Nick Loeb, a wealthy American, is trying to compel his ex-fiancée, the actress Sophia Vergara, to allow their fertilised embryos to continue what he calls “their journey towards life and birth”. That Loeb, not having a womb of his own, will have to find another individual to help the embryos achieve personhood appears to be the least of the obstacles he anticipates in forcing motherhood upon Vergara. After all, he explained, the couple tried surrogacy a couple of times during their relationship, although without success. “We actually went through the process of going through in vitro, creating life, putting it into a surrogate once, putting into a surrogate a second time.”
All Loeb needs, assuming Vergara’s protests can be dealt with, is another human receptacle, a “gestational carrier”, as Nicole Kidman once referred to the woman who gave birth to her second daughter, or “oven”, as a fellow celebrity styled his and his partner’s surrogate. In many US states, the law supports this unsentimental view of the transaction. In contrast, British reproductive law identifies any surrogate to be the legal mother of a child (pending the transfer of parental status), and, uneasily for the intended parents, allows a six-week pause before she relinquishes the baby.
This cultural difference possibly explains the considerable sympathy expressed last week for an unnamed woman who had culpably, a judge ruled, refused to honour her surrogacy arrangement with a gay couple. Care of the baby was awarded to its intending parents. Having criticised the mother for, it appeared, frustrating the other parents at every turn, the judge found herself pilloried for lack of maternal feeling (a deficiency confidently attributed to her never having had children).
In this case, a woman willing to have a child by arrangement and then to attempt to keep it for herself, plainly struck some observers as more sympathetic than either the betrayed parents, or the judge struggling with the latest Solomonic challenge to result from contemporary reproductive practice.
Fair or not, this latest evidence of the risks of informal surrogacy arrangements, in the context of Britain’s strict regulatory code, can only encourage more parents to bypass local options and head straight for a poorer or developing country. In India, for example, surrogates are plentiful, screened and by all accounts more dependable than British volunteers. A surrogacy package might be had for less than £20,000, including a donor egg and travel, with the guarantee, at some clinics, that the pregnant mother will be closeted in one of the secure facilities sometimes described as “baby factories”. Local poverty ensures a limitless supply of Indian women, often mothers themselves, willing – as surely no British woman would be – to leave behind their own children and families for nine months, become a means to someone else’s end, then disappear without a murmur.
Following a change in Indian law that complicated surrogacy for gay couples, this commerce flourishes in Nepal, using Indian mothers, Nepalese women being forbidden to participate. At least it did until last month’s earthquake. Among the foreign nationals and tourists escaping the disaster zone were parents with infants just born to surrogates, unaccompanied, it appeared, by any Indian women who were themselves far from home, and also pregnant or post-partum.
It was unfortunate and possibly unfair on the new parents that some photographs of understandably relieved Israeli couples, disembarking with their brand-new babies in carriers, recalled nothing more than a procession of happy shoppers, returning triumphant from an exhausting day at the Kathmandu sales. It is unlikely, after all, that the surrogate mothers would have been genetically related to the babies, given the desire of many would-be cross-border parents to have children resembling themselves by surrogates who may therefore be less inclined to claim them. Their fees had been paid. Even so, the Kathmandu baby airlift briefly focused attention on the asymmetries of a huge and growing global industry that has largely developed unseen. One Israeli commentator, Alon-Lee Green, wrote in Haaretz after the airlift: “Without much deep or serious thought and almost without noticing, we have allowed capitalism to expand to include the bodies of numerous disadvantaged women”.
One partial solution would be, of course, to harmonise wildly differing laws on fertility and surrogacy, so as to make reproductive travel safer for both sides, even unnecessary. If the Israelis allowed surrogacy for gay couples those parents might not have used Indians in Nepal. If Britain allowed payments and advertising for surrogates, the sale of eggs and sperm, and, perhaps, a more relaxed attitude to embryo implantation, there might be no need to impregnate women in Mexico or India.
On the other hand, the cheapest British surrogate could always be undercut abroad, and even a foreign bargain would be too costly for many would-be users of surrogates. In practice, it is only for more privileged and enterprising reproductive travellers that foreign clinics make a nonsense of British law.
Of course, even without payment, a few altruistic British women occasionally offer to gestate babies for strangers. The tiny numbers, considering how many women are physically eligible and charitably inclined, surely confirm that for most women the idea of gestational carrying, other than for someone close, with the certainty of a continuing relationship, is unimaginable. The case of the surrogate whose baby was kept from its intended parents underlines how easily such transactions can fall apart, even between the well-intentioned.
Among the things to think about while you spend nine months incubating some random person’s child: what if it’s a caesarian? How will it feel to hand the baby over, to subdue the urge to protect and feed it? What if the intending parents start acting weird or flaky? Will the child be happy never to know me? How does it feel to be treated, as in Loeb’s “putting it in a surrogate”, as if you were a demi-human precursor to one of Aldous Huxley’s decanting bottles?
For most of surrogacy’s cross-border clients, such reservations probably mean they are asking a poorer woman to do something that is not just physically impossible for them, but also, in principle, an action they would never contemplate. Poverty or desperation are surely the only reasons that most surrogates submit to the risks, indignities, grief and stigma of carrying a foreign buyer’s child. The comparison with prostitution may be inexact but, ethically, both occupations are the province of poor women with the barest alternatives, require the commodification of women’s bodies and involve dehumanising deals the buyers would be unlikely to attempt with their peers.
As with prostitution, one answer is to legalise and normalise commercial surrogacy, to agree international guidelines on womb leasing. Another, to ask if there are some things no stranger should be expected to do, not even for money.
http://www.theguardian.com/
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