The Stop Surrogacy Now Collection 2024

Marie-Josèphe Devillers and Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram (Eds)

Surrogacy is not liberty. It is a crime. Women will not settle for junk liberty. We want real freedom – the substance, not just the appearance. We want real nourishment for our spirits. We want human dignity. We want it for all of us. We want it for women in Thailand and Bangladesh and Mexico as well as for the women who have not yet been born.
—Gena Corea

In this eloquent and blistering rejection of surrogacy, a range of international activists and experts in the field outline the fundamental human rights abuses that occur when surrogacy is legalised and reject neoliberal notions that the commodification of women’s bodies can ever be about the ‘choices’ women make.

Yoshie Yanagihara shows how feminist ideas have been twisted to extend men’s freedom and their rights to access surrogacy. Catherine Lynch rails against surrogacy as the creation of babies for the express purpose of removal from their mothers, outlining the tragic outcomes for adopted people. Phyllis Chesler argues that commercial surrogacy is matricidal, “slicing and dicing biological motherhood” into egg donor, ‘gestational’ mother and adoptive mother. Melissa Farley debunks the myth of ‘choice’ in surrogacy, arguing that in a male-dominated and racist system, the exploitative sale of women in surrogacy, like in prostitution, is inherently harmful —rich women do not make the choice to become surrogates or prostitutes.

Other contributors to this book, which is published in conjunction with the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood, are Gena Corea, Renate Klein, Gary Powell, Rita Banerji, Marie-Josèphe Devillers, Laura Isabel Gómez García, Alexandra Clément-Saby, Taina Bien-Aimé, Silvia Guerini, Laura Nuño Gómez and Eva Maria Bachinger.

Editors Marie-Josèphe Devillers and Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram are long-term activists against surrogacy and live in France.

Harm cannot be regulated, because this would mean spreading and universalising it.
—Silvia Guerini

NOVEMBER 2021 | ISBN 9781925950427 | Paperback | 152 mm x 228 mm | 232 pp

Janice G. Raymond

New edition

Under the guise of liberatory science, the biomedical establishment is using women's bodies as the biological laboratories of the future. In Women as Wombs leading feminist ethicist Janice Raymond's scathing analysis of high-tech biomedical reproductive techniques contributes groundbreaking insights into the raging debate over reproductive technology and its ethical, legal, and political implications. Raymond asserts that far from being liberatory issues of ‘choice’, these techniques – including in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, and sex selection – are a threat to women’s basic human rights.

A tough brilliant mind at dance, a mind propelled by a passion for justice.

—Gena Corea, author of The Mother Machine

2019 | ISBN 9781925581874 | Paperback | 216 x 140 mm | 296 pp

Jennifer Lahl

Melinda Tankard Reist

Renate Klein (eds.)

Celebrity couple Kim Kardashian and Kanye West and their sweet new baby Chicago. Tom Daley and Dustin Lance Black and their cute little baby Robert. And thousands of other couples and single people around the world who obtain babies through surrogacy arrangements. The general public is compassionate to their plight and supportive of their 'right' to a baby.

But who are the faceless, nameless women who nurture and give birth to these babies? These women who are left with empty arms and leaking breasts after delivery? Surrogacy-dealing companies call them ‘special angels’ who ‘make miracles possible’, giving ‘an extraordinary gift’. IVF clinics call them ‘gestational surrogates’. The intended parents have promised them healthcare, full reimbursement, and ongoing contact with the baby. What could possibly go wrong?

Everything. Because surrogacy violates the human rights of the women whose bodies are used, and the children who are born. Because it is a fundamentally flawed and misogynist concept to imagine that women are interchangeable. And it is wishful thinking that watertight legal contracts and counselling can fix this.

In this book, strong and courageous women from the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, India, Austria and Russia share their true stories of becoming 'surrogate' mothers out of kindness and compassion (or need for money), only to be deceived, neglected, abused, harassed, or abandoned by ‘baby buyers’, clinics, and lawyers. Their stories are tragic, shocking, and revelatory of a profit-driven industry that preys on desperation and women’s compassion.

It becomes clear that it is not the occasional dysfunctional relationship or unreasonable surrogate causing problems in the surrogacy industry. Rather, it is the very nature of surrogacy as well as the surrogacy industry to use and abuse and discard. This book throws down a challenge to Big Fertility and its minions: women are not ovens or suitcases, babies are not products. Love is not to be bought.

2019 | ISBN 9781925581553 | Paperback | 215 x 137 mm | 142 pp

THIS BOOK IS PART OF THE RADFEM STARTER LIBRARY

Renate Klein

Pared down to cold hard facts, surrogacy is the commissioning/buying/ renting of a woman into whose womb an embryo is inserted and who thus becomes a ‘breeder’ for a third party.

Surrogacy is heavily promoted by the stagnating IVF industry which seeks new markets for women over 40, and gay men who believe they have a ‘right’ to their own children and ‘family foundation’. Pro-surrogacy groups in rich countries such as Australia and Western Europe lobby for the shift to commercial surrogacy. Their capitalist neo-liberal argument is that a well-regulated fertility industry would avoid the exploitative practices of poor countries.

Central to the project of cross-border surrogacy is the ideology that legalised commercial surrogacy is a legitimate means to provide infertile couples and gay men with children who share all or part of their genes. Women, without whose bodies this project is not possible, are reduced to incubators, to ovens, to suitcases. And the ‘product child’ is a tradable commodity who has never consented to being a ‘take away baby’: removed from their birth mother and given to strangers aka ‘intended parents’. Still, those in favour of this practice of reproductive slavery speak of ‘Fair Trade Surrogacy’ and ‘responsible surrogacy’.

In Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation Renate Klein details her objections to surrogacy by examining the short- and long-term harms done to the so-called surrogate mothers, egg providers and the female partner in a heterosexual commissioning couple. Klein also looks at the rights of children and compares surrogacy to (forced) adoption practices. She concludes that surrogacy, whether so-called altruistic or commercial can never be ethical and outlines forms of resistance to Stop Surrogacy Now. www.stopsurrogacynow.com

It is the global advertising campaigns that groom infertile couples and gay men that have led to the establishment of multibillion cross-border industries: money made literally from women’s flesh.

2017 | ISBN 9781925581034 | Paperback | 180 x 135 mm | 224 pp