Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Buying Babies — by Rachel Lu
I’m writing a paper about “third party reproduction.” If you’re not familiar, this is what they call it when a person or couple decide to make a baby but involve a third party in the process, either as a source of genetic material or as a host for purposes of gestation. Surrogacy and artificial insemination are two of the primary examples.
Third-party reproduction is going to become a big bioethical debate over the next few years. It’s not a new thing, but the pressures to make it easier and cheaper are intensifying rapidly. The reason is obvious. Same-sex couples are creating a market for children. The fertility industry is looking to meet that demand.
I’ve been working on an analogy and I’m curious how it strikes people. I’d be grateful if people would tell me what intuitions they have about it.
Suppose we have an educated gentleman living in the antebellum South. He and his wife are unable to have children. This is a source of terrible grief to her. The gentleman isn’t racist, but he also isn’t a committed abolitionist; as a copious reader of history he sees slavery together with war, poverty, prostitution, political corruption, and a million other evils, as a part of the human story. It isn’t beautiful, but it’s a thing people do and he doesn’t feel personally called to interfere.
Since his wife so desperately wants a child, however, he sees an obvious solution. He goes to the local slave market and buys her a baby. He tells his wife if she loves him like her own she’ll find that this child can satisfy her maternal longings. She believes him, and they raise the baby as their son. When he reaches adulthood, they draw up the paperwork and formally emancipate him. They help him to find a job in the north where he can live and work as a free man.
How does this scenario strike people? Is it morally defective to acquire a child through a slave market, given the intention to love and nurture him? If so, can we find a morally significant difference between the couple that buys their baby from a slave market and the couple that buys their baby through a commercial surrogacy arrangement?
Published in General
Spin, I don’t want to sound mean, but your comparison of women who carry and bear children to “lawn mowers” available for rental is just horrifying to me. Exactly the kind of objectification that makes surrogacy so offensive. Nurturing and bringing forth children is an act of love, not a mechanical operation. And the women who do it are persons, not machines.
Rachel, I don’t think you do acknowledge my sisters as “real,” because of your insistence on the primacy of a biological connection in the parent/child relationship. You clearly don’t accept that nuclear family bonds transcend biology, and so you can’t accept adopted children as real. No one on this thread has managed to make a case otherwise. Nor are adopted children “accommodations” as someone else stated. And I’ve no doubt that had alternative methods like fertility meds or IVF been available to them in the late 60’s/early 70’s, my parents would’ve tried them. You mention the bioethics issue, but it’s a well-worn smokescreen for larger gripes against gay marriage and forms of assisted reproduction. The concern for the growing demand of boutique babies is real but not because of the gays or because the Catholic church is against it. Again, hetero couples are the biggest customers of 3rd party reproduction. If you’ve been inside a Wal-Mart lately, you know that there are plenty of people unfit to be parents, despite having their children the old-fashioned way. Even more than non-married parents, I think divorce is a greater threat to the erosion of traditional marriage and the nuclear family than a gay couple using a donor egg and surrogate to have a child.
In adoption, the biological connections are first respected before they are disregarded. They are respected in the sense that the state finds the bio parents unfit or unable for some other reason to care for the children. There is a process for this; the bio connections aren’t simply disregarded willy nilly.
In the examples given in Rachel’s OP, the bio connections are not respected at all.
Karen, the way people look in Wal-Mart is a pretty superficial basis on which to judge their characters. Is their a class bias here? How much time did you spend getting to know each and every one of these “plenty of people” before judging them?
I post this comment reluctantly, because when I see comments like my three sentences above it sometimes appears to me that the commenter is trying to disrupt the flow of the argument by putting someone down. I am not trying to put you down.
With others I have been trying, very clumsily, to point to ethical problems which we see as being inherent in certain types of reproductive technology. In my case it is definitely not a “smokescreen” to mask disapproval about other things.
If you want to continue with this particular line of reasoning, it could be argued that Jesus Christ was the product of a surrogate pregnancy.
