Aust ambassador defends surrogacy policy

Paul Robilliard, Australia's ambassador to Thailand, has batted away questions over whether Canberra is undermining Thailand's surrogacy laws.

Australia's Ambassador to Thailand has defended citizenship being granted to surrogate babies despite Thailand trying to end the commercial practice.

Thailand's National Assembly passed a law banning surrogacy earlier this year, but the legislation is yet to be published in the Royal Gazette to become effective.

The issue of commercial surrogacy in Thailand emerged last year after a Western Australian couple left behind a surrogate twin boy who had Down Syndrome.

In Australia, Nationals MP George Christensen has questioned why embassies were still granting "citizenship and passports without thinking twice".

But Australia's Ambassador to Thailand Paul Robilliard told reporters in Bangkok that citizenship would be granted provided it was possible to show the child was related to an Australian.

"The situation is that if a baby is shown to be a descendant of an Australian, it has Australian citizenship extended to them by law," he said on Wednesday.

"They become an Australian citizen and then become eligible for an Australian passport."

Senior DFAT officials held talks in Thailand last year to negotiate a transition period to allow over 100 Thai women, carrying the children of Australian couples, to give birth.

Mr Robilliard batted away questions over whether Australia was undermining Thailand's law.

"We've had very good co-operation between the embassy and all Thai agencies on this very difficult issue," he said.

His comments follow criticism from a House of Representatives standing committee in Canberra on the surrogacy policy.

The report from the bipartisan standing committee on social policy and legal affairs called for a full inquiry into commercial surrogacy.

Mr Christensen, the committee's chairman, was reported as saying Australian embassy staff in Thailand had continued to issue passports for surrogate babies despite legislation there making the process illegal.

He said Australian authorities in Thailand had been receiving applications knowing children were being born through surrogacy arrangements, and that they were still issuing passports.

In comments to the committee, Federal Circuit Court Chief Judge John Pascoe expressed concern about the continued operations of commercial surrogacy in developing countries.

"I am very concerned, and anecdotally I am told, that there are Australians very much involved in the surrogacy clinics," he was reported as saying.

The issue hit international headlines in 2014 when Baby Gammy, who has Down Syndrome, was left in the country.

The child was recently granted Australian citizenship.

His Thai mother, Pattaramon Chanbua, says she faces health problems and needs citizenship to allow Gammy access to Australian medical care.

DFAT on its official travel advisory website advises Australians travelling to Thailand "not to visit for the purpose of engaging in commercial surrogacy arrangements".

Source: 

AAP

Record numbers of British parents are turning to surrogacy

As a successful career woman in her 30s, the last thing on Caroline Griffiths’ mind was motherhood. But after falling in love at the age of 42, the desire for a baby became overwhelming. Persuaded by her husband Nigel that she did want a family after all, the couple spent the next 15 years trying, and failing, to become parents, spending in the process some £80,000 on fertility treatments.
Last year, still desperate for a baby, they decided to seek a surrogate: a woman willing to be implanted with a donated egg, fertilised by Nigel’s sperm, and carry the pregnancy to term. In June, at the age of 57, Caroline finally got her baby. The longed-for child was delivered by Caesarean section to a surrogate mother at a clinic in the Republic of Georgia, as the Griffithses waited anxiously in the ward next door. The little girl was whisked away to her “intended parents” before Ekaterine, the 32-year-old surrogate and herself a mother of two, had a chance to see her.
“I was devastated every time an attempt to have a baby failed and my age was a shadow that hung over me,” says Caroline. “But now we have Grace a horrible weight has been lifted off my shoulders.”

Elle MacPherson

Thirty years after Kim Cotton became Britain’s first surrogate mother, the subject is rarely out of the news. Supermodel Elle Macpherson, already a mother of two, is reportedly set to have a third child at 51 via a surrogate, using her own previously frozen eggs. Actress Nicole Kidman, 47, had a daughter via a surrogate in 2010 and Sarah Jessica Parker, 50, had twins via a surrogate in 2009, conceived with her frozen eggs and her husband’s sperm.

