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Surrogacy Is an Ethical Minefield; Let’s Stay Out
Last week, the Indian government announced that it would ban foreigners from obtaining babies through surrogacy in India, though they will still allow Indian citizens to do so. This comes just a few years year after the country restricted surrogacy to male/female couples who had been married for at least two years. India’s legislators should be applauded for recognizing that baby production is an ethical minefield that has not received the scrutiny it deserves. Hopefully, they will soon recognize the ethical problems on the domestic front as well.
Poor Indian women and the children they gestate have been exploited by this baby-selling “industry” long enough. Women are sent away from their families during their pregnancies so that their diet and activities can be controlled. They are encouraged to bring one of their own children with them so that they will not be as lonely and can better deal with the emotionally wrenching experience of having a baby and giving the child away, something few repeat. And of course, women put their lives at risk to do this. The women are poor and they need the money, but there are ethical and unethical ways to obtain money. We all feel empathy for childless couples who want children, but we need to think about where that empathy leads. Do we believe that all adults have a “right” to a child? Don’t children have a right to know their parents if at all possible?
Unfortunately surrogacy and egg and sperm donation are something of a wild west here in the US. Laws vary from state to state but, in the states where it is legal, companies typically appeal to young women’s sense of altruism to convince them to donate eggs or become surrogates, downplaying the deeply negative factors. Women who donate eggs are pumped full of hormones that cause multiple eggs to mature at once, leading to severe medical problems, including cancer and infertility, for some. Many testify that they were not adequately informed of the risks at the outset, and received no compensation for their ongoing medical problems. Many are haunted for years by the knowledge that they will never know their own children. What seemed like a charitable act becomes an ongoing nightmare.
India has the right idea. Let’s follow their lead. Unfortunately, this shameful practice pops up around the world as quickly as another government — usually in reaction to tragic circumstances of some sort — closes it down on their soil. It is legal in some Mexican states, and stories of exploitation abound there. And then there’s the US. Last month, a young surrogate died in Idaho. The twins she was carrying for a couple from Spain died as well. We are a rich and supposedly enlightened country. Let’s follow the lead of India on this issue.
Published in Culture, Marriage, Science & Technology
You are never more grating than when you use argumentum ad populum. Please refrain. I know we’ve been through this before, and we still disagree. Kate wasn’t here then. I believe it’s almost always ethical to bring children into the world if you want to and are willing to take care of them, barring ridiculous hypotheticals. I think if you had a choice between adopting and having a new child, while both are completely ethical and fantastic options, the new life brings a new level of awesomeness to the world.
Of course, there are sad people who were raised by their parents who wish they’ve never been born either. But even the chance you might have a kid who is sick, miserable, and dies at a young age isn’t a reason not to ever have a child to begin with.
I have never had children, and am unable to have them. I am 100% against surrogacy.
As somebody mentioned on another thread recently (I think it may have been Ryan), there will always be tension between the respect we must give natural parents, and our duty to help children who are genuinely in dire straights due to their natural parents actions. Some of us believe that there must be a very high standard before the state gets involved. Others believe the standard should be lower. There are good arguments for both positions. I prefer the former position but I understand why others prefer the latter.
Regarding surrogacy, I hope we can all agree that when anonymous gametes are used, and when birth certificates are falsified due to the use of anonymous gametes, the standard is non existent.
One thing our discussions on this subject have taught me is that people disagree very strongly on this issue and that our beliefs aren’t always as universal or as experience-informed as we think. There are people who’ve had natural children who are on both sides of the matter, just as there are people without kids on both sides, as well as people who want kids but can’t have them on both sides.
Yep, and there are maladjusted children conceived the natural way by their parents who at some point wish they had never been born. And rarely is anything so galling as watching anecdotes about these poor, maladjusted souls trotted out as arguments against liberalizing adoption.
Maladjustment happens. Of course less-than-usual life-experience of all kinds (including not only adoption or ART, but divorce, prolonged childhood illness, less-than-perfectly-functional non-divorced families, etc) will raise the risk of it somewhat, but kids who wish they had never been born are not adoption’s fault. If a scapegoat is needed, blame life or the human psyche itself – whatever it is that causes so many children with perfectly natural biological connections to both parents to also wish they’d never been born.
(And Amy, if it helps to think of children very glad and grateful they were adopted, like Great Gödel’s Ghost, or folks in Sal’s or the Hemingways’ family, please don’t hesitate to do so :-))
Several adopted members of my extended family. They all fit in this category as well.
Or, as Scott Alexander puts it, one of the “developmental milestones” is:
Those are about the only adoptees I know who are happy they didn’t grow up with their birth families. Seems like the rest can’t stop complaining about how their adopted parents just couldn’t love them enough.
