Strollerderby

Surrogacy can be a wonderful thing, I'm sure...but it would not be for me.  I'm not all that happy of a pregnant person anyway.  I do it for the end result and I want to care for my children (most days anyway).  

I think surrogacy should be given freely (except for medical expenses and possibly child care during doctor appts. etc., if the surrogate has children).  

Another perspective to consider is the fact that many people have risky jobs and surrogacy could just be another one of those.  I'm sure there are plenty of people that like being pregnant but don't want to raise children (I figure if I know one, there must be more out there).

Jen S. - Which is it?  A gift or a job?  If surrogacy is only ever given freely with no compensation than you can't compare it to a dangerous job.  People in dangerous jobs, like say Fireman, are compensated for the risks they take.  So, it's an uncompensated dangerous gift?

Marj.  I told you what I considered it...a gift.  I also realize that there are other perspectives out there and offered up that one for consideration by others.

as an intended mother, through the use of a gestational surrogate.  i have written about this issue, and wrestled with how i personally feel about this.  my husband and i did not make the choice to use a surrogate lightly, in fact it was something that we struggled with.  

as an adopted child, i knew that i was not comfortable with an any kind of open adoption, so domestic adoption was out.  i wanted to have an infant, so international adoption was out.  i also knew that my body could not create life, so having a child the "old fashioned way" was out.  

when you break down the compensation that a surrogate gets, it is a very small amount of money for a lot of work.  pregnancy is work, going through infertility treatments is work, and birth is a ton of work.  our surrogate and her family should be compensated for all this work.  in the end it is not just the surrogate who is working on our behalf, it is her entire family.

she is not the mother!! giving birth to a child does not make you a mother.  being there to raise a child, makes you a mother.

please read the following posts, if you want to learn more about my feelings on these issues.

babygiddings.blogspot.com/.../her-body-my-baby-and-another-intended.html

babygiddings.blogspot.com/.../surrogacy-compensation.html

babygiddings.blogspot.com/.../nyts-article-no-i-am-not-trying-to-beat.html

UGH! I didn't know about the "fertility tourism" thing. Revolting does not even begin to cover it. My skin is crawling.

i have no relationship with my birth family.  i have met my birht mother and she is a lovely woman, but she has her own family and children, i am not one of them.  my child does have a mother right now, ME.  do you think that your child does not have a mother when they are being cared for by a babysitter?  are you no longer there mother because they are in the care of their teacher at school?  if that is how you think, which i would respect, then yes our surrogate is the mother, but this is not how our surrogate and my family think.

I was pretty unimpressed by Jennifer Block's article. The "Lauren" case was an extreme example of things that can go wrong--unethical medical care (changing the number of embryos transferred once the patient is already sedated is beyond the pale, regardless of whether a surrogate is involved), an ill-prepared surrogate, and a set of "friends" that are apparently (if this article is to be believed) stunningly oblivious to the magnitude of the gift that they have been given. This is not the typical experience of surrogates, and shouldn't be represented as such, although it does illustrate some of the issues that surrogates and intended parents should discuss before embarking on an attempt at a surrogate conception. As for the argument that the woman to gestate a child should be the child's only legal parent--where the heck does that leave fathers? That's a pretty radical view, and one that could potentially deprive many children and fathers of the right to have a relationship (remember that not all mothers prioritize their child's best interest over their own feelings about the father in divorces, bad breakups, or accidental pregnancies). And if we give the genetic father rights, but not the genetic mother, that would be sexism of of the worst kind. It really is all complicated, and I don't think that reductionist views like Rothman's are helpful. I do think that the woman that carries a child has rights, but I don't think that it's reasonable to say that she's the only party that does.

I think that surrogates should be paid in most cases, not because it isn't a gift, but because while the gift is on the part of the surrogate herself, her whole family (assuming that she has one) will pay the price. There will be moments when they all feel put upon, and knowing that they are getting something tangible out of it will go a long way toward helping them get through those moments. I look at it like e.g., having a jeweler friend make your wedding rings. The gift is the labor, but I think in most cases, the jeweler would still expect the marrying couple to pay for the materials.