Nicole Kidman and husband Keith Urban

Elton John, 68, and his husband David Furnish, 52, meanwhile, have two sons via a surrogate, whom clothes designers Dolce and Gabbana controversially described as “synthetic” earlier this month.

Sarah Jessica Parker

But it’s not just celebrities who are making surrogacy fashionable. Recent figures from the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service (Cafcass) show that record numbers of UK babies are being born to surrogate parents - 167 last year, up from 47 in 2007. Like the Griffithses, many couples go to countries where, unlike in the UK, commercial surrogacy is legal. Data released earlier this month show that in the past three years over 1,000 hopeful couples have travelled to a total of 57 such countries.

The process is, of course, not without controversy. Last month Thailand banned commercial surrogacy for foreign couples following the high profile case of Baby Gammy, the twin boy an Australian couple allegedly left with his Thai surrogate mother following a diagnosis of Down’s syndrome. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, meanwhile, warns couples about the lack of international regulation and the risk of commercial exploitation of surrogate mothers from poorer countries.

As in Caroline’s case, surrogacy also provokes strong, conflicting views about very late motherhood. “There is a doubt in my mind that Grace may be lacking an able-bodied and able-minded mother when she needs me as a teenager,” she admits. “But at the moment I have lots of energy to look after her and I enjoy her enormously.”

The couple, from London, met in February 2000 when Nigel. a chartered surveyor, was 31 and Caroline 42. “When I was younger it was difficult to have a successful career and children,” says Caroline, who owns a human resources company. “When I met Nigel I hoped it would happen naturally.”

By the time Caroline was 45 and still not pregnant, she and Nigel decided to pursue IVF, although by this time Caroline could not use her own eggs.

“A woman has produced her best eggs by her early thirties and by 43 they are unlikely to work,” explains Dr Susan Ingamells, a consultant in reproductive medicine at Wessex Fertility Centre in Southampton.

“It was upsetting,” says Caroline. “But the consultant said that if I used a donor egg I could still become a mother.”

Over the next decade the couple underwent nine cycles of IVF treatment, using Nigel’s sperm and donor eggs, at private clinics in Australia, Spain, London and Turkey. Each attempt failed, leaving Caroline desolate. “After every cycle there was an incredible sense of emptiness,” she recalls. At around £5,000 per cycle of IVF – both in Britain and abroad - the process also proved costly.

By the time she was 55, Caroline finally accepted that she would need to use a surrogate if she wanted to become a mother. “I reconciled myself to the fact that carrying a child would have been unsafe,” she says.

She and Nigel, discovered that finding a surrogate in the UK could be difficult and protracted. “Although surrogacy in the UK isn’t illegal, there is no contract you can enter into with the surrogate mother and no access to the agency services that are plentiful abroad,” says Natalie Gamble, a leading surrogacy lawyer based in London. Surrogate mothers here can only receive expenses, as opposed to formal payment, for their services, and English law treats the surrogate as the legal mother until a parental order is signed. “If they decide they want to keep the baby there is nothing you can do about it,” says Caroline. “We thought it better to go to a country where surrogacy was properly regulated and we could be surer of an end result.”

Research led them to visit the New Life Clinic in Tbilisi, capital of the Republic of Georgia, a former part of the Soviet Union and a popular destination for those seeking surrogates. She and Nigel were shown profiles of potential donors and surrogates to pick from. “Because the woman carrying the baby is not the biological mother there is less of a chance of her becoming emotionally attached,” says Caroline. “We tried to choose donors who had fair skin and looked the most like me although most of them were dark-skinned so in the end we just chose the prettiest.”

The couple’s £21,000 “package” allowed them three attempts at impregnation with three different surrogates; nearly £8,000 of this would eventually be paid to the successful surrogate mother. Their first attempt was in April 2013. “I didn’t need to be there but flew out with Nigel for moral support,” says Caroline. Three embryos, created from harvested donor eggs fertilised with Nigel’s sperm, were transferred into the surrogate mother they had chosen. But two weeks after the couple had returned to Britain they received an email to tell them the attempt was unsuccessful.

