Adaobi is a 19 year old girl in suburban
Lagos in Nigeria. Sitting in the recovery room of the maternity ward, she stares
into space, eyes filled with tears of regret. She has many things on her mind,
topmost of all the child she just gave away. She lacks the means to care for
her sufficiently and had entered a contract she was told. The couple she gave
her child to is a nice, happy, urbane couple who have been unable to conceive
for seven years.
“I have no choice” she says. You see,
Adaobi is poor and leaves with her uncle who abuses her regularly. She has lived with him since both her parents
died in a car accident ten years ago. She was in her last year of secondary
school when her uncle informs her that he would not be paying her university
fees, and she desperately wants to go to university. She is desperate. Subsequently
she learns through a friend, of young, rich couples who have been unable to
conceive for several years are looking for girls to act as surrogate mothers.
She discovers one such couple and subsequently enters into an agreement. Ada subsequently becomes pregnant by
artificial insemination and is registered for antenatal at a specialized
clinic. All her needs are taken care of for the period she is pregnant. As the
delivery date approaches, she becomes sadder and sadder because she has
developed a strong bond with “Charles” (she’s named the baby Charles in her
head). When she goes into labour, she checks into the clinic, where she gives
birth to a baby boy and immediately the child is taken to the young, couple
waiting outside.
She has given away her child and now she
is free to go to university because she can now afford it. Moreover she couldn’t
possibly keep the child, because she can barely take care of herself, not to
talk of another human being. “It’s for the best she says”, or is it?
This is the picture increasingly seen in
many African countries. Young girls are acting as surrogate mothers and giving
up their newborns to young, rich couples, when they previously simply wanted to
abort their pregnancies.
Undoubtedly, surrogate motherhood is a
very controversial issue. In many cases, the surrogate bears the child for the
contracting couple, willingly gives up to them the child she has borne, and
accepts her role with no difficulty. In those cases, the contracting couple
views the surrogate with extreme gratitude for helping their dream of having a
child come true. The surrogate also feels a great deal of satisfaction, since
she has in effect given a “gift of life” to a previously infertile couple. But
in some cases that have been well publicized in the media, the surrogate wants
to keep the child she has borne and fights the contracting couple for custody.
What began as a harmonious relationship between the couple and the surrogate
ends with regrets about using this type of reproductive arrangement.
Surrogacy itself is not new. The Old
Testament records two incidents of surrogacy (Gen. 16:1-6; 30:1-13), and it
appears that use of a surrogate to circumvent female infertility was an
accepted practice in the Ancient Near East. What makes today’s
surrogacy new is the presence of lawyers and detailed contracts in the
previously very private area of procreation. Today, surrogacy does not normally
involve any sophisticated medical technology. Normally conception is
accomplished by artificial insemination, though in some cases in vitro
fertilization is used to impregnate the surrogate. In the latter cases the
contracting couple normally provide both sperm and eggs, so that the surrogate
mother is not the genetic mother.
Problems with Surrogate Motherhood
Surrogacy Involves the Sale of Children. Certainly the most serious
objection to commercial surrogacy is that it reduces children to objects of
barter by putting a price on them. Most of the arguments in favour of surrogacy
are attempts to avoid this problem. Opponents of surrogacy insist that any
attempt to deny or minimize the charge of baby-selling fails, and thus
surrogacy involves the sale of children. This violates the Thirteenth Amendment
that outlawed slavery because it constituted the sale of human beings. It also
violates commonly and widely held moral principles that safeguard human rights
and the dignity of human persons, namely that human beings are made in God’s
image and are His unique creations. Persons are not fundamentally things
that can be purchased and sold for a price. The fact that proponents of
surrogacy try so hard to get around the charge of baby-selling indicates their
acceptance of these moral principles as well. Rather than the debate being over
whether human beings should be bought and sold, it is over whether commercial
surrogacy constitutes such a sale of children. If it does, most people would
agree that the case against surrogacy is quite strong. As the New Jersey
Supreme Court put it in the Baby M case, “There are, in a civilized society,
some things that money cannot buy….There are values…that society deems more
important than granting to wealth whatever it can buy, be it labor, love or
life.”5 The sale of children, which normally results from a
surrogacy transaction (the only exception being cases of altruistic surrogacy),
is inherently problematic. This is so irrespective of the other good
consequences the arrangement produces, in the same way that slavery is
inherently troubling, because human beings are not objects for sale. Surrogacy
Involves Potential for Exploitation of the Surrogate. Most agree
that commercial surrogacy has the potential to be exploitative. The combination
of desperate infertile couples, low income surrogates, and surrogacy brokers
with varying degrees of moral scruples raises the prospect that the entire
commercial enterprise can be exploitative.