“ I dare you to tell my mother that I, being her only biological child, am more her daughter than my sisters, but that’s exactly what your argument implies. ”
No, it doesn’t. The biological principle for parenthood is shown respect in an adoption proceeding–the bio parents are first found unfit (or dead, etc.) before the children are given new parents.
I agree with you that the desire to nurture is healthy, natural, and can also be holy. Definitely it is not selfish in and of itself. It is more a question of how that desire sometimes is dealt with that can be problematic.
You could also argue that Jesus was the descendant of a hooker, named Rahab. The Bible goes out of its way to remind the reader about some of the less illustrious ancestors of Jesus (see Matthew 1:5-6). Bathsheba is not referred to by name, but mentioned as the mother of Solomon who had been the wife of Uriah. The genealogies in the Bible are long and boring, but often they contain gems of wisdom like this that are worth meditating on.
I’d forgotten about that. I’ll certainly bring it up the next time the subject of prostitution is raised on Ricochet.
Karen: some of my cousins are adopted, and some have given children up for adoption. I have seen the issue from both sides, and totally agree with you that biology shouldn’t be, and can’t be the defining factor of family. Which is why I am against things like surrogacy and IVF. The main reason, and in many cases, the only reason couples choose such a route is because they are hung up on the idea of having biological children. Those who promote things like IVF are, I think, putting too much emphasis on biological ties.
This matter is an effect not a cause. The cause is our contemporary self-indulgence at the expense of children.
Most commonly, this self-indulgence shows itself in a mother’s having a baby and then abandoning the baby to the “care” of a stranger while she runs back to the office. She has her career, for what that’s worth, but she has effectively treated her baby like a commodity, not unlike a toaster. We leave our toasters behind all day without any compunction. We are doing the same with our babies.
And once many women start leaving their children to unrelated persons, it becomes a lot easier to treat a child as a commodity in other senses, too. If a child doesn’t need his natural mother to do more than get him dressed in the morning and put him to bed at night, then why does anyone need his natural mother, or father, or siblings? And why can’t a child be bought, sold, or stolen?
If natural connections are deemed of little importance, the results are nasty.
So you agree with the Left then. They’ve been trying to destroy the biological basis of the family for over a century – and they’ve just about succeeded now, with utterly disastrous results.
Biology has always been the primary basis of family, and should remain so. Children who grow up without one or more biological parents do not do nearly as well as those who do. That this should surprise anyone today is a sign of how much we have forgotten.
Karen, the problem is that family isn’t based on feeling, or whether you feel your adopted siblings are “real” members of a family. Family is based on love, but love isn’t simply a feeling. No one argues (or should, imo) that you should feel any differently, certainly not any less, about your siblings.
The point is that if a man and a woman bear a child, they are responsible for the child; equal, joint, and irrevocable responsibility. Not because they have strong feelings for the baby, although nature usually supplies plenty of warm emotion. But the emotion isn’t the basis of their relationship; their responsibility for each other is. In fact, they have responsibility for each other whether they enjoy each other’s company or not.
A further complication is that our culture makes a muddle of the differences between the legal relationships and the biological, emotional, and spiritual relationship in families. Adoption is a legal relationship, not a biological one. Society supports adoption as a way to rescue a child without parents; it’s for the sake of vulnerable children. In Rachel’s scenario, we’re creating children to be rescued.
Karen — My oldest brother is adopted, and the other five siblings are not.
He is my brother; our tie is strong. My love for him is enduring and not based on biology.
It is foolish, however, to think that it does not bother him that he is not the biological child of our parents. It is not the defining feature of his relationship with them, but it is a difference.
I don’t think that acknowledging this difference means that Rachel or I or anyone else does not think that your sisters are your sisters, or that my brother is not my brother.
As Jennifer points out, adoption is a solution for children who cannot be with their biological parents. Many adopted children value and esteem their adoptive parents for their love and devotion, while still wishing they knew or could have been raised with their biological parents.
I think we have a number of overlapping arguments in play here that are leading to confusion. Here’s a short list:
4. I find this completely unfounded and, frankly, rather pernicious. Children have natural rights and parents have obligations to them. In the case of parents who naturally conceive children, the obligations are in force whether you desire them or not. In the case of adoptive parents, they’re chosen. In the case of ART, they’re decided before the child is born. Once chosen, these obligations are permanent.
