Posted on 07/25/2007 2:08:11 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
What do Cinderella, Pinocchio, Madame Bovary, and the Frankenstein monster share? They are among the many motherless characters that populate Western literature, and they all highlight the difficulty and suffering inherent in motherlessness.
Recently, these stories have become relevant in an entirely new way. On May 16th, a Maryland State Court of Appeals decision determined that children born to surrogate mothers—with whom they have no genetic connection—can be legally motherless.
In August 2001, a surrogate mother—or “gestational carrier”—gave birth to the biological twin daughters of a man identified as Roberto d.B. When the hospital put the surrogate’s name on the children’s birth certificates as the legal mother, Mr. d.B. sued to have the certificates reissued without a mother, on the grounds that the surrogate is not genetically related to the children. The Court of Appeals granted his wish, basing its decision on Maryland’s Equal Rights Amendment, which guarantees men and women equal rights under the law.
According to the opinion, “[T]he paternity statute, as written, provides an opportunity for genetically unlinked males to avoid parentage, while genetically unlinked females do not have the same option.”
The implications inspire a sense of foreboding. As Judge Dale Cathell noted in his dissent, the decision means that “an entrepreneur could contract with a sperm donor, contract with an egg donor, contract with an assembler, contract with a woman to carry the child through the gestation period, and a child could be manufactured with neither a mother nor a father…. The child could then be put up for adoption at a price—and a new business, in the spirit of American ingenuity, is created.”
Not only “the spirit of American ingenuity” but the spirit of post-modern selfishness seems to be in play.
With this month marking the 29th birthday of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is nothing new, and neither is the controversy surrounding it. In his 2002 book Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, Leon Kass referred to “egg-selling and womb-renting entrepreneurs,” and warned that, “Through the rental of surrogate-womb services, and through the buying and selling of tissues and embryos priced according to the donor’s merits, the commodification of nascent human life will be unstoppable.”
Indeed, even though IVF is shrouded in the language of altruism, in practice it underpins a profitable market in eggs and sperm. A popular radio station in Washington, D.C., runs advertisements from a local fertility clinic soliciting egg “donations,” imploring young women to “give life, anonymously, and enhance” their own lives—for up to $6000 at a time. For Valentine’s Day, The New York Times printed a breezy article about a sperm donor in Los Angeles who decided to reveal his identity to at least seven of his biological children. The piece notes that he earned $400 a month for the “donations” he made in the 1980s.
So not only “the spirit of American ingenuity” but the spirit of post-modern selfishness seems to be in play. The Maryland ruling and the gamete market are designed to satisfy the rights, whims, and wishes of adults. They are utterly unconcerned about the best interests of children, who have the most to lose from careless IVF transactions.
As Kay Hymowitz noted in her article “The Incredible Shrinking Father” in the Spring 2007 issue of City Journal, artificial insemination has been dramatically changing the underpinnings of American families. In what she calls the “unmarriage revolution,” sperm donation has built “a wall between children and their fathers”—and the same can now be said of children and their mothers. Yet quietly and without much debate, in laboratories and clinics and courtrooms, the process of producing fatherless and motherless children has been set in motion.
Camille Paglia warns in Sexual Personae, “In a totalitarian future that has removed procreation from woman’s hands, there will be no affect and no art. Men will be machines, without pain but also without pleasure. Imagination has a price, which we are paying every day. There is no escape from the biologic chains that bind us.” One needn’t look farther than Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex to see the damage that can be caused by discovering the identity of one’s mother too late.
Elise Passamani is an Associate Editor of The American.
Image credit: 'dad and son' by Flickr user meemal.
Other than that I tend to agree.
In Vitro Fertilization, sperm banks, egg banks, and surrogate mothers could cause some problems for generations yet to come.
Well, as Billie Holliday used to sing, “God less the child who’s got his own.”
Well, as Billie Holliday used to sing, “God bless the child who’s got his own.”
Children are already put up for adoption at a price -- it's illegal but common.
They are utterly unconcerned about the best interests of children, who have the most to lose from careless IVF transactions.
Well, since the only alternative for the children in question is not to be born at all, I'd say they have a lot to gain and nothing to lose when someone goes to the trouble of using advanced medical technology to bring about their births.
No genetic connection? Aren't the DNA sequences 99% exactly identical? Only a tiny amount of DNA differs between complete strangers and only half of the difference would come from the genetic mother.
There is likely software downloading of some type that occurs in the womb from mother to baby that is not accounted for in the DNA. The surrogate mother's body has a major influence in how the baby develops.
Add in that half or more of how a baby develops is environment and nutrition rather than just genetics. The unique influences of the biological mother through DNA contribution is very slight, so slight it should not be the legal basis of determining who a legal parent is.
Other than that I tend to agree.
Thank you. I hate it when in order to establish a foundation for one's thesis an author presents irrelevant facts and doesn't even bother to get the irrelevant facts correct.
