Surrogacy’s blessed babies

POTENTIAL parents using surrogates for motherhood is nothing new.

In the UK, parental orders transferring legal rights from a surrogate to the parents tripled from 121 in 2011 to 368 in 2018 — and one can only imagine the heartbreak and joy that lies behind those figures.

At the age of 73, newscaster Jon Snow and his wife Precious (pictured) have just had a surrogate baby after 11 years of marriage and many medical setbacks and miscarriages.

‘We will always be deeply grateful to our surrogate who carried our embryo to term,’ he said this week.

Meanwhile, Alec and Hilaria Baldwin welcomed a surrogate daughter just months after she gave birth to their fifth child.

Hilaria said that she ‘doublebabied’ because her children ‘were grieving’ for the child she had miscarried last year before getting pregnant again. Confused? Read on. A new BBC series The Surrogates told the story of Caitlin, who had a baby for her boss, Kate.

That might be taking company loyalty to extremes and one wonders what kind of corporate environment compliance allowed it to go ahead.

There is so much potential for surrogacy to go wrong. Many argue about the lack of boundaries and how it turns life itself into a commodity, along with potentially leaving children in lifelong confusion about the identity of their own mother.

On the other hand, it can bring untold joy to couples who might not otherwise be able to experience parenthood.

To want to have a child so much that you are prepared to go through all this says one very important thing — that the baby is cherished, wanted and needed, therefore already blessed.