Grating as I may be, Mike, you did not deal with the question at hand. I used an extreme hypothetical to point out that we are dealing with an ethical question. You apparently agree that the hypothetical I presented is unethical, but skirted the actual question by simply asserting that bringing a child into the world is awesome. Since many children so brought into the world feel that they are missing something very important in not knowing their parents, I don’t think we can say that they agree that whatever way adults go about producing kids is awesome. Much as you dislike it, this is an ethical issue with regard to both parents and children.
Rape is a bad example, since we don’t think of rape as a moral way of acquiring anything. Rape does not distinguish distinguish the getting of children from the getting of anything else for this reason.
Unfortunately, for things like this it’s really difficult to distinguish what part of this is adoption and what part of this is the genetic legacy of their biological parents.
Amy, life is a crap shoot either way. There are two adopted children in my extended family, and both are grateful, though there is also a longing to know their birth parents to some degree. Life is imperfect. Most teen-agers probably WISH they were adopted at some point too, as in, I can’t really be related to these dorky parents, can I? We can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In family life, there is no perfect, but there is a whole lot of good.
The point, however, is that we all agree that there are ethical and unethical ways of bringing children into the world, which I believe is the case.
Well, the cranks on the message boards where people specifically go to whinge about it, yeah. Publication bias – I doubt the adopted people who don’t have a grudge against being adopted go on and on in public about how non-sucky adoption was for them.
I guess if you’re unlucky enough, the adopted people you know personally could all really hate it, too. If so, well… I’ll pray for them.
Thank you for going out of your way to state the obvious, Midge. I appreciate it.
Also, Kevin Williamson.
I too have done quite a bit of reading about adoptees and their stories. I think at least some, if not the majority, of their complaints center around a lack of knowing who they are. After reading so much from adoptees, I am really starting to think that those of us who know our genetic parents take for granted the vast amount of self knowledge knowing them gives us.
I consider it an crisis of one’s ontology. As a child of divorce, I can appreciate to an extremely small extent this ontological crisis that adoptees seem to face. For example, they often complain that they don’t know who they look like. Being raised in a step-family, I have a taste of how that feels, and it’s not a good feeling. I can’t imagine being completely blind to who I looked like, and having structural barriers in place which prevented me from ever discovering that information. It must be absolutely maddening.
Important enough to be restated.
Which do you think is more ethical? A teenage couple that has sex and accidently conceives a child or a married couple that has sex and wants a child? Or is this also grating?
On the other hand, I think there are incentives to remain silent.
They sure do look miserable at Christmas time when the whole family is together. When they bring their young children home, and their adoptive parents hold and dote on their grand children.
Just miserable the whole way around.
I am not sure if “ethical” is the right framework. The teenage couple didn’t do anything impermissible. A married, presumably older couple, seems like it would be the better situation, all else being equal. Both children are likely a net benefit to the world though.
I buy that it’s a crisis of one’s ontology. But there are many ways, as you point out regarding divorce, to have a crisis of one’s ontology.
For some people, it is the lack of any doubt that they are their parents’ genetic children that prompts an ontological crisis. In fact, for the children “at risk” for adoption, I imagine this might especially be the case if they stay with their bio-parents rather than being adopted.
Do you know what it is like to not look like your family?
No, I also don’t know what it is like to be raised by drug addicts, or in any other number of terrible circumstances with your biological parent(s).
^ The exact attitude that scares me about adopting. What’s the point of trying to be a parent to a child who cares more about their gamete donors than the people who loved them?
I’m not sure what you mean by the second sentence.
If we look at the social science data regarding the benefits of intact families for the children raised in them, wouldn’t this suggest that ontological crises are either far less frequent or less severe in those families?
There are ethical distinctions, sure. Two divorced people who remarry and conceive children together are also in a less-ethical state than never-divorced married people conceiving children. The mere existence of ethical gradations, though, does not by itself tell us which gradations should be forbidden and which should not be.
Some people believe that bringing an out-of-wedlock child into this world is so immoral that it is better to abort the child than let it live. You would probably say that these people are exaggerating the immorality of out-of-wedlock conception, though. (I think Heather MacDonald at the Manhattan Institute falls into this latter category, incidentally.)
I taught my teenagers that it was unethical to engage in sex before marriage for a number of reasons, but one of them is that babies result from sex and the proper place to have babies is within marriage. That is very much about ethics. Though we value all people who are born, there is a time and a place to get pregnant–that is the point. We live in an imperfect world and mistakes happen. When they do, we deal with it through adoption or other ways. But do you really think it is ethical to create a child deliberately intending to separate that child from his or her parents, when you know full well that the child may suffer needlessly because of that action?