Devastated, they chose a new egg donor and surrogate and flew out that July to repeat the process. Three embryos were transferred to their new surrogate, with three more frozen to be used later. When their second attempt failed, however, Caroline and Nigel nearly gave up hope. “We agreed to give it one final attempt with a different surrogate mother and the remaining embryos but didn’t think it was going to happen,” says Caroline. Nigel adds: “We accepted our journey had to stop somewhere.”

The embryos were transferred to the third surrogate, Ekaterine, in October 2013. Two weeks later Caroline received an email to tell her that Ekaterine was pregnant. “Nigel and I were euphoric,” she says. They were sent monthly reports on their baby’s development and when Ekaterine was six months pregnant Nigel and Caroline flew out to meet her.

They learned her husband had injured himself and was unable to work, and she was unemployed. “This was her way of earning,” says Caroline. “She didn’t speak a word of English, which made things difficult. But when we flew out again a couple of months later she was more relaxed.”

As part of the clinic’s policy, a date was fixed for Ekaterine to have an elective caesarean section around 37 weeks.

“We flew out the day before and as Grace was delivered I lay down in a room next door and took off my top,” says Caroline. “The midwife brought her straight in to me and put her on my chest. It was a wonderful feeling.” But afterwards she felt bad about the caesarean section. “Ekaterine was in a lot of pain. She talked about how her milk had come in and she’d had to take drugs to stop it.”

Ekaterine had no right to see the baby but Caroline felt she should. “It didn’t seem right that she’d gone to all this trouble and couldn’t see the baby she had carried,” she says. “As I watched her hold Grace tenderly I felt like an imposter, as if I were taking her baby. I had to remind myself Grace wasn’t hers because a donor egg had been used.”

Nigel and Caroline Griffiths and baby daughter Grace

While Nigel had returned to London earlier, mother and baby flew home in early July, after travel documentation had been completed. The parental order from the Family Court in Britain that makes Caroline Grace’s legal mother arrived last month. “It’s difficult to stay in touch with Ekaterine because she doesn’t have the Internet, but we try,” she says. “I gave her my gold necklace to thank her and she has a picture of Grace we gave her on her mantelpiece.”

Caroline and Grace meanwhile have formed an unbreakable bond. “My age does worry me, and sometimes I look at Grace and feel sad I couldn’t carry her myself,” says Caroline. “But I’m delighted we finally have a perfect healthy baby.”

Surrogacy procedures explained

EGG DONATION

An egg donor is given daily injections of stimulating hormones to encourage her to grow more eggs for 10 days until she ovulates. During egg collection a needle is introduced through the back of her vaginal wall into her ovaries. The eggs are removed with a gentle suction pump and fertilised with sperm in a laboratory dish through in vitro fertilisation (IVF).

EGG FREEZING

A woman can freeze her eggs for later use. Eggs are removed in the same way as they are for egg donation. They are dehydrated before freezing and can be stored for up to 10 years in liquid nitrogen at 196 degrees centigrade. When the woman wants to have a baby the egg is thawed slowly before being warmed up again and injected with sperm to fertilise.

TRADITIONAL SURROGACY

The surrogate mother acts as both the egg donor and the surrogate, so is also the biological mother. The biological father gives a sample of sperm that is transferred into the uterus of the surrogate with a process called intrauterine insemination (IUI) in the hope that fertilisation will take place naturally.

GESTATIONAL SURROGACY

The embryo is created using the biological father’s sperm and an egg donor through IVF, meaning the surrogate is not the biological mother. Resulting embryos are transferred into the surrogate mother’s uterus with a plastic catheter using a process called uterine embryo transfer (UET) around three days after fertilisation.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Psychological Aspects Deciding to Use Donor Eggs

Choosing a program of egg/sperm donation infertile couples often face with rather difficult emotional situations. For both men and women it can be difficult to accept the fact that their child will have a set of foreign genes. Nevertheless using donated eggs or sperm can be a wonderful choice for couples who have been down the difficult road of unsuccessful infertility treatment. Each situation often leaves couples with unfulfilled dreams, intense disappointment and feelings of grief, sadness, anger and exhaustion. Making the choice to use third party reproduction offers the possibility of being pregnant and having a child who has a genetic connection to one of its parents. As in any major life decision, there are issues and feelings to consider.