Surrogacy Involves Detachment from the
Child in Utero. One of the most serious objections to surrogacy applies to both
commercial and altruistic surrogacy. In screening women to select the most ideal
surrogates, one looks for the woman’s ability to give up easily the child she
is carrying. Normally the less attached the woman is to the child the easier it
is to complete the arrangement. But this is hardly an ideal setting for a
pregnancy. Surrogacy sanctions female detachment from the child in the womb, a
situation that one would never want in any other pregnancy. This detachment is
something that would be strongly discouraged in a normal pregnancy, but is
strongly encouraged in surrogacy. Thus surrogacy actually turns a vice
— the ability to detach from the child in utero — into a virtue.
Should surrogacy be widely practiced, bioethicist Daniel Callahan of the
Hastings Center describes what one of the results would be: “We will be forced
to cultivate the services of women with the hardly desirable trait of being
willing to gestate and then give up their own children, especially if paid
enough to do so…. There would still be the need to find women with the capacity
to dissociate and distance themselves from their own child. This is not a
psychological trait we should want to foster, even in the name of altruism.”
Surrogacy
Violates the Right of Mothers to Associate with Their Children.
Another serious problem with commercial surrogacy might also apply to
altruistic surrogacy. In most surrogacy contracts, whether for a fee or not,
the surrogate agrees to relinquish any parental rights to the child she is
carrying to the couple who contracted her services. In the Baby M case, the
police actually had to break into a home to return Baby M to the contracting
couple. A surrogacy contract forces a woman to give up the child she has borne
to the couple who has paid her to do so. Should she have second thoughts and
desire to keep the baby, under the contract she would nevertheless be forced to
give up her child. Of course, this assumes the traditional definition of a
mother. A mother is defined as the woman who gives birth to the child. Society never before
needed to carefully define motherhood because medicine had previously not been
able to separate the genetic and gestational aspects of motherhood. It is a new
phenomenon to have one woman be the genetic contributor and a different woman
be the one who carries the child. There is debate over whether genetics or
gestation should determine motherhood. But in the great majority of surrogacy
cases, the surrogate provides both the genetic material and
the womb. Thus, by any definition, she is the mother of the child. To force her
to give up her child under the terms of a surrogacy contract violates her
fundamental right to associate with and raise her child.11 This does
not mean that she has exclusive right to the child. That must be shared with
the natural father, similar to a custody arrangement in a divorce proceeding.
But the right of one parent (the natural father) to associate with his child
cannot be enforced at the expense of the right of the other (the
surrogate). As a result of this fundamental right, some states that allow a fee
to be paid to the surrogate do not allow the contract to be enforced if the
surrogate wants to keep the child. In these states, any contract that requires
a woman to agree to give up the child she bears prior to birth is not
considered a valid contract. This is similar to the way most states deal with
adoptions. Any agreement prior to birth to give up one’s child is not binding
and can be revoked if the birth mother changes her mind and wants to keep the
child. Many states that have passed laws on surrogacy have chosen to use the
model of adoption law rather than contract law that essentially says “a deal’s
a deal.” The problem with allowing the surrogate to keep the child is that it
substantially increases the element of risk for the contracting couple. They
might go through the entire process and end up with shared custody of a child
that they initially thought was to be all theirs. To many people, that doesn’t
seem fair. But to others is it just as unfair to take a child away from his or
her mother simply because a contract states that she must.
Surrogate
motherhood can be viewed as a classic social problem, which this century must
come to terms with. But till then, we will continue to see many more cases of
adaobi and Baby Charles.
I think that was a brave thing to do...
ReplyDeleteBrilliant and insightful work by a good friend, Charles Aikhimien. The problem of surrogate mother is fast becoming a sociocultural issue in this part of the world. Its good to read and learn new things about this very controversial topic.
ReplyDeleteEmmanuel Owobu
A very well written piece, although the piece seemed to be anti-suroogacy. I believe that surrogate motherhood is not a bad thing and that it actually brings succor to couples all over the world.
ReplyDeletei would probably suggest that the writer writes another piece shedding more light on the beneficial aspects of surrogate motherhood. Kudos though.
Very incisive piece.rili captures d complexity of d issue.Big ups Charlie
ReplyDeleteVery good piece this. I really enjoyed the narrative and i must confess that i didnt know alot about surrogate motherhood before now.
ReplyDeleteI really love the blog