Sparks: Rise in overseas surrogates ‘increases risk of stateless babies’
That a child, being born of the will of one and the body of another, should find his inherent right to a country dissolved by the friction of competing laws - this is a violation of the natural architecture of citizenship.
Our governments have finally figured out how to make a baby without a country, which is about the only thing they’ve ever managed to produce that didn’t require a tax stamp or a three-year waiting period.
Why do we entangle the very arrival of new life in a web of distant ink and parchment, as if a soul required the permission of a ledger to belong to the earth upon which it breathes?
The international market processes the womb of the poor woman like any other raw material, and when the gears of different legal machines grind together, it is the infant who is spat out into the cold of no-man's-land.
Do not wonder that these children wander without a home, for we have made even the cradle a theater of commerce, and where profit leads the way, the safety of the vulnerable is always left behind.
Wealthy men exchange gold for the labor of a woman’s blood and bone, yet they are shocked when the artificial papers of their own invention fail to recognize the living reality of the child they have effectively purchased.
The dog is born and belongs wherever there is sun and a scrap of meat, but your civilized man manages to invent a child who has no place on the entire earth because two pieces of paper disagree.
Before we remove the old fence that tied a child to the soil of his birth, we ought to ask why we are so eager to replace a mother with a contract and a country with a vacuum.
As the river finds its path by the gravity of the land, so must the infant find his station by the origin of his physical being, yet we attempt to divert this natural flow through the fractured conduits of man-made law.
This legal crisis is the inevitable symptom of a global capital that commodifies the reproductive power of the proletariat, creating a class of humans whose very existence is unrecognized by the bourgeois states that brokered their birth.
From inside the sterile waiting rooms where these deals are struck, the official promises of protection vanish, leaving only the terrified faces of mothers and the uncertain futures of babies who officially do not exist.
Watching the caravans of hopeful parents cross these distant frontiers, one notices that the local customs of birth are being overwritten by the cold requirements of foreign solicitors, leaving the newest travelers without a passport for the road.
Things that are distressing: a tiny infant with no name in a ledger, a mother who is paid to disappear, and a great pile of legal documents that provide no warmth to a cradle.