I'm a surrogate right now and I have no doubt in my mind that it is the right thing for me to do- for others, maybe not so much. My body does pregnancy well- it's nothing I strive for, it's just biology. I have two healthy boys, not in a place to have more babies of my own at the moment and I like knowing I'm helping someone build their own family.

Had to add- as a surrogate- carrying another couple's baby will not make me it's mother. No thanks, very much all the same.

In short, I see myself as an incubator helping another couple reach their life dream of a biological family of their own. I am my own children's mother and no one elses.

Shannon - could be, I'll give you that...but in my own happy circumstance the little bundle of joy will be with it's parents far away and across a sea and more than likely will not be told of it's birth circumstances. In their particular culture, one doesn't speak of such things. The Intended Parents and I chose each other for our own very important reasons.

I do know this is certainly not the circumstance for all gestational surrogacy arrangements, but for ours it is a closed book.  

I have never understood why any parent is threatened by the idea that their children have others who love them, some in ways that are also of a parental nature.  The more the merrier, I say. Children are not ours to own.  

I also think that surrogacy is yet one more reproductive issue/industry/moral quagmire that reflects our society's inability to fully comprehend  the complexities of human relationship and design language, laws and social constructs which reflect that complexity.  

I fear that the time is still decades away when we see reproduction and parenting as more than rights or commodities.

Well, I don't normally let blog writers give me homework, but I actually took you up on it and read the article on Indian surrogacy and I must say that I was not impressed. The article was reasonably well-written and VERY well-organized. I'll give it that. There was also a very comprehensive list of footnotes given the impression that the author had done her homework. However, whenever she got anywhere near a topic about which I have insider knowledge, she got either the facts or her interpretation of the practical implications of said facts wrong. Most of these areas are peripheral to her central thesis (e.g, the medical aspects and the legal issues surrounding the birth of a US citizen overseas), but they did make me wonder about the quality of her scholarship elsewhere (in areas where I was less likely to see the glaring errors). More to the point, though, her central argument was not supported by the very data that she presented (in most cases, she admitted that there were no data at all). I think that if her main point was that the implications of surrogacy for all parties involved should be studied in more detail, I would agree completely. However, her conclusion that it should be banned seemed to come out of nowhere. If I feel really motivated, I'll post a detailed review here later, but I doubt it would be of much interest to most readers, so I may not bother.

I am also very troubled by the (implied) analogy being made between surrogates and birth mothers in adoption in much of her argument (and apparently yours as well, given that most of the works that you are telling us to read are on adoption, not surrogacy). I think that most birth mothers would be offended by this analogy. Surrogates deliberately conceive a child for the sole purpose of relinquishing it to somebody else. Birth mothers usually conceive by accident, having had no intention to create and then relinquish a child, and generally having had no desire ever to do so. Gestational surrogates have no genetic relationship with the child. Birth mothers are the child's genetic AND gestational mother. The intended parents of the children borne by surrogates ARE usually the genetic parents, and therefore are linked to the child by much more than just the desire to parent. The adoptive parents of the children born to birth mothers have no intrinsic link to their children aside from the legal, emotional, and social relationships that result from the adoption itself (I don't mean that the relationship isn't just as important, but rather that it didn't exist prior to the adoption). It's apples and oranges. Implying that a birth mother is like a gestational surrogate (i.e., that the child that she bore was somebody else's or intended for someone else in any meaningful way before the adoption was finalized), in my opinion, is disrespectful to birth mothers, and unfair to surrogates as well.

I do agree that the woman that gestates a child has rights with regard to that child, regardless of any and all agreements that she may have made prior to the birth. Period. However, I disagree with the notion that biological fathers and genetic mothers have no rights in a surrogacy situation. Why should the fact of surrogacy nullify the rights that the fathers would enjoy as biological fathers in any other situation? Cases of embryos accidentally switched in fertility clinics are informative here as well.

I admit that if I found out now that my IVF-conceived child had been switched in the lab, I would gladly surrender the rights to any genetic child that I may have out there to keep this child that I gestated, and would have done so at the moment of her birth (I actually thought about this at the time, as she looked so little like me at birth that my imagination ran wild), but that doesn't mean that I would feel that I had any right to deny her the right to know any theoretical genetic parents that she might have, or to deny them the right to know her.