Choosing a donor is a very emotional process for many couples. Couples will want to discuss what characteristics and traits are most important to them in a donor and to understand their feelings about using a donor. Some couples are very focused on finding the perfect donor who looks most like the recipient. However, it is impossible to know how the combination of genes will express themselves in the child. Worries about being able to bond with the child usually occur at the beginning of this process. As a pregnancy progresses, worries about bonding usually diminish. However, feelings related to the loss of and longing for the genetic connection may recur at times. These are normal feelings and do not mean that you are not bonded with your child.

One of the most important and sometimes most difficult issues that couples confront is that of sharing their family building information with others and with their child. At first the information shared is about the pregnancy, but ultimately it is information about your child and your family. Obstetricians, pediatricians and close family members and friends are usually those with whom couples feel comfortable sharing this private information.

Whether to share this information with your child can be a source of anxiety for some couples. Some couples are fearful that if the child knew that donor gametes were used that it would harm and diminish the parent-child bond. Others want to protect the child from the pain this knowledge might cause them. It is important to weigh these fears against the burdens of keeping such an important secret. Sharing this information gives a loving and affirming message about your desire to have this child and your openness and resilience as a family.

There are many issues and feelings to explore in making the decision to use third party reproduction. Working through these issues and feelings will allow you to make an informed choice and pursue a new vision of building your family with greater ease. On the clinical end, psychologists are helping ART clients prepare for and handle parenthood when it comes. Encouraging clients to engage early on in stress reduction, support groups and couples counseling helps not only during treatment, but once a baby comes, note specialists.

Fears can be especially strong if a baby is the product of donor sperm, eggs or both, doctors add. In fact, it often takes time for couples unsuccessful with IVF to decide to use donor gametes.

For those who decide to take this route, experts help them to grieve the biologically, genetically shared child they had hoped for and to imagine and work through how they'll feel once their child is born.

"People need to figure out how they'll react when people say things like, 'Whose eyes does this child have?'" doctor says.

In any case parents who decided to use ART, egg or sperm donation in particular, must gird up their loins and love child as he will be their own one. Parents-to-be can visit pre-entry courses and have consultations by professional psychologist. Starting the medical program couple should clearly understand their baby will see the world in 9 months and he has already chosen a lovely family. So parents have no right to throw doubt upon child’s genes. Couples who use ART must know and remember that child born with the help of assisted reproductive medicine is their own beyond a shadow of doubt.  

 Source http://www.resolve.org/

Happy Children! :)

Twins born to surrogacy in Ukraine

A High Court Judge has granted parental orders to a couple who commissioned the birth of twins in Ukraine.

In RS v T, the couple concerned had been married for 38 years and were both in their 60s. More than 20 years previously the woman had undergone IVF treatment in an attempt to have a child but this was unsuccessful and the couple decided to explore surrogacy as an alternative.

But it was not until 2012 that they decided to proceed with surrogacy and entered an arrangement with a commercial clinic in Ukraine, paying a fee of EUR 26,000 (£18,520) plus a supplement of EUR 5000 (£3,562)when the surrogate mother became pregnant with twins.

The current period of civil unrest in Ukraine began around the time the twins were born and the couple were therefore stranded in the country for several months.

While still in Ukraine, the couple asked the surrogate mother to signdeclarations stating that she agreed to the children being brought to the UK and to giving up her parental rights.

The commissioning couple have now returned to the UK with the twins. In February they applied for the parental order, transferring to them the status of parents to the twins. Under English law, the birth mother of surrogate children is their legal mother unless and until this status is transferred by the courts.

However, the couple ran into difficulties demonstrating the amount of money which had been paid to the surrogate mother, and were also unable to contact her in order to serve her with notice of the proceedings.

In the Family Court sitting at Canterbury, Mrs Justice Theis explained:

“The applicants invite the court to dispense with the need for the respondent to be served, as they submit they have taken reasonable steps to try and locate her. The evidence demonstrates that the only other method left to seek to contact her would be by way of notification in the media to try and locate where she is.”

