connected to them, was on to the ALRC inquiry quickly. Her work has been nationally recognised. In 1986 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM).

She discovered that there was apparently no room at the inquiry for any woman who'd been impacted by adoption. Harper, who battled for years to hold on to her daughter, is keenly motivated to put the welfare and interest of the child as paramount in public policy and legislation. She also wants to protect the welfare and interests of women who become pregnant but are then forced at the end of the pregnancy to relinquish their child whether by adoption or surrogate mother agreements.

Last year, she and her friends and fellow activists heard the ALRC was planning this inquiry. They set to work and discovered that the advisory group was filled with those who had a keen and commercial interest in surrogacy laws. At the end of last year, the ALRC wrote to a dozen women's organisations asking for input via a one-hour Zoom roundtable meeting almost on Christmas Eve. They tried to raise concerns about the lack of input and about the process of the advisory committee. The women say Bromberg told them he would take concerns via email but a direct email was never provided.

Lily Clifford is one of the founders of ARMS, the Association of Relinquishing Mothers. In 1972, her son was taken from her. He was one of 10,000 babies removed from their mothers in that year. The only reason? She was not married to the baby's father.

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She sees this new move to loosen the rules around surrogacy as reproducing another generation of children who will never know their real parents. Not their mother. Not their father.

"There's a really important mothering process that happens when we gestate a child. We're not growing a pumpkin or a nothing. We interact with this baby, this baby knows us, they hear the timbre of our voice, they hear the rhythms of our being."

And she's advocating not just for the mothers whose children were removed but for the children whose mothers were removed. Losing her first child turned her into an advocate - by the time she was in her early 20s she was campaigning for law reform around adoption. Clifford went on to have four more children. She says herself: "It's a psychological thing that happens when you have a child taken, you feel like there's this huge hole in your heart, in your being and you are trying to fill it and having more children was one way that I felt like maybe that will fill the hole.

Clifford eventually found her son - but he died when he was just 43, leaving behind a three-year-old son, Clifford's only grandchlld.

She wants the Attorney- General to revise the terms of reference and the advisory group.

"The right thing to do would be to abolish the committee and start all over again - at a neutral point and a genuine consideration of surrogate mother arrangements and their impact on the child and the mothers," she says.

And I guess my other question around all of this is - if we can't sell our blood and our organs, why would we be selling our babies?

A few years back now, ABC journalist Sarah Dingle discovered she wasn't who she thought she was. Her book Brave New Humans, now translated into Chinese and Japanese, was both a revelation of her personal story and an investigation into the fertility industry. When she discovered that the ALRC was turning its attention to surrogacy, her heart broke all over again.

It had good reason to break the first time. She discovered she was donor-conceived and then discovered that the clinic which facilitated her conception had destroyed any information which could lead her to her father. And what has donor conception have to do with surrogacy? Sometimes donor conceived children and surrogacy born children are one and the same. When they cross over, the baby can experience three different ways - sperm donor, egg donor, surrogate - in which they were sold, isolated from their families and/or lied to, says Dingle.

Dingle is blunt in her letter to the ALRC.

"If Australia has not fixed anything for its donor conceived people - and trust me, it has not - it is beyond belief that, just because some people think they have a right to rent other people's body parts, we would expand commercialisation of babymaking to exploit not only the children produced, but the women who carry them."

Exploiting the children and the women who carry them. Let's not create another generation of grieving mothers and of grieving children. Why did I back out of surrogacy? My husband reminded me of who I really was - someone who could never give up loving a baby I'd taken nine months to make.