5. As someone who really wants biological children, I can’t dismiss this out of hand. However, I don’t find this particular desire to be very noble of me; it’s just an artifact of my biology and not a terribly smart one. Values and heritage are orders of magnitude more important than blood. That many adopted kids desire to find their birth parents doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily a good thing for them to do. If I discovered my father wasn’t my biological father, I can’t say that I’d have no interest in finding out who the other guy was, though I don’t think it’d be worth pursuing. My dad is my dad, whether or not he helped conceive me.
When a person says to a spouse (or lover!),”I want a baby; let’s have sex”, there’s no certainty that a baby will result. They are creating conditions that could enable it to happen, but it certainly might not, for any number of reasons.
The important thing isn’t really the probability of success, of course, but the comportment. When God or nature bestows a child on us, there’s always an element of miracle and mystery, which underscores that the child isn’t just “something I made”. You have a sense of the baby erupting forth out of nowhere in a really remarkable way; religious people usually use language of “gift” to talk about it, but I think the non-religious feel something similar. Having been there from the beginning, we know that that the child is much, much more than the sum of anything we did to bring it into being.
A commercial transaction, to put it mildly, does not lend itself to that same feeling. Commercial transactions are the way we use our resources to impose our will on the world. The child then becomes a subsidiary to that imposition of will.
Karen mentioned a few comments back that she thinks this concern is just an offshoot of antipathy to same-sex coupling. That’s definitely not true for me. I think third-party reproduction represents a very serious attack on human dignity, with the potential to do significant harm to our culture (perhaps on a level with contraceptives) if the practice becomes widespread.
If you don’t see how, read about the Akanksha Clinic in India where babies are farmed for wealthy (often foreign) couples. (Unfortunately, that really does seem the appropriate description.) Interestingly, the Indian government only permits married, heterosexual couples to adopt the children. That doesn’t make the clinic’s practices any less appalling to me.
Disregarding natural ties and obligations as we do in surrogacy can have serious consequences far beyond what proponents immediately see. This is what happened with artificial contraception. Initially the Church was laughed out of court when she claimed that it would have ramifications far beyond the sympathetic case (married couples being able to prudently limit their family size). Whoops.
With surrogacy too, the sympathetic case is indeed sympathetic, but the ramifications may go far, far beyond it. Babies should not be bought.
Would you say the same is true for adoption (a process similarly suffused with non-transcendent forms and fees)? Are those children similarly subsidiary to their adopted parents imposition of will? If not, why not?
Of course the intersection of this issue with gay rights is particularly unhappy, not only because same-sex couples grow the market for babies but also because we already have a bad track record of trying to use legislation to “correct” nature’s mistakes. Already California requires insurance companies to make “infertility benefits” available to lesbian couples, even though most are not infertile but rather have chosen to be in naturally sterile relationships. The push for “liberalized” surrogacy laws is also underway, and of course by “liberal” what we mean is “laws that give less options to surrogate mothers and make contracts more enforceable.” Laws that enable women to truly sell children in utero.
State laws currently differ, and there have been cases of women moving states pre-partum to get out of their surrogacy contracts. Expect to see a push for a federal law that would impose laws on all the states and take away that strategy.
(cont)
Such as self-indulgently having sex before marriage and then having children by accident?
Rachel earlier complained that people having ART aren’t having children out of love, but in order to fulfill some emotional need. Well, people don’t always have sex out of love, either (and certainly not the “ordained in Eden, image of Christ and the Bride” kind of love).
When people have sex without love, aren’t they “merely fulfilling an emotional need”? Aren’t any babies conceived “merely products of an emotional need”?
Further down the road I can definitely imagine more aggressive possibilities that might be floated. State-sponsored surrogates, for example, or perhaps state-operated clinics like Akanksha on foreign soil. And who knows? There’s already a lot of antipathy towards religious families who have “too many kids”. Might we eventually hear arguments suggesting that the state should find the extra kids “more suitable” homes with couples who just happened to have the misfortune of being infertile (or naturally sterile, or disinclined to have children until it was too late)?
