{"id":305377,"date":"2024-01-20T11:35:29","date_gmt":"2024-01-20T17:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liveaction.org\/news\/?p=305377"},"modified":"2024-01-19T13:26:40","modified_gmt":"2024-01-19T19:26:40","slug":"surrogacy-riskier-women-babies-most-realize","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/surrogacy-riskier-women-babies-most-realize\/","title":{"rendered":"Surrogacy is riskier for both women and babies than most people realize"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In an essay for The Dispatch<\/a>, Elizabeth Nolan Brown makes the bold and erroneous argument that surrogacy is good for women \u2014 including the surrogates. She also claims that “both devout feminists and devout Christians” should embrace it. But surrogacy is dehumanizing for both the surrogates and the children \u2014 and as Pope Francis recently said<\/a>, is the result of “false compassion” and should be ended.<\/p>\n

Surrogacy involves the exchange of money for the use of a woman’s body<\/strong><\/p>\n

Surrogacy involves the rental of a woman’s body \u2014 typically an underprivileged woman \u2014 for the benefit of someone else. Brown calls surrogacy “a sisterhood of women helping other women fulfill their dreams of motherhood.” But it isn’t that simple, and it isn’t that pretty.<\/p>\n

Surrogates are often treated as disposable objects, personal property, or employees \u2014 not as “sisters” or family. Lance Bass and Michael Turchin provide just one example of this. They turned to surrogacy to obtain a child but have treated the women involved \u2014 egg donors and surrogates \u2014 as either practically<\/a> invisible or, said Live Action News’ Cassy Fiano-Chesser, as “though they were farm animals who were not producing enough eggs to meet [the] demand.”<\/p>\n

\u201cWe got all the way down the path of about to retrieve their eggs,\u201d Turchin said, describing the process of IVF and surrogacy. \u201cSome just wouldn\u2019t produce enough eggs, some weren\u2019t good genetic matches. If you\u2019re going to be a match, you don\u2019t want to even risk it.\u201d<\/p>\n

According to Fortune<\/a>, “Today, the cost to the prospective parents can reach over $300,000 \u2013 and surrogates themselves may be paid anywhere from about $35,000 to $100,000<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>for a pregnancy.”<\/p>\n

Fiano-Chesser reported on surrogacy as a \u201cHandmaid\u2019s Tale<\/a>\u201d epidemic, in which poor women are attempting to better their situations through an act they see as generous and altruistic. However, as Fiano-Chesser explained,”[T]heir wealthy clients all too often tend to treat their bodies as property, buying insurance<\/a>\u00a0in case the woman\u2019s body doesn\u2019t perform on demand as expected, or forcing a surrogate into abortion if the preborn child she\u2019s carrying has a\u00a0disability<\/a>, if she has too many\u00a0multiples<\/a>, or even if the baby is the ‘wrong’ gender<\/a>.”<\/p>\n