The Judge said the documents signed by the surrogate mother while the couple were still in Ukraine were not sufficiently detailed to demonstrate that the birth mother had fully consented under the relevant legislation. On the other hand, she also believed that the couple had taken all reasonable steps to find the mother and the Judge decided that it would not be sensible for the couple to purse the possibility of trying to contact the mother through the media given the “very sensitive subject” and the unrest in the region.

Mrs Justice Theis authorised the payments made by the couple, saying the couple had “acted in good faith” and not sought to conceal the sums paid. Payments made to foreign clinics and surrogate mothers must be authorised by the family courts when granting parental orders because commercial surrogacy is illegal in the UK.

Noting that some of the difficulties encountered by the couple could have been avoided if they had taken specialist legal advice, she turned to the question of the couple’s age. They had no health concerns and a Cafcass officer had approved the granting of a parental order after interviewing them. However, the officer did stress the importance of the couple making arrangements for the children in the event that they became unable to care for them.

The Judge concluded that the twins’ welfare required “the position with their current carers to be secured in a way that provides lifelong security.”

http://www.marilynstowe.co.uk/

Madonna Defends IVF And Surrogacy, Says 'God Has A Hand' In Technology

Madonna joins in the furor that designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s comments with regard gay parenting and IVF babies. Formerly the face of the Dolce and Gabbana, or D&G, many people have been waiting to see which side the pop icon would choose.

While Madonna did not say she would boycott the brand, which is the course of action incited by Elton John when he got riled up over the designers’ comments, Madonna took to her Instagram to share her two cents on the issue of IVF. It appeared from her post that the pop icon disagrees with the majority of what the designers said on the topic and even pushed forward a new angle to the debate – God.

According to Madonna, all babies, however created, have souls and therefore should not be called synthetic. She said that people cannot dismiss IVF and surrogacy because these technologies and modern processes lead to babies “coming to this earth and their families.” She added that all souls are here to teach a lesson. She also said that God is in control of all things, “even technology.” She claimed people are “arrogant to think Man does anything on his own.” She cautioned people to think first before they speak. She added her famous hastag #liveforlove. One of the songs in her new album “Rebel Heart” is “Living for Love” so she might have derived her inspiration from the song.

Dolce and Gabbana’s comments on IVF babies, calling them synthetic caused public outrage and debate. After Elton John called for boycott of the designers’ products, some celebrities followed suit and called for the same. The fashion industry’s major publication firms also claimed that the statements made alienated majority of the D&G’s client base. Apart from the LGBT community, straight couples who have problems procreating have looked into IVF processes to have their kids. There were also many politicians who stood by the designers’ comments, labeling John a “gay Taliban” for being intolerant of views different from his.  For their part, the designers have already explained that their views were personal and were not made to judge others’ decisions.
au.ibtimes.com

Surrogacy, making babies, ‘synthetic humans’, and the rising cost

“

Motherhood itself is now on trial.”

A leading constitutional lawyer, and one of the leading attorneys (if not the leading one) involved in high profile surrogate parenting cases in the US, made that claim, and not lightly nor without deep knowledge of the issues involved. Harold Cassidy was chief counsel in the first contested surrogacy case in the United States that struck down surrogate mother contracts as unenforceable, the ‘Baby M’ case. Decades later, he’s now sounding alarms about the issue of surrogacy and where it’s headed. In New Jersey especially now, but far beyond ultimately.

Some fervently believe that if gestational surrogacy laws were to be widely accepted they would irreparably change human civilization. Gestational surrogacy is now front and center for debate, not only in New Jersey, but across the nation. It demands attention…

The Baby M court made the following observations: private adoptions are disfavored; the surrogacy arrangement places a child without any regard for the child’s best interests; it circumvents all laws that require counseling of the mother before she surrenders her rights; and the compulsion of the contract makes surrender of the child after birth not truly voluntary or informed. Beyond that, the arrangement exploits women as a “surrogate uterus” or an “incubator” and expects a mother to act as an inanimate object, which denigrates the woman in her role as mother.

