GPA – “If we start producing children by contract, we are dehumanized”. Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram, co-president of CIAMS

2023-12-20 16:48:09

ESSENTIAL MAINTENANCE – It is a cry of alarm launched by Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram, co-founder and co-president of the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood (CIAMS), a group of international feminist associations which fight against globalized surrogacy (GPA) market. A market that generates millions and for which women pay a high price.

CIAMS, created in 2018 by four French organizations, and which today brings together nearly forty associations from 14 countries, denounces the practice of surrogacy, as instrumentalizing women’s bodies and reducing children to rank of commercial products.

Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram explains the dangers of this exploitation of a woman’s reproductive capacity, for her health and sometimes for her life, and denounces trafficking that resembles human trafficking and abuse of weakness and poverty. She particularly emphasizes the very worrying situation that Ukraine is experiencing in this area.

The activist also highlights the dangers of negating the bond between a newborn and his mother, and the consequences for children born to women who did not want to become mothers.

Finally, she points out that the arguments attempting to make this practice acceptable constitute a danger for the right to abortion.

Regulatory maneuvers to legitimize surrogacy outside democratic processes

The CIAMS warns of the “regulatory maneuvers of certain institutions such as the Hague Conference on Private International Law” (HCCH – Hague Conference) which tend to socially legitimize this violation of human rights and work quietly to impose on countries international standards which will not pass through the filter of the democratic tools provided in each country. The European Union, for example, is represented as a “federal regional organization” at the Hague Conference, described by Ana-Lucia Stoicea-Deram as an institution at “extremely opaque operation” and tool of a “denial of democracy”.

Last November, CIAMS activists demonstrated in front of the HCCH headquarters, dressed in the costume of women reduced to reproductive slavery in dystopian television fiction The Scarlet Maid which adapts the novel of the same name written by Margaret Atwood.