That's not quite accurate. In this case, the alternative is for no conception to occur: no child exists. Therefore one is not wronging a child by foregoing IVF, any more than one is wronging a child by being celibate.
On the other hand, if you deliberately bring a child into being in a state of intentional, radical fracture, you are wronging that child in the way you have called him into being: deliberately deprived of a father, or deliberately deprived of a mother.
By analogy, it would be like deliberately designing a child to be without legs. Of course, a live child even if legless, and has the same rights to love and support as every child has. But hasn't the person who willed the child to be legless, done him an injustice?
And here is something worse: a child whose natural parentage has been intentionally distorted and ruptured: from whom does he have the natural right to expect love and support? Someone answer me that. The genetic father? Gone. The genetic mother? Gone. The "gestational carrier"? Has no legal relationship.
The person who purchased the gametes, paid for the human incubator and arranged for the reproductive lab services?
That's not parenthood. That's ownership at best.
A child made bereft on purpose. It is a profound injustice.
Some children are deprived of parents--- by chance. No child should be deprived by choice.
These moral concerns are common to IVF, adoption, divorce, indentured servanthood and slavery. I agree that they are not exclusively related to IVF.
But with IVF at least one morally objectionable feature --- procreation by commercial transaction --- in every case deliberate. Newly begotten children in vitro--- embryos in a lab--- are property. Please check the law. Their use, manipulation, survival, or disposal is not regarded in law as a matter of the child's right but of the adults' wants and preferences. This is inherent to the process. Intended beforehand. Premeditated. By design.
If a woman deliberately conceived and bore children in order to put them on the market for sale, it would be a similar situation.
Nam Vet
Consider this situation: an IVF set-up in which you have a:
1. Genetic mother (egg donor/vendor)
2. Genetic father (sperm donor/vendor)
3. Gestational mother ("surrogate")
4. IVF lab workers
5. Nurturant mother (wet nurse/nanny)
6. Organizer (the person or corporate entity who arranged for the materials and services of 1-5)
7. Purchaser (the person or corporate entity who paid for the materials and services of 1-6)
Who, in your opinion, has an undisputed moral right to be the father or mother or "legal parent" or owner of this child?
Conception has no significance in my book. I’m glad I’m alive, but if were not to have had one, I would certainly have had no preference as to whether I had never been conceived, or had been miscarried or aborted before birth. We’ve got a huge number of kids conceived the natural way to unknown and/or career criminal fathers and drug-addicted lowlife mothers who don’t give a crap about anything but their own moment-to-moment pleasure. On the other hand, children conceived by IVF — regardless of whether the “owner(s)” provided either or both of the gametes themselves or bought someone else’s — always have at least one functional adult who really wants them enough to at least pay a lot of money to get them. I think we’d do well to focus our concern on the phenomenon of kids getting born that nobody really wants, and who are usually damaged before birth by their drug and alcohol abusing mothers.
There's no undisputed parent in a mess like that. A court would have to consider who has had possession of the baby and for how long, and what the desires, resources, and lifestyles would best serve the interests of the child, not the interests of the parents. The judge can't predict the future so it all comes down to a guess. The egg and sperm donors don't have a priority claim based on their special genetic contributions alone, but if they took care of the baby their claim would quickly gain weight.
We should have a culture that tries to avoid court cases like that. That kind of case should be a rare exception. We certainly shouldn't have a policy of letting people bring babies into the world as if they were things to buy and own.
These subjective reactions of indifference towards one's own survival, or that of others, does not constitute evidence that life is not worth safeguarding. In fact it may constitute what criminal law codes call "a depraved indifference to human life."
Furthermore, all newborns in the USA, anyhow, are wanted by somebody: if not their natural parents, then adoptive parents. Even newborns with drug-related health issues, Down's syndrome and other disabling conditions have have lists of people willing to adopt them.
It's easy to say you wouldn't care if you were aborted. I would imagine there are those who would say they wouldn't care if they were killed at age 3, or 5, or 13, who wouldn't care if they had been killed "yesterday."
But come at them today with a good long knife, and you'll see even self-proclaimed suiciders struggle for life.
Bingo.
"Well it's a bit of a semantic argument as even born children can be considered property by some measure it just that we prefer to call it custody. There is more than a passing similarity between the two."
It's true that there is an almost ubiquitous danger of treating children as property in a wide variety of circumstances: it can certainly get ugly in custody fights. And we'd all agree that that is wrong.
So let's agree that treating offspring as property is wrong, period. OK?
"...by the law they are not people."
Precisely.
"Do keep in mind though that parents do have the legal right to force their child to undergo various forms of body modification without the consent of the child so the distinction is not as great as you see it.
But that's wrong, too. I am not the one who's making a distinction here, nor am I singling out IVF alone as morally objectionable. It is not ethically permissible to subject ANY child (or any dependent person) to any bodily modification unless it is in the child's/dependent's therapeutic interest.
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