A legend has it that Black Friday (or “Black Friday”) dates back to the days of slavery. On that day, it is said, slaves were sold off in the public squares of the United States. The rumor may have been denied by historians, it dies hard and returns each year towards the end of November.
However, sometimes reality goes beyond fiction. Recently, the site of the firm BioTexCom titled “Black Friday sale” above the stylized faces of two infants. Because BioTexCom does not sell washing machines or plasma screens, but babies. Between November 15 and 26, the Ukrainian clinic offered an attractive 3% discount on its “surrogate mother” packages, otherwise known as “surrogacy” (surrogacy).
Will there soon be babies in Santa’s hood? Unless you order them on Amazon. On the Ontario site Canamcryo.com, after selecting the characteristics of your future offspring, you can choose a sperm or egg donor by clicking on “add to cart”. The site does not say whether delivery is offered.
The image would make people smile if the most sacred thing in the world since the appearance of Christendom, the birth of a child, were not becoming a product like any other. After the woman-object, here is the disposable mother and the made-to-measure baby. Twenty years ago “cultural products” desecrated art, now the time has come for motherhood at auction and babies on sale.
Fortunately, in many countries, barriers still exist against this instrumentalisation of the bodies of women, often poor, intended to make orphans by voluntarily separating the child from its biological mother. All this to satisfy the hubris of wealthy couples unable to live with the normal limits of procreation imposed on all human beings.
Under the pressure of a booming reproduction industry, these obstacles are however in the process of being blown. If France still prohibits surrogacy on its territory, Quebec is on the verge of giving up. Bill 2 discussed this week in parliamentary committee wants to delete the article of the Civil Code which stipulates that “any agreement by which a woman undertakes to procreate or bear a child on behalf of another person is null and void. absolute ”. An article which also exists in France and which prohibits any commercial contract on the back of the one that was designated yesterday as the “fruit of love”.
While its tradition and its law have always been different, Quebec is on the verge of submitting to the Canadian diktat which has legalized surrogacy (known as “unpaid”) since 2004. The project obviously sets guidelines, but everyone knows that these are often fictions. Thus the prohibition on remunerating surrogate mothers is easily circumvented when the transaction and payments are made abroad. Paid or not, this practice represents a gigantic enterprise to circumvent adoption laws. Why are sponsors, who basically adopt a child who until then only belonged to their mother, are not subject to the strict controls that apply to those who want to adopt?
The government is preparing not only to legalize surrogate mothers, but also to offer as a bonus the benefits of its health insurance and maternity leave. Foreign parents will thus be subsidized out of taxpayers’ taxes.
Quietly, for the past few years, Canada has been becoming an El Dorado for reproductive tourism. This is what the Globe and Mail from 2018. In some provinces, half of the children born to surrogacy are intended for foreign parents. While countries like India, Nepal, Thailand and Mexico have closed their doors to foreigners, Canada offers them a good health system, free health care, simplified adoption procedures and a Canadian passport in bonus for the baby. “Canada is a great place for surrogacy. Lots of people want to take advantage of it, and we can expect that number will only grow, ”writes journalist Alison Motluk.
It will not be surprising that the 116 pages of this bill sometimes borrow the style of a science fiction novel. There are formulas as convoluted as “the mother or the person who gave birth” (article 208). As if a person who has given birth could be anything other than a mother! We speak of “the woman or the person who gave birth to the child” (article 235). As if the person who gives birth could be anything other than a woman!
No wonder, since this law is also on the verge of breaking with the entire history of civil status and Quebec family law by superimposing on the biological and indisputable notion of “sex” enshrined in all international conventions. that from the United States, totally fuzzy and arbitrary of “kind” (gender). And not just any “genre”, a “genre” that everyone is free to change as they wish.
Are we aware that we are ratifying on the corner of a table and without any real debate what must be called an anthropological break?