In a recent episode of Stacey Dooley Sleeps Over, multimillionaire and British Surrogacy Centre CEO Barrie Drewitt-Barlow admitted in an interview that he and his current partner paid a model to be an egg donor to avoid having “ugly” children.
As Dooley noted in her show, Drewitt-Barlow gained notoriety, along with his then-“husband,” as the first same-sex couple in the U.K. to both be listed as the parents on the birth certificate of their surrogacy-born twins. Drewitt-Barlow is the father of seven children via surrogacy.
Drewitt-Barlow recounted finding an egg donor to Dooley, as his current partner, 23 years younger than he, hovered silently in the background. Drewitt-Barlow was unashamed of his strategy to control the physical appearance of his children, describing the process of choosing a model from a Miami catwalk to be an egg donor based on “her looks, completely.” He noted that he has “hundreds of those models on our books right now.”
He acknowledged that some people consider this “just buying a baby,” but argued that “most people could do a lot worse than spend one month of their life on drugs to give some embryos for 50 grand.” Drewitt-Barlow reportedly paid the model £50,000, or more than $100,000, to donate her eggs.
When Dooley asked if this attitude would create a “slippery slope” to over-emphasizing beautiful children, Drewitt-Barlow shook his head “no.”
“What do you want me to say? ‘No, we need ugly ones as well?’ I’m sorry, I just can’t lie,” he added.
“Nobody wants an ugly kid,” he said. “Sometimes we get them, but we don’t always want them, and we deal with it, and carry on,” Drewitt-Barlow said.
According to the episode, Drewitt-Barlow procured his seven surrogate children through the United States, since in the U.K., commercial surrogacy and certain eugenics processes often used in the IVF process are illegal.
When Dooley brought up criticism over genetic engineering, Drewitt-Barlow noted that in the U.K. the process is “blind.” He offered a sort of justification that, had he had children with a woman naturally, he would have known what the mother looked like. Procuring them through IVF and surrogacy, he demands to know the same.
He disagreed that his route was “a step closer to selective breeding,” saying, “if I really would have agreed with that, I would have asked for my money back … the ones that I got are definitely not those designer kids. … They’re just normal kids.”
Blurring the Lines Between Infertility and Sexual Deviance
Dooley confessed that she didn’t agree that such a heavy importance should be placed on the looks of a child. In a tearful aside, she recalled her own ectopic pregnancy, and expressed the pain of those wanting more children and being unable to have them. She said her experience caused her “to think about alternatives.”
The episode also featured a conversation with one of Drewitt-Barlow’s surrogates, who said her initial motivation to become a surrogate was to help those struggling with infertility.
But the episode sidesteps the obvious elephant in the room. Infertility isn’t Drewitt-Barlow’s problem. Comparing the situation of a British multimillionaire who has chosen to pursue unions that can only ever be childless with those, like Dooley herself, who experience tragic loss or legitimate infertility is deeply insensitive and intellectually dissonant.
While many of Drewitt-Barlow’s children were included in the episode, mention of any maternal figures, beyond what was physically required to have the children, was largely absent. No one seems concerned that these children will never experience a home in the care of both their biological mother and father.
The IVF process used to manufacture Drewitt-Barlow’s family exposes them to other unnatural relationship dynamics: When introducing some of his children to Dooley, Drewitt-Barlow explained that one of his sons was “created at the same time as” one of his sets of twins, but he was frozen until birth three years later.
As The Federalist’s Jordan Boyd previously reported, hundreds of thousands of in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycles “yield big batches of embryos every year” in the U.S. alone, but less than 10 percent of the babies survive to the womb. As Boyd noted, “Widespread endorsement of IVF emboldens an industry that prioritizes profit over people, adults’ selfish desires over children’s natural rights, quick fixes over long-term women’s health solutions, [and] desirable traits above all.”
As Katy Faust, founder and president of Them Before Us, wrote, “Traditional or gestational, altruistic or commercial, commissioned by gay or straight adults — surrogacy takes something away from the child. … It is the infliction of an intentional loss simply because an adult wants it that way.”