‘Wombs for rent’

There is one legal and ethical issue that is brewing in New York and in several states in the US while others are waiting how this issue will be resolved in NY.

Wombs for rent or, technically, commercial surrogacy, refers to paying a woman to act as a “gestational carrier” for another’s baby.

This arrangement is illegal in NY and outlawed in six other US territories.

East Side “Our Town” (October 18) report quoted State Senator Liz Krueger saying that commercial surrogacy is “like organ donation and adoption, a complicated issue rife with thorny ethical and moral questions.”

Krueger is an advocate of women’s reproductive health and commercial surrogacy and she concedes that it is “clearly expanding but our laws need to evolve carefully.”

Indeed the case in 1986 of a surrogate mother refusing to give up the child after it was born although she owned only the egg that was fertilized by the “father’s sperm created a chilling effect on surrogacy throughout the country.”

The court eventually decided in favor of the father but the surrogate mother got visiting rights. The Supreme Court of the State of nearby New Jersey “invalidated all surrogacy contracts, rendering paid surrogacy illegal.” Other states followed suit.

This chilling effect has influenced New York to outlaw this option for childless couples and the controversy continues to this day. One aspect of this issue is the finding of Reproductive Possibilities, a surrogacy agency, is that mothers tended to keep their babies.

Another drawback in surrogacy is the cost. A couple was cited by Our Town to have paid $100,000 for this option because they had to find a surrogate in a state which allows the commercial contract and then fly the surrogate to another state where it is legal to have one. Since they live in New York, they had to fly to that state so they would be present when the baby is born and take him home.

Price then is a deterrent rather than the law.

There is what is known as “altruistic surrogacy” where a relative or a friend would agree as a gestational carrier without compensation thus the arrangement is not commercial and thus New York allows it.

The problem is that no one was willing to be a surrogate for free. This is big money and women are willing to suffer the difficulties of the medical operation and carry the child to term and then lose it. They want to get paid since that is big money.

The incidence of surrogacy, however, is increasing with the legalization of same sex marriages. In this kind of union, the same sex couple would adopt but now the male in the union can have a surrogate for him and the couple could have a child.

However, there is another drawback. The couple, as in “normal” surrogacy has to legally adopt the child as if they were born of another.

There is a group now working to remove the legal obstacles, arguing that “a lot of women think it’s the end of the road if they can’t have a baby.”

Truly, for a woman, having a child is the fullness of womanhood. That is how God made them, one of the normal, natural purposes for which woman was created and not “the new normal” that advocates claim should be the inevitable course in gestational surrogacy.

The thinking here with friends and the newspapers is that it would be a long way for wombs for rent to be legalized. There are, however, groups pushing hard for legislation and in this election one candidate has made surrogacy as a platform.

The moral issue, however, is not in the agenda because issues of this nature cannot be legislated. The question of the fertilization of the egg in a dish is opposed by the Church. Surrogacy uses the in vitro to get the fertilized egg into the rented womb.

The process can also take several tries until the donated egg (of the carrier) is fertilized by the man’s sperm and that can be a moral issue.

The other question is the genetics of the child. What if the child looks like or gets the personality and psychological characteristics of the mother?

Of course the selection of the surrogate is crucial which can make the process expensive and to prevent the mother from claiming the child, the renter takes the child immediately to end the surrogacy contract but to the “new mother” the process was “nerve-wracking.”

To some, though, surrogacy is a better option than direct adoption. At least one of the genetic characteristics belongs to the father.

There is a long way for us in the Philippines for surrogacy and our culture does not look kindly into this process.*

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