Talk about getting the wrong end of the stick here

The Times has a piece from Alice Thomson which manages to get matters entirely the wrong way around:

Surrogacy rules treat babies like objects

No, not really, that's the one thing that the surrogacy rules don't do:

The 30-year-old Surrogacy Arrangements Act, and the system of parental orders under the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, is a bizarre anomaly. Even Mary Warnock, the author of the 1984 Warnock Report which formed the basis of the legislation, now says the law is wrong.

The legal parents of a child at birth are the surrogate and her spouse rather than the biological parents. The baby is viewed as an object to be kept or given away rather than as the most important consideration.

Again, no, the very problem is that the baby is not treated as an object. For we can make contracts about objects in a manner that we cannot about human beings. The sale of one human from one to another is also called slavery and we're really pretty sure that we don't in fact like that sort of objectification of a human. This is why we don't, do not and probably cannot, have binding contracts upon surrogate parents.

Simply because if we are to do so then we've got to declare that the child is indeed an object which can be subject to such contracts, an object that we can force someone to deliver up.

We are vocally in favour of organ and gamete donation being sullied by filthy lucre. As we are of paid surrogacy contracts. We're deeply, deeply, unsure whether such surrogacy contracts will ever be thought to be truly, in extremis, binding, rather than a looser laying out of general expectations about what is to happen. 

But we are entirely certain here that this particular problem is that the baby is not an object and thus cannot be subject to contractual, err, terms of delivery.