Back at that time, Cassidy made the prescient observation of the corrupting influence of money in the purchase of babies. Here he cites one of New Jersey Chief Justice Wilentz’s remarks in the court opinion.

There are, in a civilized society, some things that money cannot buy. In America, we decided long ago that merely because conduct purchased by money was “voluntary” did not mean that it was good or beyond regulation and prohibition. . . There are, in short, values that society deems more important than granting to wealth whatever it can buy, be it labor, love, or life.

That would prove to be a powerfully prophetic statement.

Cassidy went on to become the attorney for a different high profile surrogacy case, this one gestational surrogacy (not the biological mother carrying the child). The mother was Angelia G. Robinson, “AGR” as she would later be known in court papers. It’s a case study in how surrogate parenting can be fraught with problems.

Robinson felt that the girls were her responsibility and that she was the only person in the world who could protect them. The bond and love for the girls who had developed by then and in the ensuing months was far more powerful than anything she ever anticipated. The growing sense of moral obligation to her daughters increased as she realized that her daughters needed their mother.

Read the whole thing, it goes from bad to worse.

Which people involved in the industry of ‘making babies’ knew, all along. Alana Newman was a ‘donor child’, and has devoted herself and her time to both warning of and healing from the impact of reproductive technologies that favor the adults at the expense of the children. The calculus is off, she says.

All of the virtues play into our fertility or marriageability. And if virtues and trustworthiness are too slow to develop, we may miss out on our natural fertility window. If a certain amount of virtues education is not observed after the wedding day there will be more divorces—which I’ve come to understand increases the use of egg donors and surrogates as divorced women in their 40s and 50s seek to remarry and bond their new relationship with a child, or remedy loneliness as single mothers by choice.

Or same-sex couple wanting children, the situation at the heart of longstanding debate. George Weigel puts it bluntly here, in this piece on ‘Children As Commodities.’

Moreover, in their determination to deny reality ”or perhaps reinvent it” the proponents of the D.C. surrogacy bill have adopted a species of Newspeak that would make George Orwell cringe. You can get a flavor of it in a letter written by a friend of mine to his D.C. councilman:

“ . . . in reading the bill I was struck that nothing was said about the child to be born out of the surrogate agreement. Much is said about the rights and responsibilities of the ‘gestational carrier’ (a very strange expression) and the ‘intended parent,’ but nothing is said about the child. The child is treated as a thing to be used as the gestational carrier and intended parent wish. This is the most troubling feature of the proposed law. It gives no indication that one is dealing here with a human person who will have feelings, thoughts, and memories. These are all swept aside as though the child to be born will have no interest in how he or she came into the world, who his or her parents are, and all the other things that are so fundamental to our identity as human beings.”

“Gestational carrier”? The D.C. bill not only treats the child as a thing, a commodity that can be bought and sold; it treats the woman bearing the child in the same way.

Where are the laws regulating these things, asks Margaret Datiles Watts, a DC area attorney who writes on legal issues of bioethics and the family.

Michael Cook called it early, that surrogacy would become “one of the big human rights issues of the first half of our century”.

I hope that the Nobel Peace Prize committee is listening. But I fear that it is not.

The reason is simple: it would offend supporters of same-sex parenting. Every Nobel Peace Prize needs both an acclaimed hero and a despised anti-hero. If the Swedish Women’s Lobby or Jennifer Lahl’s Center for Bioethics and Culture or Alana Newman’s Anonymous Us Project, were the hero, who would be the anti-hero?

The UN Commission on the Status of Women heard Jennifer Lahl just days ago, on Egg Trafficking and Rented Wombs, and How Not To Make Babies.

Some cases of surrogacy go beyond coercive to exploitive. One woman describes her twin children being taken from her at the hospital and given to the father. Until that moment, she had expected to raise her children in shared arrangement with the father, with whom she had a platonic friendship. She was not aware he was using her as a “breeder” for him and his male partner.

