Thomas Frank has an excellent piece over at the Wall Street Journal today. (2008) WSJ is on a two-day roll for me – hat tip to you! Specifically, he draws attention to this woman's story.
Frank does an excellent job of exposing the underbelly of IVF and surrogacy where the rich exploit the poor. The have's and the want to have mores at the expense of those who don't have but need – often money.
Frank writes, "Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years. To summarize briefly, it is a class-and-gender minefield. When money is exchanged for pregnancy, some believe, surrogacy comes close to organ-selling, or even baby-selling. It threatens to commodify not only babies, but women as well, putting their biological functions up for sale like so many Jimmy Choos. If surrogacy ever becomes a widely practiced market transaction, it will probably make pregnancy into just another dirty task for the working class, with wages driven down and wealthy couples hiring the work out because it's such a hassle to be pregnant."
Rock on Frank! Well said indeed.
Stars like Dennis Quaid and his wife have used a "gestational carrier" to have their twins. I've always objected to that term – it sounds like some kind of aircraft!
Center for Bioethics And Culture Network
http://www.cbc-network.org/2008/12/rent-a-womb-is-where-market-logic-leads/
Wombs For Rent
The United States is the only country that does not prohibit surrogacy. Surrogacy is the process in which one female "rents" her uterus out for another couples eggs and sperm. Therefore the person carrying the baby will have no DNA present in the child and will also have no legal rights to the baby. Some people may say this is morally unjust. I personally have no problem with surrogacy. I think it's helping thousands of mothers who are infertile become the parents they've always wanted. A few questions come to mind when I hear about surrogacy. Are the women's children affected by this? What if the woman becomes too attached to the child she is carrying and decides she doesn't want to give it up?
Surrogacy has been around since the biblical ages and we, the united states, see no problem with it. People who are infertile, or have had cervical cancer, tend to go with either surrogacy or adoption. Personally if I had to choose I would go with adoption because I can't personally monitor the person who is carrying my child 24/7 and I can't choose the foods he or she is eating. I recently read an article about someone who said; "is it ethical to rent the wombs of the poor for our children?" and I somewhat agree with that statement/ question. Is it really okay for us to say that the poor people have nothing else to do, or no way of income, so let's just ask them to have our children. I don't think someone should only rely on surrogacy as a source of income.
A downside of surrogacy was shown in the video Wombs For Rent. The mother who so desperately, after having cervical cancer, wanted to have children but could not due to the hysterectomy she had to undergo. She took all of her eggs and froze them, saved up 20,000+ dollars so that this surrogacy could happen. She later found out that the surrogacy website she had given her money and eggs to was a fake, when she was trying to get a hold of the "owner" but there was no response.
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