Thank you for collecting these diverse responses.  Not many seem to get the fact the person born with these methods may develop a critical view of them.   It is scary to me that some are happy with concealing the truth from another generation about the facts and circumstances of their origin.  This should be repugnant.  But, such feelings can not be assumed anymore to guide moral choices.  We need to discuss this stuff in places like this.  We are creating worlds these days.  It scares me sometimes to think about it.  

"It's interesting that people seem to want it both ways.  An egg donor baby ONLY belongs to the recipient of the egg; a surrogate-gestated baby ONLY belongs to the commissioning parents."

Who said that? A lot of parents that use these technologies are not stereotypes or straw men but actual real thinking caring people who are capable of understanding the complexities involved (sadly, it's also true that some aren't). Many surrogates maintain long-term relationships with the children that they gestated, and some egg donors also have relationships with their genetic children.

I was referring to the fact that you said "people," rather than e.g., "some people." I'm glad to read that I was mistaken.

The fact that some birth mothers are opposed to surrogacy does not make surrogacy equivalent to adoption. I have heard birth mothers rail against (offensive, in my opinion) practices such as telling babies that God put them in another woman's belly for their "real" parents (i.e., the adoptive parents), since they couldn't have a child. Well, in surrogacy, the embryo WAS placed in another woman's body just for that reason (by doctors, but still...). Birth mothers are not surrogates, and shouldn't be considered as such. And some (most?) surrogates don't consider themselves to be the mother of the child, whereas I think that view is rare among birth mothers that relinquish their children to adoption. Hence my view that it is apples and oranges. I recognize that the child may view the surrogate as his/her mother regardless of the surrogate's thoughts or wishes on the subject, but I suspect that it's very much less likely with surrogacy than adoption.

I DO think that the child has the right to know, though. A baby that is separated from the woman that gestated him/her immediately after birth doesn't know that this woman is not her/his genetic or intended mother. He/she has been hearing this woman's voice for nine months, and knows his/her smell, and may suffer a sense of loss as a result of this separation, just as adopted newborns may feel a loss. It is possible that this may have long-term impacts on the child's emotional wellbeing. (I hope not, but I don't think there's adequate research to be sure one way or the other at this point.) Giving that feeling a name and an explanation may go a long way toward helping the child to deal with these feelings, should they arise.

Having said that, I don't feel like I'm in a position to judge people who are making these complex and difficult decisions. In particular, while I personally would not make the decision to be an anonymous (to the child) surrogate, I acknowledge and commend the generosity of women who choose to be surrogates and to give a child the gift of life, and a family the gift of a child.

I think that one other thing that bothers me in the discussion about India specifically is the (implied) assumption that poor women aren't smart enough to give informed consent, or that selling babies if the price is high enough is a normal response to poverty. Obviously there is huge potential for misrepresentation and manipulation here, and that needs to be addressed, but that doesn't make the practice itself intrinsically unethical. There was a time when I would have been horrified at the thought of (relatively speaking) wealthy women from rich countries contracting surrogates from poor countries. However, that was before I actually lived in a poor country and got to know many of these (previously theoretical) poor women. The friends that I made were smart and very capable of weighing the choices and making decisions about what was best for them or their families. They don't always make the choices that I would make for them, but they make choices that make sense in their own cultural, social, religious, and economic context. Their circumstances may be unfortunate, but they are not pawns, and they are not just helpless victims. None of my poor friends or relatives living in poor countries would sell one of their children for any price. However, I think that one or two of them would consider acting as a surrogate, and I personally know people involved in two cases of women giving their children to infertile women in their communities to raise (in an open adoption-like situation), simply because they could have more children and the other woman couldn't (one of my friends there was the child in this scenario, another was the adoptive mother). Being poor doesn't mean that you lack the ability to love, to feel compassion, or to act out of genuine generosity. I think it is patronizing to assume that these women are treating themselves as commodities (essentially objects, to be used and manipulated), rather than acting as agents in their own right to improve their circumstances in a manner of their choosing. I agree that when a woman has a dying child (an example from that article) and no other way to pay for the treatment that might save that child she is in a very bad bargaining position, but would her position be improved by taking away her options and letting her existing child die? Why are we better qualified to decide than the woman herself?

