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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
The separate issues of adoption and ART should not be conflated with each other. For every wanted child created through ART, there are at least several unwanted embryos left frozen in a tank somewhere. That is an ethical problem.
As I said previously on this thread, I think those of us who know our genetic parents take for granted the vast amount of self knowledge that relationship has given us.
I guess I just can’t get over the fact that adoptees have attempted suicide rates at four times over those who are not adopted. And yet, somehow, we are on track to expanding legal structures to make it easier for more and more kids to be raised by people who are not related to them. I can’t square that circle.
Yes–I absolutely agree. I can tell that from reading the stories of people who wish they knew their parents on sites like Anonymous Us. I really can’t imagine that kind of pain, having known my full family on both sides, and having been raised in an intact family.
You say this like it is universally true. I doubt I am the only one here who was raised without one of their biological parents.
Heck, any child who has me as either a bio-parent or a parent-parent may suffer needlessly because of that action.
(And if we got to the point where prenatal correction of congenital maladies became possible, would it be immoral to forgo that correction on the grounds that forgoing it may cause the child to suffer needlessly? I’m pretty sure you’d say “no”, and I’d respect the decision to refuse such a treatment.)
There are so many ways parents can inflict needless suffering on their children, after all, and even good parents do it. The distinction is that good parents tend to do it less!
Those who criticize adoption are making the perfect the enemy of the good. It would be great if all biological parents were capable of raising their children; it would also be great if no one ever had to work again and none of us ever died. There will always be biological parents who for whatever reason are not able to raise their children; for those children, being adopted into a loving family is the best thing that can happen, both for them and their families. I really do not understand why the issues of adoption and ART are being conflated, especially when many of those who resort to ART do so because they are obsessed with having biological children.
And by all accounts, a basically happy and functional intact family.
Sure, there are people who are not bothered by not knowing their parents but many are. You certainly don’t know who that will be at the outset, however, and I think we must honestly acknowledge that it is very painful for some people.
The reason adoption keeps coming up in discussions of ART is that those on the anti-ART side use the examples of unhappy adopted children as evidence that not existing is preferable to being raised by any non-biological parent.
My point was simply that not all of us have this “vast amount of self knowledge” which is supposedly coloring our take on this.
Adoption certainly has its own set of difficulties that could occur. Or they may not. For some kids, it may be really hard not to look like the rest of the family. But this is clearly not the case for all adopted kids.
For many reasons, it seems to be better for adopted kids to have the opportunity to know about, or even meet, their biological mothers or fathers. But my guess is that most adopted kids love and appreciate their adoptive families, even when they are curious about their biological origins.
Adoption is clearly different from third party ARTs in which a child is created with the intention of separating it from its biological parents. Adoption is a solution to a problem. Adoption does not create the problem.
Yes–I have been very, very blessed. Look, Midge, I know there are biological families that are messed up, but statistically, as was just shown last week in a new study, kids do best when raised by both biological parents. That’s why this is an ethical question. Those stats don’t mean that no biological parents are bad, but they do mean that if we are going to assure that as many kids as possible will have the best shot in life, we’ll regard how children are brought into the world as an ethical question, and we will structure our mores to accord with that statistical reality. There will still be plenty of mistakes and plenty of adoptions, and that is a good thing, but we should know enough about ethics to not deliberately create that situation for a child.
Brilliant.
Keep in mind that my argument implies that kids who know their genetic parents also know those extended family members (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, etc). I didn’t think that this information needed to be stated plainly but maybe it does.
So it’s not just having a relationship with the parents, as important as that is. It is also access to the entire genetic family on both sides.
Do you know the family of the parent who did not raise you?
Exactly.
For those whose primary moral objection is against voluntarily separating children from their biological parents, it is very hard to avoid arguments that conflate the two. After all, in many cases, the birth-mom could keep the child and raise it – meaning adoption is also a voluntary separation. Now, the child might have a relatively horrible life raised with his birth-mother, but at least he would know a biological parent!
Well, if that is the case, then it’s a ridiculous argument. Having basic respect for life should be enough to keep us away from ART. The fact that God only knows how many embryos are now frozen and will at some point probably be destroyed by the parents who don’t want them is disturbing.
Far from being brilliant, this avoids the necessary questions all together. I’m not sure what is brilliant about that.
Because I greatly disagree with Merina’s notion that we empathize with the barren. We don’t.
We tell them that any child they have is going to be unhappy because they will never know their birth parents.
We have a “safety net” that means that the world rewards mothers for raising children by themselves with Medicaid, WIC, SCHIP, and welfare.
We have a judicial foster system that is so racist and so defends horrible birth parents that adopting through the public system means years of fighting the system and thousands of dollars of legal fees. This is why 80% of foster kids will never get adopted parents.
We have a private adoption system with such a meager supply of healthy babies and such a high demand of potential adopted parents that the agencies can charge tens of thousands of dollars and insist on a vetting that 90% of biological parents couldn’t pass.
And then if the adopted parents then decide to create an orphan to adopt, we accuse them of being evil exploitative baby-nappers.
I’m not seeing where the excess of sympathy for the barren comes in.
Sure!
And kids do best without divorce, and without a history of alcoholism or mental illness in the family, and do better with more prosperous parents, and, and, and…
We do not disagree on where the optimum is. Our disagreement is on what sorts of suboptimal situations should be banned outright, and which bans are letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
I don’t think I understand what you are saying. Don’t you think, however, that it behooves us to recognize that knowing our parents if at all possible is a good thing and that it is ethically wrong to deliberately deprive children of this knowledge, recognizing that sometimes it will happen anyway in our imperfect world? This is a very goo way to fashion a moral code with regard to ARTs.
So you think it is ethically fine to create a child deliberately intending to deprive the child of his or her biological parents? That’s an ethical choice we make as adults and as a culture. It’s not the result of dumb teenagers having sex or the death of a parent. It is a deliberate ethical choice.
I agree with this. It probably appears that I object to adoption, but strictly speaking that is not the case. I bring up the problems with adoption, not as a way to argue against adoption but as a way to argue against adoption being used to justify something that is not adoption.
Definitions matter. I define adoption as an institution that finds parents for children who need them. Third party reproduction creates children for adults who want them. They are not the same thing, not by a long shot.
I am opposed to third-party ART and I am pro-adoption. For the record.
What part of the difference between “ethically fine” and “not so unethical that it should be banned” do you not understand?
Amy, I am also barren. I cannot fathom how anyone could criticize adoption in a country where a million babies are aborted every year by mothers who in many cases really believe that abortion is kinder than adoption. Having said that, I don’t believe that I have a right to a child. Yes, there are bad biological parents, and yes, there is room for reform, but there is good reason to seriously, seriously, seriously constrain the government’s ability to take children away from their biological parents. There are excellent reasons to set the bar for biological parents very low, and to give them at least a couple of chances before severing their relationship with their children.
Can we have a clarification on which forms of ART cross the line? Specifically, the following two scenarios.
I am opposed to all forms of ART; human life should not be created and destroyed at will in a lab.
Categorical ethical statements should not be made about particular ethical dilemmas.
That certain practices as related to ARTs or surrogacy can have ethically problematic dimensions in no way makes ARTs or surrogacy categorically wrong.