Agreed. My two sons both know their birth mothers. They experienced a little pain. The two birth mothers have experienced a lot. Adoption is making the best of a bad situation. Surrogate pregnancy is paying someone to undergo pain on your behalf.
Posted on 12/31/2007 5:25:52 AM PST by Brilliant
ANAND, India (AP) — Every night in this quiet western Indian city, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills.
A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world.
The small clinic at Kaival Hospital matches infertile couples with local women, cares for the women during pregnancy and delivery, and counsels them afterward. Anand's surrogate mothers, pioneers in the growing field of outsourced pregnancies, have given birth to roughly 40 babies.
More than 50 women in this city are now pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Taiwan, Britain and beyond. The women earn more than many would make in 15 years. But the program raises a host of uncomfortable questions that touch on morals and modern science, exploitation and globalization, and that most natural of desires: to have a family.
Dr. Nayna Patel, the woman behind Anand's baby boom, defends her work as meaningful for everyone involved.
"There is this one woman who desperately needs a baby and cannot have her own child without the help of a surrogate. And at the other end there is this woman who badly wants to help her (own) family," Patel said. "If this female wants to help the other one ... why not allow that? ... It's not for any bad cause. They're helping one another to have a new life in this world."
Experts say commercial surrogacy — or what has been called "wombs for rent" — is growing in India. While no reliable numbers track such pregnancies nationwide, doctors work with surrogates in virtually every major city. The women are impregnated in-vitro with the egg and sperm of couples unable to conceive on their own.
Commercial surrogacy has been legal in India since 2002, as it is in many other countries, including the United States. But India is the leader in making it a viable industry rather than a rare fertility treatment. Experts say it could take off for the same reasons outsourcing in other industries has been successful: a wide labor pool working for relatively low rates.
Critics say the couples are exploiting poor women in India — a country with an alarmingly high maternal death rate — by hiring them at a cut-rate cost to undergo the hardship, pain and risks of labor.
"It raises the factor of baby farms in developing countries," said Dr. John Lantos of the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, Mo. "It comes down to questions of voluntariness and risk."
Patel's surrogates are aware of the risks because they've watched others go through them. Many of the mothers know one another, or are even related. Three sisters have all borne strangers' children, and their sister-in-law is pregnant with a second surrogate baby. Nearly half the babies have been born to foreign couples while the rest have gone to Indians.
Ritu Sodhi, a furniture importer from Los Angeles who was born in India, spent $200,000 trying to get pregnant through in-vitro fertilization, and was considering spending another $80,000 to hire a surrogate mother in the United States.
"We were so desperate," she said. "It was emotionally and financially exhausting."
Then, on the Internet, Sodhi found Patel's clinic.
After spending about $20,000 — more than many couples because it took the surrogate mother several cycles to conceive — Sodhi and her husband are now back home with their 4-month-old baby, Neel. They plan to return to Anand for a second child.
"Even if it cost $1 million, the joy that they had delivered to me is so much more than any money that I have given them," said Sodhi. "They're godsends to deliver something so special."
Patel's center is believed to be unique in offering one-stop service. Other clinics may request that the couple bring in their own surrogate, often a family member or friend, and some place classified ads. But in Anand the couple just provides the egg and sperm and the clinic does the rest, drawing from a waiting list of tested and ready surrogates.
Young women are flocking to the clinic to sign up for the list.
Suman Dodia, a pregnant, baby-faced 26-year-old, said she will buy a house with the $4,500 she receives from the British couple whose child she's carrying. It would have taken her 15 years to earn that on her maid's monthly salary of $25.
Dodia's own three children were delivered at home and she said she never visited a doctor during those pregnancies.
"It's very different with medicine," Dodia said, resting her hands on her hugely pregnant belly. "I'm being more careful now than I was with my own pregnancy."
Patel said she carefully chooses which couples to help and which women to hire as surrogates. She only accepts couples with serious fertility issues, like survivors of uterine cancer. The surrogate mothers have to be between 18 and 45, have at least one child of their own, and be in good medical shape.
Like some fertility reality show, a rotating cast of surrogate mothers live together in a home rented by the clinic and overseen by a former surrogate mother. They receive their children and husbands as visitors during the day, when they're not busy with English or computer classes.
"They feel like my family," said Rubina Mandul, 32, the surrogate house's den mother. "The first 10 days are hard, but then they don't want to go home."
Mandul, who has two sons of her own, gave birth to a child for an American couple in February. She said she misses the baby, but she stays in touch with the parents over the Internet. A photo of the American couple with the child hangs over the sofa.
"They need a baby more than me," she said.
The surrogate mothers and the parents sign a contract that promises the couple will cover all medical expenses in addition to the woman's payment, and the surrogate mother will hand over the baby after birth. The couples fly to Anand for the in-vitro fertilization and again for the birth. Most couples end up paying the clinic less than $10,000 for the entire procedure, including fertilization, the fee to the mother and medical expenses.
