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WORLDWIDE
CAMPAIGN & COALITION TO END SURROGACY EXPLOITATION OF WOMEN & CHILDREN
San Francisco,
CA/May 11, 2015 — Stop Surrogacy Now launches today. Stop Surrogacy Now brings
together a worldwide, ethnically, religiously, and culturally diverse group
opposed to the exploitation of women and the human trafficking of children
through surrogacy.
With support from
16 organizations and more than 100 individuals from 18 countries, Stop
Surrogacy Now demands recognition that surrogacy exploits women (in many cases
poor and marginalized) who are paid to bear children. Often these women are
subject to coercion, restrictive or substandard living conditions, and poor
health care. In addition, surrogacy carries many severe, short- and long-term health
risks. Many surrogates live as indentured persons with 24 hour monitoring of
the “property” within their wombs.
Stop Surrogacy
Now demands recognition that children conceived for surrogacy are
quality-controlled: subject to sex-selection or abandonment for disability or
simple change-of-mind. Children produced through surrogacy are objects of
contract as well as products of inequitable bargaining power and unregulated
markets. Most often, these commercially produced children experience the sudden
and complete severance of the natural bond between mother and child and are
intentionally deprived of contact with and knowledge of one or both biological
parents in direct violation of the U.N.’s Declaration of the Rights of the
Child.
Signatories to
Stop Surrogacy Now demand a complete stop to surrogacy in order to protect
women and children worldwide and to end efforts that would seek to legitimize
and normalize trafficking children.
“A woman is a
human being not a machine, states Shagufta Omar, President, Pakistan Chapter of
the International Muslim Women Union. She continues, “Disconnecting both mother
and the child from each other is the violation of the human rights of both.”
“There is no
right to a child and rich people must be stopped from using a woman as a living
incubator and then taking their baby away and showing it off as their own. We
must prevent this reproductive slavery and stop it now”, says Dr. Renate Klein,
long-time health activist and FINRRAGE (Australia) co-ordinator.
Among the 16
organizations joining the Stop Surrogacy Now campaign is CoRP, a French NGO
that promotes human rights and the abolition of surrogacy as being in
contradiction to international conventions such as Article 21 of the Council of
Europe Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine, the so-called Oviedo
Convention, which stipulates, “The human body and its parts shall not, as such,
give rise to financial gain.”
Dr. Mia Fahlen of
Sweden states, “I’m joining this campaign to fight surrogacy to combat the
exploitation of women all over the world. The ethical, medical and
psychological consequences are far greater than thus far have been recognized.”
We invite
everyone to join us and add their signature in support of the Stop Surrogacy
Now Campaign. Media
Contact: media@stopsurrogacynow.com