“How do we promote reproductive justice for all in these third-party arrangements?” Lahl asked…

“For science to serve rather than hurt us, we must always link what we can do to what we should do,” said Archbishop Auza, the Vatican’s representative to the UN.

Alana Newman is speaking out again on that subject, after the flap between Dolce & Gabbana, and Elton John.

This past week has seen the outrage generated by parents of donor and invitro-fertilization children following a now-infamous Panorama magazine interview conducted with the fashion designers Dolce & Gabbana, wherein Domenico Dolce proclaimed, “You are born to a mother and a father — or at least that’s how it should be. I call children of chemistry, synthetic children.” Immediately, Elton John advocated a boycott of the designers’ products in retaliation for the perceived offense against his two sons, who were conceived via an egg donor and surrogate mother.

Speaking as two donor-conceived young women—alive because of reproductive technologies—we felt an urgent need to respond…in support of Dolce and Gabbana.

So they go on to say

(Elton) John’s children were commissioned in partnership with his spouse, David Furnish, and it is not yet public information which man is the biological father, or if they both are and the children are not fully genetically related…

It is important to note, however, that infants, toddlers, and all of these “miracle” beings are too young to protest their own objectification. We however, are now of age and in a position to speak for ourselves. “Synthetic” indeed is a harsh and inaccurate description of us offspring born by third-party reproduction. Dolce’s word choice was a mistake. But there is much underlying truth in what he said: “life [does] have a natural flow, there are things that should not be changed.” Emphasis ours.

Those of us conceived non-traditionally are full human beings with equal capacity in every regard—no one need question our humanity. It is not our individual, case-by-case worth as humans that is debatable; rather, it is how we value human beings in general that warrants discussion. Has anyone asked John for how much he purchased his kids? How much money he and Furnish paid the boy’s genetic and birth mother for their absence and invisibility?

It’s not brave, this new world of technological capabilities.

Some suggest that spending more money on making children means that they are more loved. Our children are definitively wanted, they say.

“The baby doesn’t care anything about the money,” says marriage and family therapist Nancy Verrier, regarding the issues surrounding surrogacy. “That’s not what hurts the baby. The baby is hurt by the separation, by the loss of that mother that it knows.” This ever-present realization of loss remains with both mother and child throughout their lives. Nature has ensured that mothers and children attach to one another, as it is a trait necessary to our survival; without motivation to love or instinctively care for her child, why would a mother protect her children from potential danger? She wouldn’t, and that would have heralded the end of our species. With this biological connection so immediate and meaningful, why doesn’t society view maintenance of that connection as more imperative?…

Growing up donor-conceived, it has been a great struggle to comply with the commandment “Honor thy mother and thy father,” because in order to obey the desires of one parent we must agree to the obliteration of the other. We plead, we beg: let us honor both our mothers and fathers as essential and irreplaceable.
http://www.mercatornet.com/

Mothers and Daughters :)

A Dad Explains Surrogacy To His Children Through Cartoons

When cartoonist Charles Danziger went through the surrogacy process to start his family, he decided that there should be a story about it.

“I wanted to find a way to introduce the topic of surrogacy to children and families in a charming and warm-hearted way,” Danziger, creator of illustrated parenting blog Boys in ‘Burbs, says. “Since I couldn’t find any of those stories, I decided to make one myself.”


The cartoon series “All Our Wishes” tells the tale of two father mice who want to have a baby.

Danziger, who has a 2- and a 19-month-old son with his partner, says of the cartoon: “I hope it will reinforce the idea that the big difference between kids born through surrogacy and other kids is…nothing!”

And the story of surrogacy isn’t just meant for people who have experience with it.

“Every child on the playground might have questions about how different families form,” Danziger says. “Surrogacy is becoming more and more common, and what better way to educate children than through cartoons.”

Here’s a sneak-peak of the series…

Danziger looks forward to reading this story to his children (once they’re a little older), and he hopes other kids can enjoy it, too.

“I’d be delighted to turn this story into a book because I’ve found nothing that tackles the topic of surrogacy in this way for children,” Danziger says. “And besides, what parent wouldn’t like to read his own kids’ book to his kids?!”
http://www.buzzfeed.com/