I could never ask another woman to have a baby for me

The Handmaid’s Tale

is praised for its prescience. Margaret Atwood’s agonising novel, in which women are reduced to reproductive entities in a polluted dystopia, was published in 1985. Women’s autonomy over their bodies is being rolled back across America and the world. Several American states – Alabama, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio – have passed laws banning abortion as early as six weeks; so early that women may not know they are pregnant. An attempt last week to introduce the same restrictions in Mississippi has been blocked by a district judge. But not, I suspect, for long.

These laws are outriders to the intent of criminalising all abortion. Even people who might call themselves progressive in other instances are turning against abortion. I spent last week enraged by a man on Twitter who seemed to oppose it chiefly because he thought he might have been aborted, and that would have been a tragedy. So he explained fertility management to an entire gender; unwanted pregnancies, he told us, can always be prevented. Empathy dies, and narcissism swells.

Who cares to speak about the tragedy of a family for whom another child could mean financial ruin – or the loss of their mother? Who talks about how pregnancy and childbirth can be life-threatening for women? Who remembers that a raped 11-yearold girl was forced to carry a child in Argentina this year? That in Sumatra, a 15-year-old girl assaulted by her brother delivered her baby herself and was later imprisoned when it died? That women so close to home, in Northern Ireland, are subject to some of the world’s most restrictive abortion laws? That if you criminalise abortion, you will merely send it underground, and women will die?

Many women are fearful of this destruction of their rights; but others are prepared to exploit female bodies not their own. I am referring to surrogacy, which is becoming as socially acceptable as abortion is not.

All that seems to matter is that women produce children. I don’t object to the British laws on surrogacy, which permit no payment for the service beyond expenses. The surrogate can also keep the baby if she changes her mind. That seems fair, for no one can be coerced financially into producing a child, which they then must give away – and it is a rare gift. But as we follow America down the terrible road to culture wars and – might I be paranoid? – restrictions on abortion, I fear we will follow US laws on surrogacy, too.

Payment for surrogacy is legal in most American states. Women ordinarily seek surrogates when they cannot safely have a child; or they cannot have a child at all. It is hard to walk in the footsteps of a woman who cannot have a child and so is prepared to pay for one. I have a child, and I can only say that having endured an appalling birth, I could never ask another woman to do it on my behalf and then to give the child away, and all for money. I would call it morally ambiguous.

But there is a new trend in America, in Los Angeles particularly, where anything can be had for cold, hard money. It is for physically healthy women who can produce children to use a surrogate anyway.

According to an interview with a fertility doctor published last week, they do it because they don’t want to “ruin” their bodies by bearing their own babies. I would question whether anyone who thinks their body is aesthetically “ruined” by pregnancy is mature enough to be a parent to anything, but perhaps I am weird. They are models and actresses and wielding their “right” to a career, they are prepared to use another female body to secure it.

This is the feminism of fools. It is madness. The doctor relates that some of them are anxious of being judged and pretend to be pregnant by wearing false bellies. So perhaps they do know what they ask and do it anyway. What does a deception like that do to a woman and a child?

In England, too, I feel the wind changing. A columnist for a national newspaper who lost her fertility to cancer has detailed her search for a surrogate. I sympathise, but is she aware that she talks about her quest for a child like a woman shopping for an object? She wants to change the law, so she can disentangle herself emotionally from a potential surrogate – unpaid surrogacy is fraught – and simply buy a baby.

But it comes down only to her own undeniable pain. You should not legislate with pain. There is no such thing as a right to a baby. Who would have thought that 21st-century women would not only lose autonomy over a womb of one’s own: but to other, richer, women, too?

The handmaid has walked out of fiction, and into life.

I couldn’t ask another woman to have a child on my behalf and then give it away for money