Posted                      

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Originally posted by bib:
The majority of people paying for the service were rich Westerners. I feel ashamed that there are people willing to do this to the poor and defenceless.

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Originally posted by Enoch:
I'm not even that comfortable with the concept even if not done for money.

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Originally posted by Enoch:
I suspect I'm old fashioned on this. I am sure there will be many shipmates will regard me as prejudiced and out of date, but I think surrogacy for cash is ethically beyond the pale and emotionally disgusting. I'm not even that comfortable with the concept even if not done for money.

When there were grumbles about the Patriarch of Moscow's intervention on this subject, I agreed with him.

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Posted                          

quote:

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Originally posted by Enoch:
I suspect I'm old fashioned on this. I am sure there will be many shipmates will regard me as prejudiced and out of date, but I think surrogacy for cash is ethically beyond the pale and emotionally disgusting. I'm not even that comfortable with the concept even if not done for money.

When there were grumbles about the Patriarch of Moscow's intervention on this subject, I agreed with him.

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Originally posted by Beeswax Altar:
Only if one rejects the Council of Chalcedon which I do not.

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Originally posted by Pomona:
I cannot understand what is disgusting about an adult acting of their own free will in offering surrogacy for cash - it is their body after all.

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Originally posted by bib:
I would like to see commercial surrogacy made illegal and even altruistic surrogacy strictly regulated to protect all the parties involved, including the babies.

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originally posted by IngoB:
I assume this was in reference to the virgin birth. It is not clear to me just how you would argue against Crœsos' comment from Chalcedon.

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the Self-same Perfect in Manhood; truly God and truly Man; the Self-same of a rational soul and body; co-essential with the Father according to the Godhead, the Self-same co-essential with us according to the Manhood; like us in all things, sin apart; before the ages begotten of the Father as to the Godhead, but in the last days, the Self-same, for us and for our salvation (born) of Mary the Virgin Theotokos as to the Manhood;

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quote:

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originally posted by IngoB:
(FWIW, I do not believe that God needs to follow the moral code He assigned to human beings, nor indeed any other moral code, so for me Crœsos' comment has no force at all. But you seem to have something else in mind.)

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Originally posted by Boogie:

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Originally posted by Pomona:
I cannot understand what is disgusting about an adult acting of their own free will in offering surrogacy for cash - it is their body after all.

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There is very little free will involved when the poorest in society feel they need to do this for cash.

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Posted                       

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Originally posted by Laurelin:

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Originally posted by bib:
I would like to see commercial surrogacy made illegal and even altruistic surrogacy strictly regulated to protect all the parties involved, including the babies.

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Word.

And then there’s this case, where the attitude and outcome was harshly punitive towards the surrogate mother (who was obviously desperate to keep her child):

http://www.spiked-online.com/…/the-inhumanity-of-bri…/17012…

I wasn’t a fan of surrogacy before I read about this case, and I am even less of a fan of it now. I can accept it more within an existing family context, e.g. a mother bearing a child for her infertile daughter, or vice versa.

But I find commercial surrogacy (the sole preserve of the very rich, ripe for exploiting the very poor) morally repulsive, and I am disturbed by how the birth mother was treated in the case above. Obviously the relationship between her and the gay couple who are now parents to her child had completely broken down: I am sympathetic to their personal pain, just as I would be sympathetic to any prospective adopter where the birth mother has changed her mind. And the woman was no saint – that’s clear. But neither was she an abusive mother.

A woman WILL bond with her unborn child - it's a force of nature. This is a child we're talking about, not property. As an adoptee, I know that this ‘primal wound’ stuff is for real - why else do people go in search of their biological origins?

Decades ago, birth mothers who gave up their babies for adoption had very little legal rights, were allowed no agency and had very little moral or practical support. In recent years that injustice was rectified: birth parents who had given up their children for adoption (often through societal coercion, to be blunt) were finally granted the right to gain access to their childrens’ birth records. (Adoptees were granted this same right 40 years ago.) And yet now this recent ruling in UK law exhibited a 'you have no rights whatsoever' stance towards a surrogate mother.

