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We outlawed the buying and selling of human beings like a long time ago. But why is there an ever growing multi billion dollar industry doing exactly that? The reality is you can go online right now, pick out eye, hair color, the IQ from a sperm or egg donor, rent a woman's uterus for nine months, and then take home your very own custom made baby. We've been sanitizing and commercializing human rights abuses in the West. We call killing children and abortion, reproductive health care, and we call selling children in se. Surrogacy is sistent reproduction. But when you strip away all of the language, surrogacy is the commercial sale of a human child. At the core of commercial surrogacy is the question, are adults entitled children? Or are children a gift to be honored, to be respected? Are children equal to all other humans? It's hard to argue that a nation that kills about a million kids every year via abortion truly honors and views children as a gift. We rarely come out and say it, but the pervasive, unspoken belief in modern society is that children exist at the pleasure of adults. Adults can pay to bring them into existence via IVF and surrogacy if they're wanted. If we want to turn the tide, we have to insist on two things. Number one, the child in the womb, no matter their size, age, genetic makeup, has inherent moral worth and human dignity just like all other humans. Number two, adults are not entitled to use their power or their wealth to bring them or take them out of existence. The desire to have children is natural and good because children are good. The good desire is being subverted when we create a commercial market that violates all the natural rights of a child in order to fulfill an adult's desire to have a child outside of natural procreation. We know that surrogacy violates the rights of the child by turning them into commodities. But the dehumanization of surrogate mothers is equally horrifying. We've been sold an image of surrogacy as an altruistic pursuit where a family member or friend helps a couple who otherwise couldn't create a family. But the vast majority of surrogacy is commercial, and surrogate mothers are often prime targets for exploitation by wealthy overseas buyers and other intermediaries. Last year, the United nations released a special report on the human rights violations both children and their surrogate mothers face worldwide. And the findings were shocking. Many women involved in surrogacy are economically vulnerable and subject to coercion. Their consent is not truly free. Surrogacy contracts are designed to protect the desires of buyers, not the mother and the child involved in the physical act of surrogacy. She is often forced to waive her rights to make certain medical decisions about her own body. Surrogates can be continuously surveyed by the buyers and their agents and may even be restricted to one location for an entire pregnancy. Surrogates face serious health risks from the surrogacy process and face greater risks of depression, trauma, PTSD from being separated from the child they carried for nine months. Surrogates have reported that they weren't paid at all or were only paid a fraction of what they were originally promised. They have even been abandoned by the buyers when they face miscarriage or other serious pregnancy complications. Buyers can easily pay into the hundreds of thousands all in to acquire the child. But a surrogate mother generally only receives a tiny fraction of that. The science of maternal fetal attachment is not new and it's not pseudoscience. The child gets to know the voice of the mother carrying him or her in the womb. He becomes familiar with her movements. He's affected by her stress levels. She is his home. She is his comfort. She is his entire world. And it's not a one way transmission. The pregnant mother also bonds with the child she is carrying. In fact, the strength of her bond impacts the long term mental health of her child. Children of mothers with stronger maternal emotional connection during pregnancy are more likely to develop their own emotional health in the future. But the entire science of maternal fetal attachment is discarded in surrogacy. The child's bond to the mother who carried him is disregarded. He will be ripped away from her at birth. The mother's connection and her body's continued desire to nourish and protect her babies continue long after she relinquishes the child to his or her buyers. In a contractual monetary agreement between buyers and the surrogate, the sole focus is on the surrogate producing a healthy baby. For the buyers. To say this way of bringing a child into the world is not natural would be an understatement. At its core, it's simply inhumane. Logistically, commercial surrogacy largely relies on ivf. Buyers create multiple children in the lab. These humans embryonic form are usually screened for health markers, but have even been screened for things like eye color and sex. The children who don't fit the buyer's ideal are either thrown away, donated to science or research, or frozen indefinitely. The rest are implanted in the surrogate. The assumption with IVF is that most of the children transferred into a woman will die before they can successfully implant and grow to term. But every single embryo created in an IVF clinic is a human being in the embryonic stage of life. Whether the embryo is destroyed shortly after fertilization or carried to term to mature into adulthood, he or she have the same right to exist and grow and not to be harmed that you and I sitting here today have. But when our culture, including our laws, medical community and other industries don't object to the idea of adults being entitled to create, buy, sell, discard, freeze and abort children simply because they have the money to do so, it's time to take back the plot and refuse to be silent about human rights abuses and happening with IVF and surrogacy. America needs to ban commercial surrogacy, as many other civilized nations already have. Human rights movements require culture change, and you don't have to be a powerful politician or public figure to make a difference. Work your circle of influence. That has a greater impact than you probably even realize. A buyer's desire to be a parent does not override a child's right to be bought, sold, and stolen, separated from his mother. The fight to end commercial surrogacy is not going to be easy. With its lawyers and corporations, commercial surrogacy has a massive profit motive. The pain and loss of infertility which is rising in the United States is real. Politicians and cultural icons who embrace the 1970s call for an end of natural childbearing so we could put women on equal footing with men are cheerleading for this to succeed. Meanwhile, the victims of commercial surrogacy are not able to speak for themselves. That is a job for you and for me.