Counseling is a major part of the process and Patel tells the women to think of the pregnancy as "someone's child comes to stay at your place for nine months."
Kailas Gheewala, 25, said she doesn't think of the pregnancy as her own.
"The fetus is theirs, so I'm not sad to give it back," said Gheewala, who plans to save the $6,250 she's earning for her two daughters' education. "The child will go to the U.S. and lead a better life and I'll be happy."
Patel said none of the surrogate mothers has had especially difficult births or serious medical problems, but risks are inescapable.
"We have to be very careful," she said. "We overdo all the health investigations. We do not take any chances."
Health experts expect to see more Indian commercial surrogacy programs in coming years. Dr. Indira Hinduja, a prominent fertility specialist who was behind India's first test-tube baby two decades ago, receives several surrogacy inquiries a month from couples overseas.
"People are accepting it," said Hinduja. "Earlier they used to be ashamed but now they are becoming more broadminded."
But if commercial surrogacy keeps growing, some fear it could change from a medical necessity for infertile women to a convenience for the rich.
"You can picture the wealthy couples of the West deciding that pregnancy is just not worth the trouble anymore and the whole industry will be farmed out," said Lantos.
Or, Lantos said, competition among clinics could lead to compromised safety measures and "the clinic across the street offers it for 20 percent less and one in Bangladesh undercuts that and pretty soon conditions get bad."
The industry is not regulated by the government. Health officials have issued nonbinding ethical guidelines and called for legislation to protect the surrogates and the children.
For now, the surrogate mothers in Anand seem as pleased with the arrangement as the new parents.
"I know this isn't mine," said Jagrudi Sharma, 34, pointing to her belly. "But I'm giving happiness to another couple. And it's great for me."
Great. America aborts about 1.5 million per year and around the world others are paying women to have babies. What’s wrong with this picture? America has its dark side, too.
OK, my son is adopted. But his loss of his birth-mother was not something we deliberately arranged; we didn't bring him into being as an intentionally outsourced product or as an article of commerce.
We were responding--- after the fact ---to a tragic situation that had already happened: motherlessness. We were responding to his need, not wounding him via commercially-motivated mother-separation to serve our need.
And that's the difference. Ths reproductive concubinage transaction is organized so as to purposely eradicate any relationship between the birth-mother and the child, as if birth-giving had no personal meaning and the women were just, literally, incubators. Meat machines.
I referred to "conservatives" being against procreative adultery, and was instantly rebuked for making this generalization. Perhaps I misspoke. I should have referred instead to "Judeo-Christian conservatives." This is, historically, the group that abolished reproductive concubinage ("surrogacy"), this is the group that historically upheld, and still upholds, the integrity of sex and procreation between the marriage partners exclusively.
Separation from the woman who gave you birth is a wound. Some children --- like my son--- were wounded by chance. No child should be wounded by choice.
Agreed. My two sons both know their birth mothers. They experienced a little pain. The two birth mothers have experienced a lot. Adoption is making the best of a bad situation. Surrogate pregnancy is paying someone to undergo pain on your behalf.
Exactly, gitmo. The "surrogate" contract means intentionally structuring the situation so that the baby and the birthmother both suffer the premeditated severing of attachment in order for you to get what you want.
It's astounding that this could be legal when buying and selling babies is rightly considered criminal in every country in the world.
It's the aforethought, deliberate planning of this fractured situation is what makes the huge moral difference. It seems so few people understand that. But let's keep telling them til they get it.
I agree with you, Mrs. Don-o. It’s a deification of Freedom of Contract, so to speak. (Robert Heinlein, that libertine-tarian, predicted this way back, fwiw.)
Seems like a very reasonable distinction to me. The person who told you that you have no right to speak on it because you are an adoptive mother is not a deep thinker. That said, I don’t really know what to think about the latest outsourcing phenom in India.
In the year 6565
Ain’t gonna need no husband, won’t need no wife
You’ll pick your son, pick your daughter too
From the bottom of a long glass tube
How has that worked out? I pretty much rejected that as an option when we were in the process. My thinking was (and is) that kids do have their moments when the wish that they had anyone else for parents, except Mom and Dad (at least I remember thinking that.)
So, why introduce that reality "You aren't my real mother. You can't tell me what to do."
You could think of it as a substitute for real economic reform in India. A woman doesn't donate eggs, or incubate another couple's child and hand it over, because that's what she really wants to do with her life. They're doing it for money, and there should be better ways for Indian woman to contribute to their families' support.
Rather like Mexicans' migration to the United States, this is a convenience for the governments that don't want to do the hard work of freeing people to earn a decent living in their own countries.
Those who are ‘ordering’ babies are likely the same class of wealthy yuppies who waited too long to go the traditional family route because they were too involved in their own selfish interests (careers, sleeping around, traveling, whatever) and are now placing custom orders for their children.