Trust me on this one: donor children, and children born of surrogacy, will start asking the exact same questions we adoptees do. Will the law be on their side, as it is for adoptees?

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Originally posted by Enoch:
It strikes me there are two different ethical issues smouldering under this one.

First, there is one rich person (usually two rich people) hiring the womb of one poor person to carry a child for them. Second, there's whether it's ethical to do this at all, irrespective of the money involved.

As regards the first issue, I can't see any real ground for discussion on this. It is disgusting in the same way as buying and selling third world kidneys is. One can see the power of the emotional and economic drivers are on both sides. I sympathise with them. If I were dying of kidney disease and thought spending lots of money might get me a few more years, or were a desperately poor person with sick children and a kidney that appears to be OK at the moment, I'd feel under enormous pressure to go down that road. It's the fact that modern science means those two temptations now exist so forcibly, which is why it seems to me so self-evident that that the transaction should be forbidden and those caught should be heavily penalised. The penalties for those caught buying or facilitating should be higher than for those caught selling.

IMHO, surrogacy for cash should be forbidden for the same reason. I agree with Australia on that one.


As for the second I accept that I'm less unequivocal on a blanket forbidding of surrogacy between close relatives or where no money changes hands apart from out of pocket expenses. Organ donation between close relatives though, is different from organ selling for cash. I'm still uncomfortable about one family member pressurising another - 'if you can do it, you have a duty to'.

I still have to admit, though, that I find the idea of surrogate pregnancy distasteful even between blood sisters and this is in a yuck sort of way. I also don't think one should either ignore the yuck reaction to ethical dilemmas or insist that it must bow every time to the dissuasively rational.

Pomona and Karl, that's my response. I suspect you'll neither of you agree, but I also suspect you'll be wasting your time trying to persuade me to change my mind.

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Posted                       

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Originally posted by Pomona:

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Originally posted by Boogie:

quote:

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Originally posted by Pomona:
I cannot understand what is disgusting about an adult acting of their own free will in offering surrogacy for cash - it is their body after all.

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There is very little free will involved when the poorest in society feel they need to do this for cash.

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But I'm not the poorest in society needing to do this for cash, so what's it got to do with my situation?

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Originally posted by Fineline:
Regarding the fact that poor people are so in need of money they are hiring out their bodies for rich people to use, doing something they wouldn't ordinarily want to do - how different is this from all kinds of ordinary, low wage work?

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Posted                       

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Originally posted by Beeswax Altar:
Holding that Mary was only a surrogate would be heretical because it fails to affirm the humanity of Christ which was the issue at Chalcedon with Eutyches overreaction to Nestorianism. Jesus was as much the son of Mary as the son of God.

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Originally posted by Laurelin:



A woman WILL bond with her unborn child - it's a force of nature. This is a child we're talking about, not property. As an adoptee, I know that this ‘primal wound’ stuff is for real - why else do people go in search of their biological origins?

Decades ago, birth mothers who gave up their babies for adoption had very little legal rights, were allowed no agency and had very little moral or practical support. In recent years that injustice was rectified: birth parents who had given up their children for adoption (often through societal coercion, to be blunt) were finally granted the right to gain access to their childrens’ birth records. (Adoptees were granted this same right 40 years ago.) And yet now this recent ruling in UK law exhibited a 'you have no rights whatsoever' stance towards a surrogate mother.

Trust me on this one: donor children, and children born of surrogacy, will start asking the exact same questions we adoptees do. Will the law be on their side, as it is for adoptees?

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Originally posted by Pomona:
But the surrogate is not the mother, it is not their child. So of course they have no rights, and if I were a surrogate I would not expect such rights.

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Again, please tell me why an adult doing it for altruistic reasons and not money shouldn't be allowed to volunteer as a surrogate, if they're aware of the risks? It's their body.

