AMANDA PLATELL
It’s a deeply emotive subject. But in this personal view, AMANDA PLATELL, who knows the agony of being childless, says...
As someone who has been told that she can never bear children, I understand the yearning, the almost primeval need, for a baby as well as anyone. Like every other girl, I grew up simply assuming that I would be a mother. It was not a question of if, but when.
My dream was to be married, have five children and be a stay-at-home mum to bring them up with love and comfort, fussing over them like a mother hen. But that never happened. After years of trying to conceive naturally, I took the well-trodden route of fertility doctors, the rollercoaster of IVF, endless scans to determine what was wrong with me, and even operations in an attempt to become pregnant.
I remember only too clearly the despair I felt when, aged 40, I was told by a doctor at one of the country’s top fertility clinics that I would never carry a child unless I used a donor egg.
But I did not want to carry an anonymous other woman’s child, and at that age there was little chance of adopting — unless I did a Madonna and rushed off to Malawi to find a son or daughter.
Over the years since then, I have accepted that I will be childless. I managed to bury that longing for the babies I would never have.
It is because of my personal experience that I feel to a certain extent qualified to comment on the extraordinary story on the front page of saturday’s Mail — followed up today with an interview with the individuals involved — of how a surrogate mother gave birth to her own gay son’s baby.
It is a story so unusual, it’s almost hard to get your head around it — and one that, quite frankly, leaves me feeling deeply queasy.
supermarket worker Kyle Casson, 26, was so distraught when his plan to have an IVF child through another surrogate fell through that his 46-year-old mother stepped in. she became pregnant with a donor egg fertilised by her own son’s sperm.
‘I l ove being a parent, and f or Kyle to experience that, I would do anything for him,’ she explained.
Kyle added: ‘I understand that not everyone will agree with it, but I have a son and I am very happy.
‘As long as people can provide a home and they have support, I don’t see why anyone should be denied the right to be a parent.’
WhAt is so disturbing is Kyle’s sense of entitlement. Why should his ‘right to be a parent’ be inalienable? What about the rights of an unborn child and its future happiness? the boy’s plight came to light last week only because a high Court judge ruled that Kyle can now adopt the boy — who’s called Miles and is eight months old — as his father. Even though in the eyes of the law he was also the infant’s brother when Miles was born.
Just imagine the effect on the poor little kid when Kyle one day explains to his son the unique ‘family’ arrangement into which he has been born. ‘so you see, Miles,’ dad will explain, ‘you’re not only my son, you were my brother too. And as for granny, she’s also your mum.’
Becoming a parent comes with profound and arduous responsibilities. A baby is not something to be bought like a designer handbag or a comfy companion to enhance one’s lonely life. that’s what Battersea Dogs & Cats home is for.
Kyle plans to return to his job as a supermarket worker next month, with granny/mother Anne-Marie Casson stepping in as the boy’s primary carer. I’m sure this arrangement is well-intentioned — it’s not as if the child will be short of love. But I fear it is a story that may not have a happy ending.
My great worry is that in this case IVF — which was developed to end the pain of childlessness and has undoubtedly brought great joy to couples who otherwise would not have experienced parenthood — may inflict another kind of pain on the child it is creating.
Academic research has overwhelmingly demonstrated that children brought up in a happy marriage by both their biological parents tend to do better in every way than those who aren’t.
Yet over the decades, bit by bi t , we have unpicked t he institution of marriage to suit the convenience of individuals and their ‘rights’.
Under attack by feminists, minority groups, divorce lawyers, ‘progressive’ politicians and all manner of other self-interested parties, marriage is so degraded that it is no longer regarded as a bedrock of society.
the combination of this vandalism with the great strides in IVF and the science of fertility has pushed us further and further into the unknown, as ethical and moral considerations are brushed aside where the family is concerned, along with self-restraint.
We have opened a Pandora’s box in which people make demands for babies without considering the effect of unconventional family arrangements on the child.
In the past, it seems that ethical dilemmas posed by such ‘progress’ would have been the subject of lengthy consideration and Parliamentary debate. Yet in our modern-day free-for-all, precedents have been broken without any of us hearing about it.
Miles’s father Kyle is not only the first man to use his own mother as a surrogate, he is also the first single man to have a child through surrogacy in this country.
Until now, no single man or woman in Britain has been able to become a parent using a donor egg and a British surrogate — the law allows only two parents to apply for a parental order for any surrogate child born in this way.
But by going to court to adopt Miles, Kyle Casson has neatly circumvented a safeguard that was there to protect the child.
I pray that Miles prospers in the extraordinary arrangement — by all accounts his father Kyle is a decent, kind and conscientious man, and it’s true that many single mums and dads do a wonderful job of raising happy, well-adjusted children who do well at school.
Equally, many gay couples who have r ecently had surrogate children, like Elton John and his partner David Furnish, or Mary Portas, whose wife carried the sperm of Mary’s brother, could yet prove exemplary parents.
But as I have said, all the recent research shows that children have the best life outcomes if they are raised by two parents in a traditional marriage, with a mother and father. And the farther away from that ideal we move, the more risk to the child it inevitably entails.
ThE CONCLUSION of a study by the Centre For Family Research in 2013 was that surrogate-born children were more likely to suffer from behavioural and emotional problems, and depression, than those carried by their biological mother.
they struggle to cope with the idea that they were carried by a woman other than their mother.
One has only to witness the lengths to which hundreds of thousands of adopted children now go to find their ‘real’ mothers to see what heartache could lie ahead when they feel they have to search for their true identity.
I appreciate that I may sound like a Luddite who resists the advance of science. And it is true that when the first ‘test tube baby’ — yes, we did call them that then — Louise Joy Brown was born in 1978, there were many siren voices about what IVF would bring.
But you don’t have to be some stuck-in-the-mud religious zealot to question whether IVF should be used to fulfil absolutely everyone’s longing for a child.
there have been sickening instances of its misuse — not least women in their 60s using IVF to become mothers again.
For instance, the British child psychiatrist Patricia Rashbrook and her husband John Farrant, from East sussex, had an IVF baby when she was 62 — even though she already had three grown-up children from a previous marriage.
how could this be considered anything other than selfish — engineering having a child so long after nature deemed you shouldn’t?
For his part, Kyle Casson also insists that nature had to be overcome: ‘I didn’t choose to be gay. I was born that way. I was born unable to have kids. I can’t just go out and have sex with a woman. Being a dad was a high priority in my life and now I’ve done it.’
Even in our liberal age, I’m not sure how anyone could explain Kyle’s ‘right to have a child’ to a young lad — let alone to the rest of society.
sometimes, painful though they may find it, some people simply have to accept that they will never be a parent. As I did.