It's all very complicated.

"I have friends who've used these methods, and do it the right way, which is why I have these strong feelings about those who don't do it the right way."

This statement, embedded in which is a certainty that you know The Right Way, is very off-putting.  Yes, you are very sure that you are correct, but nearly everyone feels that way at one time or another.  Does it help the conversation to make statements with this level of self-righteous smugness?  I for one am so taken aback by this attitude I can barely read on.  

Well, as Voltaire said, Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.  What has led you to be so sure that there's a Single Right Way--and that you know it?  We're talking about human beings here--not exactly the realm of absolutes.  

"But what it really was about, was the adults involved not wanting to be outed as infertile, not wanting their children to love them less for not having birthed them, etc."

Here is another "turn of phrase" that suggests a hostile attitude toward infertile people. How on earth can you presume to know that the adults involved in adoption care more about their own feelings than those of their children. What a stunning assumption. Isn't it at least conceivable that in some (many, most?) cases parents genuinely believed that if the truth would cause their children pain, hiding the truth would prevent that pain? Don't forget that back then, adoption was very much regarded as "second best." I agree that very bad things have gone on (and continue to go on) in adoption. However, you seem to assume that other parents don't love their children as much as you love yours. Most parents do their very best for their children, even if that "best" isn't always enough to keep their children from getting hurt. Yes, we ALL bring our own baggage into our parenting, and addressing and deconstructing that baggage can sometimes be helpful in guiding parents as they strive to make better choices or to mitigate the damage done by previous poor choices. However, this kind of finger-pointing is hardly helpful.

"But far too often, I hear folks with fertility problems not wanting to adopt for fear of these issues, assuming that children produced through donor gametes and/or surrogates will have a simpler situation.  Not so.  Not so.  Not so."

How on earth do you know? Obviously you like to think so, because that will validate your own choices (which I do not question, I think it's great that you chose the option that was best for your family.) But there is simply not enough information available about the effects of egg donation, embryo donation, or gestational surrogacy to even begin to address that question. We're all flying blind.

The technologies involved in surrogacy and egg donation are quite new, and the first large cohorts of resulting children being systematically studied are still young. As for conceptions involving donor sperm, there is surprisingly little systematic quantitative research.

In a quick search on medline, I found a ton of literature that confirms that we know virtually nothing about the effects of surrogacy (the topic of this conversation, I thought), donor egg use, and donor embryo use on the long-term happiness of the resulting children, and not nearly enough about the implications of donor sperm use.

A few key quotations from peer-reviewed journals:

"Few studies have included children at adolescence or beyond, and little is known about the consequences of conception by assisted reproduction from the perspective of the individuals concerned. In addition, there are some types of assisted reproduction family, such as families created through a surrogacy arrangement or through embryo donation, about whom little is known at all. Although existing knowledge about the impact of assisted reproduction for parenting and child development does not give undue cause for concern, there remain a number of unanswered questions in relation to children born in this way."

"Despite many concerns about the well-being of these children, no adverse effects of this alternative family structure on child development could be identified. As the DI children in all investigations were still young, our knowledge about the long-term effects of DI remains incomplete."

"Similarly to previous studies, we generally found that the impact of assisted conception on parenting and child development gives no undue cause for concern while the children are still young. However, the young age of the children in our sample prevented us from answering many questions about the children's socioemotional development and about disclosure of donor conception to children born to older single women using double gamete donation and IVF."

I think that the literature suggests that there is room for disagreement about whether donor-conception or surrogacy necessarily has the same consequences for the child as adoption (that's me trying to "get to yes", I still think I'm right). Obviously some donor-conceived individuals are upset about their origins. I'm sorry for their pain. However, whether that indicates that donor-conceived or surrogate-born adults can be expected to have lower quality of life in general than adults with other conception stories remains an open question.

I think that we can agree that placing a greater emphasis on openness in family building is a good idea.

You might be interested in this review of the ways in which western assumptions about motherhood create bias in research on the effects of surrogacy on the surrogate.

www.scribd.com/.../Social-Construction-of-Surrogacy-Research