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Originally posted by Twilight:
I think the idea of bonding with the baby while it's in the womb has been very much exaggerated by the anti-abortion movement. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that it's not a certain thing in every case.

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What I understand much better today is the feeling of rejection that so many adopted people carry all their lives. At the time of my friend's decision the conventional wisdom was that it would be very selfish to keep the child. At the time mother and child would have been socially ostracized and we envisioned a nice, "Father Knows Best," life for the baby instead. So when I hear adoptees wondering what was wrong with them that their mothers could give them up, I want to remind them that all her friends and family were telling her that if she truly cared about her baby she would, "Give it to a good home."

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I was happily adopted and never wondered what was 'wrong' with me. I worked out fairly early on that my birth mother had been unmarried and pregnant in a very judgmental time and I felt compassion for her. I never once blamed her for giving me up: I understood perfectly why she had, and when I finally met her, there was nothing she needed in my eyes to justify herself for. It was a successful reunion.

But on a psychic (and I would say spiritual) level, the breaking of that primal bond leaves a scar. Separation anxiety and fear of abandonment are big issues for adoptees, as you have rightly discerned.

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My fear is that the child of a surrogate would feel the same rejection.

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I'm fine with people who are against surrogacy; you don't have to do it.

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Posted                      

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I'm fine with people who are against surrogacy; you don't have to do it.

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Posted                       

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

quote:

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I'm fine with people who are against surrogacy; you don't have to do it.

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Well, that is cute. But are you saying you are fine with the current situation in India? Were women are indentured into surrogacy by their husbands? Where they are treated a mobile wombs more than they are people.

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Posted                       

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Originally posted by Twilight:

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I'm fine with people who are against surrogacy; you don't have to do it.

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But you see, this is a discussion thread where we each get to voice our opinion about the ethics of surrogacy. It's not a thread to see if Quetzacoatl is fine with us or not.

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Posted                      

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
I'm fine with people who are against surrogacy; you don't have to do it.

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Well, that is cute. But are you saying you are fine with the current situation in India? Were women are indentured into surrogacy by their husbands? Where they are treated a mobile wombs more than they are people.

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Well, my last post but one was talking about poor women being exploited, and the last one, the control of women's bodies by men, so what do you think?

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Posted                      

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Originally posted by Laurelin:

quote:

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Originally posted by Pomona:
But t
[QUOTE]Again, please tell me why an adult doing it for altruistic reasons and not money shouldn't be allowed to volunteer as a surrogate, if they're aware of the risks? It's their body.

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I haven't said that altruistic surrogacy shouldn’t be ALLOWED. (I think everyone in this thread is agreed that commercial surrogacy is repugnant.) I’m just pointing out that the whole thing can become a legal and moral quagmire, hence the need for altruistic surrogacy to be strictly regulated, for the protection and good mental health of all parties.

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Posted                       

quote:

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Originally posted by Pomona:
I do not want children, however I would like to have surrogate children for others. Since my sister does not want children either, it would be for people outside my family. I don't understand why it would be wrong for me to offer that?

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Posted                          

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Originally posted by lilBuddha:
Well, to be completely honest, my thought is why should someone have children simply because they want them?
Now understand, I am not saying it is anyone else' right to tell another that they cannot have children.
But why do you have to?

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Posted                      

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Originally posted by Lamb Chopped:
Well, if we hew to nothing but logic here, nobody HAS to. Neither do people HAVE to use wheelchairs, walkers, or canes--wear hearing aids--or do any of the myriad things that enable the disabled to have something akin to the life that most people take for granted.

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Originally posted by quetzalcoatl:
It seems odd to ask why humans want that,

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Posted                          

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(I think everyone in this thread is agreed that commercial surrogacy is repugnant.)

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Posted                      

• He is the dearest person in the world to me, bar none. Not hyperbole, merely fact. There is no one I would do more for. I am constantly glad he exists and would have nothing change this.
• His conception was a mistake. My sister became pregnant for the wrong reasons and if she had been thinking clearly, he would not exist.