You can laugh, but again, our track record of trying to legislate away nature’s injustices is pretty grim, and it seems pretty natural for the gay rights movement to move on from marriage to contending that the natural sterility of same-sex couples is a travesty that we need to fix, just as the natural fertility of women is something we’re evidently morally obliged to “fix” through publicly provisioned contraceptives.
I just read the Witherspoon report you linked to and — assuming it’s accurate — it strikes me equating all the labor practices of Akanksha Clinic with something inherent to surrogacy. It’s like saying “Here’s a berry farm that uses nitrogen fertilizer and abuses its workers. Ergo, we need to outlaw nitrogen fertilizer to protect workers.”
No, Midge, no! Babies are not the products of emotional need, because they simply go far beyond any plans or actions or motivations of their parents. This is obvious when you have a baby. Have sex once and suddenly there’s a new person in the world? Amazing! You’d have to be a complete cretin to look at your baby and say (seriously), “Go me. That’s a pretty awesome thing I made.”
But once you start buying them, you can’t totally escape the bloodless logic of commercial transaction. You practically have to start with the question, “What’s a baby worth?” and go from there.
Tom, I think adopted kids can be in danger of becoming instrumentalized. That’s why we have to try to avoid that by social and legislative processes designed to emphasize that the adoption is *not* a purchase and is arranged with the child’s best interests in view. And again, like others have said, this is all premised on the assumption that the child actually *needs* a family, not that the parents need a child.
But Tom, think about my comparison to contraceptives. When we agree that it’s okay for two people to enter into a commercial contract wherein one agrees to carry and deliver the other’s child and then hand it over like a package of goods, that can have consequences for the way our culture develops beyond the cherry-picked “best case” scenarios that persuade us to sanction the practice in the first place. Again, contraceptives were sold as a way of helping married couples prudently limit family size. Needless to say, they’ve gone a little beyond their originally-approved function.
Did you note earlier when Spin compared surrogate mothers to “lawn mowers”? It’s easy to slide into this sort of objectification once we sanction the buying and selling of babies.
And I think the real danger here is of creating a sense of entitlement to parenthood (just as contraceptives created an “entitlement” to baby-free sex). Once we decide that adults who want babies *have to* get them, women and children are going to suffer for that decision. But as with contraceptives, we may not be able to roll the clock back once the damage is done.
Since we’re going there, I’d like to posit that there’s a tremendous difference between arguing that something is inherently corrupt and that it might have negative consequences in the aggregate, especially if we’re not careful. Humanae Vitae was quite correct about the negative effects of contraception in the aggregate*, though it wrongly, IMO, conflated this with finding something inherently wrong in contraceptives. I think you’re making the same logical mistake here.
* Though, as I said before, I think the negative aspects of contraception have been massively, overwhelmingly enabled by the rise of the welfare state. Responsible people use contraceptives responsibly; irresponsible people don’t.
As Tom has previously noted, the arguments here presented rely on an appeal to nature which simply does not mesh with many peoples understanding of family today.
This appeal to nature grants moral superiority to two rutting teenagers over a committed infertile couple married for 5 years who pursue IVF or third party surrogacy. This strikes me as both emotionally and morally unsatisfying.
The appeal to nature in the case of parenting is incredibly dubious given the evidence that biological connection is in no way linked to good parenting. There is no statistical evidence yet presented showing the parents of children via surrogacy or adoption have worse outcomes when raising children. If such evidence exists please present it.
In the end what really bowls me over is that here we have arguments from Social Conservatives that are against family formation. That strikes me as a profoundly weird and dangerous path for the champions of family as a stabilizing institution for society.
Anyone who thinks that of contraceptives is a fool, or is acting very foolishly. The same thing could be said of people who use NFP on the same assumptions.
I’ve done plenty of stupid things in life, but I’ve never assumed that contraceptives give me an “entitlement to baby-free sex.”