Surrogacy

Tuesday

Nicholas Lezard

An unconventional orphan: Queen Esther, by John Irving, reviewed

Back in the 1980s and 1990s everyone read John Irving, or so it seemed. You had to have a copy of A Prayer for Owen Meany, The World According to Garp, The Hotel New Hampshire and The Cider House Rules. After a while even the most obtuse reader realised that a novel by John Irving was very likely to contain elements that had appeared in other John Irving novels. In fact, a friend of mine invented John Irving Bingo: cross off a box every time one of the following is mentioned: an orphanage; bears; Vienna; sex that is in some kind of way weird; and sudden acts of violence, usually

Thursday

Lara Prendergast

Britain’s bureaucratic bloat, debating surrogacy & is smoking ‘sexy’?

40 min listen

This week: The Spectator launches SPAFF The civil service does one thing right, writes The Spectator’s data editor Michael Simmons: spaffing money away. The advent of Elon Musk’s DOGE in the US has inspired The Spectator to launch our own war on wasteful spending – the Spectator Project Against Frivolous Funding, or SPAFF. Examples of waste range from the comic to the tragic. The Department for Work and Pensions, Michael writes, ‘bought one Universal Credit claimant a £1,500 e-bike after he persuaded his MP it would help him find self-employment’. There’s money for a group trying to ‘decolonise’ pole dancing; for a ‘socially engaged’ practitioner to make a film about someone else getting

Mary Wakefield

The dark reality of surrogacy

I was a twin when I was born, but this was in the days before decent scans and proper neonatal intensive care, and we were more than two months premature, so not long afterwards, my twin died. As a child, I thought nothing of it. It simply wasn’t relevant. But when I was drifting around America in my early twenties, the subject came up one day in conversation. A Texan friend asked me: ‘Do you miss your twin?’ I turned to her, meaning to laugh at the daft question, but instead, embarrassingly, I cried. And I’ve known ever since, whether I like it or not – and I really don’t,

Wednesday

Isabel Hardman

Liz Kendall to be first MP to have a child through surrogacy

Labour frontbencher Liz Kendall is expecting a baby through a surrogate, making her the first MP to have a child through surrogacy. Kendall tells me that she and her partner are expecting the baby in January after a lengthy and painful fertility battle. She says: ‘We have been through a lot to get here but it really is happening now, and we’ve been telling people this week.’ During the couple’s attempts to conceive, Kendall suffered two miscarriages and needed surgery after both. Last month she also spoke in a parliamentary debate about the ‘debilitating’ symptoms of the menopause that she had been experiencing over the past year. She won praise