The BioTexCom clinic in Ukraine offers a “Black Friday GPA”, i.e. discounts on the use of surrogate mothers from this country. The opportunity to tell you everything about this controversial medical technique.
- In the United States and Canada, Black Friday is a one-day shopping event that occurs on the Friday following Thanksgiving Day (the fourth Thursday of November).
- This Friday traditionally marks the start of the holiday shopping season.
These are balances to say the least… surprising. The BioTexCom clinic in Ukraine offers a “Black Friday GPA”. That is between 1,200 and 1,500 euros reduction for having a child born to a surrogate mother living in this vast country of Eastern Europe. But what really is this practice, which is becoming commonplace in the world to the point that we can now promote it?
In vitro fertilization (IVF) or insemination
Highly controversial, surrogacy is recognized by the WHO as a form of medically assisted procreation. Concretely, this technique allows a woman (the “surrogate mother”) bears the child of a couple of future parents (the “intended parents”). To do this, an embryo resulting from in vitro fertilization (IVF) or insemination is implanted in the uterus of the surrogate mother. “Depending on the techniques used, either the members of the couple are the genetic parents of the child, or the intending couple has only a partial genetic link with the child, or the intending couple has no genetic link with the child”, specify the site life-public.fr.
In France, surrogacy was prohibited by the law of July 29, 1994 and its article 16-7, which clearly stipulates that “any agreement relating to procreation or gestation on behalf of others is void”. The same is true in Germany, Belgium, Spain, Italy, Luxembourg… Other countries, on the other hand, authorize the use of surrogate mothers: Ukraine therefore, but also Russia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Greece, Canada, certain American federated states or even India…
Different legislations
“Some countries authorize it under conditions established in an agreement, monitoring and compensation which ensures the surrogate woman not an income but the assurance that she will be able to meet the costs generated by the medical monitoring and a normal pregnancy, explains in the Women’s Journal Master Muriel Bodin, specialist in health law. “What a “normal” gestation is can be interpreted differently depending on the sponsors of the gestation. Indeed, there are intended parents who impose unimaginable constraints on the surrogate mother, such as going to bed at a fixed time. every evening, to take a minimum of steps per day, to adopt a certain diet, to no longer have sexual intercourse or not to go out to avoid contaminating the fetus, etc. she continues.
If legislation varies so much, it is because surrogacy raises ethical debates, particularly around the commodification of the human body. Thus, Céline Revel-Dumas, journalist and author of “GPA, le grand bluff”, writes in the weekly Marianne about “Black Friday GPA”: “from now on, pregnancy by another is settled. What to read, what to understand? If not the odious and shocking shift of a mercantile and greedy logic to the domains of procreation, the body and the child itself” .
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