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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
Consider your whole family very blessed – and probably very different from average.
Certainly not if you’re going to be there, living the reality of raising the children you conceived. Fastest life lesson you’ll ever learn.
Here’s a link to a brochure put out by the Family Research Council, with an attached article that reviews the literature.
That is also evidence that lighter regulation is unlikely to lead to a baby-selling epidemic: most people will fight tooth and nail to keep their kids.
Agreed!
So, you start parenting young and stupid, and it’s the process of being a good parent that eventually makes you not-young-and-stupid. Meaning it’s less a question of “people who will be good parents when they are no longer young and stupid” than it is of people starting out as young, stupid (and so presumably bad?) parents and improving from there.
Young, stupid people can and ought to be trusted with the responsibility of parenting, but cannot be trusted with tissue donations used for reproductive purposes.
I am not comfortable characterizing young people as stupid.
Well, it started as me characterizing my once young and stupid self, so it wasn’t exactly a blanket generalization. And deserved in my case….
I really doubt you were stupid. Inexperienced? Sure.
But as far as whether or not to trust young people… we can’t neglect that their sexual urges are going to motivate them in ways that the appeal of making a tissue donation will not.
Well, I will say that even though young, I certainly chose a terrific husband!
Yes–that is certainly true that young people are greatly motivated by their sexual urges and these days they are not given the wherewithal to wisely control those urges. I often feel deeply grateful that I was taught a strict moral and sexual code that, yes, led to early marriage, but also prevented a whole lot mistakes that I’m pretty sure I would have made without that teaching.
I think more to the point – we tend to approve of young people taking on risks when we believe those risks will significantly hasten their maturation into the kind of adult we’d approve of, but disapprove of young people taking on risks for other reasons. This gets phrased as you are not “too stupid” to take a gamble on maturing yourself, but you are “too stupid” to take a gamble on other things. So it’s really about approving of the gamble, not about the stupidity of youth.
I think there is a lot of truth to this. However, I still wonder about the sexual drive and its role here. It seems that what we might call “you’re-not-too-stupid-to-take-a-gamble-on-maturing-yourself” which was created by the need to channel the sexual drive, is not the same as “you-are-too-stupid-to-take-a-gamble-on-other-things,” things that do not have the sexual drive as a motivator.
In other words, if those choices were like a scale, the scales are not even. The one that contains the reckoning with the sex drive is weightier and more important.
Merina, I liked this comment, but in a “yes, exactly, been there, done that” kind of way. I would characterize myself as pretty stupid at that age, when it came to certain things. My guess is that, in fact, given your upbringing and good sense, you weren’t stupid; just young.
Well, I have a lot of memories that currently make me cringe, but I’m more than happy to go with the more charitable interpretation!
I just realized something else. I am deeply suspicious of the social brotherhood that is imposed on children due to what we call sexual/marital/reproductive freedom.
Jennifer, could you elaborate on this? What is the social brotherhood?
I am using “brotherhood” broadly. It includes sisters. It could be termed “social siblinghood.” It is the imposition of social/non-related siblings instead of natural siblings as the result of sexual/marital/reproductive liberty.
I think this is one reason why Zach Wahls thinks it’s “really cool” that he has a full-blooded sister. Social brotherhood wasn’t imposed on him.
I must admit that it might not be happening to the extent that I fear. For example, in AGD, people may be creating full blooded siblings more often than not. And to me, this just speaks to appeal of DNA ties. If it weren’t that important, why create full blooded siblings? Even Zach Wahls’ mother and her lover couldn’t help themselves! By choosing the same gamete donor, on some level they sent a message that the father mattered.
Half siblings are part natural, part social. There are clusters of them springing up all over the place.
Social brotherhood is rampant in divorce/remarriage arrangements.
I would think the divided loyalties are the more problematic part of divorce and remarriage. For example, if two divorced people both with children remarry, the mother’s children already have a father and the father’s children already have a mother. Moreover, the kids, up to that point, have spent their whole lives growing up apart from each other, and each set sees the other as outsiders. Divorce is naturally very hard on family loyalty – and, I would think, on parental authority as well.
“I have known one kind of parental authority since infancy, and now I am expected to suddenly accept another,” whether it’s the once-unified authority of married parents divided into conflicting authority by divorce or the strange new authority of a step-parent, would of course rankle.
Children raised from infancy by two parents who stay married would not experience the same divided loyalties, or confusions about parental authority, that children of divorce seem likely to experience. Plus, parents who stick together present a united front of authority to their children, stronger than one single parent or the divided authority of divorce. It’s quite possible that children, whatever their genetic origin, do pretty well having a consistent, united source of parental authority from infancy on.
My social worker son encounters such families all the time. Often they revolve around one stable person, typically a grandmother or grandparents, who serve as a fulcrum for a lot of instability–people with various sorts of connections constantly coming and going from the group. It seems kind of jolly in a way, but actually is generally terrible for the kids involved. There are degrees, of course, but I think kids generally fare best with a rather boring life, a schedule, organization in the household, dinner together every night, parents who nag about homework and piano practice and who drive them to soccer practice and games, that sort of mundane stuff that actually leads to a pretty darn good life. The more schlepping goes on from household to household and parent to parent, the worse for kids.
I agree with all of what you said about the kids of divorce.
I have no doubt that consistency is extremely important–on that point we agree. It always crushes me to read stories of adoptees and AGD kids who had to live through their parents’ divorce. Some call it the “double whammy.”
But I keep coming back to the testimonies, the idea of incentives in relation to giving testimony, and how their testimonies mirror my own even when they were in a consistent environment. Because of this, I have attenuated (not eliminated) circumstances where I believe adoption is ethical, and I have done a complete reversal in regards to ART/AGD. There was a time when I supported ART/AGD (and I don’t want to say why), and there was a time when I would have unequivocally agreed with the hypothetical that Mike proposed a couple pages back.
But I can no longer assume that strong loyalty and the peace of mind of belonging and fitting-in are automatically triggered by a consistent environment and/or the presence of two loving adults.
I would like to say one more thing in regards to AGD/ART.
The state is distorting the market by treating these children unequally under the law from children conceived naturally.
The state is complicit in installing an impermeable legal wedge between the child and his origins. Unlike with ethical adoption, there is no child-centric reason for the legal wedge. In AGD, the state treats intended parents as if they are natural parents. But the rights that went to the intended parents were not legitimately obtained.
For a brief period I contemplated advocating the addition of an adoption procedure to this process, as a concession to its supporters. However, upon further reflection I realized that this won’t solve the basic problem. This is because the problem begins before the embryo is conceived.
The process presupposes that some have the right to create others with the purpose or intention of severing those others from their cultural and/or genetic origins. I believe demand for the process would drastically shrink if not die altogether if the state was not complicit in the installation of an impermeable legal wedge that was not installed for child-centric reasons—it was installed for adult-centric reasons. Imagine what would happen to the supply of gametes if gamete donors were required to pay child support. They are not required due to the adult-centric wedge. Thus, the state is distorting the market by treating these children unequally under the law from children conceived naturally.