This appeals to two types: capitalists who don’t mind making a profit from unnecessary human reproduction and anti-establishment types who are seeking ‘alternatives’ to the traditional, Judeo-Christian family.
The key here is unnecessary human reproduction. If there were a genuine shortage of repopulation numbers, that would lend some credibility to the concept. But as long as there are too many people already being born in certain parts of the world, there is no need for surrogacy.
Oh, there is also a third element to this. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it is a type that doesn’t like to buy used cars or used houses, a certain nouveau riche element that likes things to be brand spanking new, custom ordered, custom tailored. They want to order a child. They don’t like the idea of ‘owning’ someone else’s throw-away or used article. Pretty sad state of affairs.
This is a moral judgment, not an objective observation. In the spirit of my post #10, I would rephrase it in this way: "There are place where parents do not have the economic opportunities or cultural resources to adequately support and rear the children they bear.
I remember reading an article years ago in a newspaper published in Howard County, MD (a rather wealthy county which includes the "planned community" of Columbia, MD) about the rate of child abuse in Howard County, which exceeded that of most other counties in MD.
Turns out that child abuse is not only associated with such low-class behaviors as out-of-wedlock unplanned pregnancy, single-parenting, welfare, etc. It's also associated with wealthy, control-freak parents who demand a planned, perfect and privileged child, and who freak out when the kid acts like a kid, i.e. imperfect.
If you've spent $40,000 on an in-vitro-plus-surrogacy exotic import custom designed baby, you're likely going to have sky-high standards for customer satisfaction. If he turns out to be just an average kid, you may feel a little defrauded. If he cries and gets snot running out of his nose, you may feel definitely ripped off, investment-wise. And if he dribbles his organic pomegranate smoothie all over your $18,000 Versace Blue Barocco Velvet on Silver Leaf Sofa Set, you may just grab him by the neck and throw him against a wall.
It happens.
I'm not saying that never happens to a natural-begotten baby. I am saying that obtaining your child in a commercial transaction will tend to heighten the perception that he's something you acquired to satisfy your needs. And that's a dangerous state of affairs.
I am convinced that God designed natural marital sexual love, pregnancy, childbirth and nursing to maximize the instinctual bonding and personal, intimate, bodily attachment between a mother and her child. Deliberately designing a new physical paradigm of motherhood (e.g. surrogacy) violates the wholeness God intended, and deprives the child of the natural protections God designed.
We have never regreted that decision. We told each other there was no way we could tell that young woman (now 2 young women) "Thank You for this greatest gift we can imagine. Now please never contact us again."
The first boy's birthmother didn't feel up to the challenge of seeing him, so we sent pics and letters. Eventually, that boy got very curious about his past. He was about 14 at the time. We took him to meet his whole birth family ... they were having a kind of reunion anyway. His birthmother was out of town, though. We took him to the hospital where he was born. He was completely satisfied by the time we went back home a few days later.
His birthmother eventually got to the point where she felt she could handle it. I prepared my son ahead of time, telling him I didn't know what his expectations were but it was probably going to be like meeting any other adult. We spent a weekend with her and a bunch of half-siblings and cousins. He had a grand time with the kids. But I was right about what it would be like meeting his birthmother.
My other son has known his birthmother and her family from day one. I don't think he "got it" until he was about 6-7. We visit them about once or twice a year. Mrs gitmo and I have become good friends with his birth-grandparents.
It has been helpful to be able to get family medical information. We have also been able to call one of the birthmothers and tell her we think we know what is going on with one of her kids because of medical conditions our boy has.
It was definitely a scary step to take, but we are convinced it was the way to go. In fact, it was because of our open relationship with the first birthmom that the second one approached us about adopting her then-unborn child.
So, why introduce that reality "You aren't my real mother. You can't tell me what to do."
My older son has once or twice used something like that. But he recognizes that we are his real parents. We just ignored him when he threw that out. I feel much more comfortable that there will never be a moment when they feel we have hidden the truth from them. And those questions about why this happened are already addressed during a time when they are not distraught. They fully understand their birthmoms love them but this happened because they couldn't care for them. We have made a point that we never say one negative word about their birthmoms and the ladies know that.
Do you have pictures of that sofa?
I can say from experience that pomegranate does not wash out.
On eBay: $18,000 Versace Blue Barocco Velvet on Silver Leaf Sofa Set Costs more than our car did, new.
I think we paid $18,000 for the Big Van (a year old with 30,000 miles).
Zot, that’s an ugly thing, but it wouldn’t show blue Kool-ade spills, at least!
Ha! Here they come with slurpees!
LOL! Even that bilious blue would probably still show pomegranate stains, though. That stuff is BAD.
It wasn’t a moral judgment. Your explanation is exactly what I meant by ‘too many’ in ‘certain parts of the world.’ I didn’t think it needed an explanation given the context of the post and my previous post (the value of human life, the immorality of farming people as a commodity, one country aborting by the millions each year and people in those countries buying children from surrogates).
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