The “Assisted Reproduction and Surrogacy Parentage Act, ” which decriminalizes surrogate mother in the state of Michigan, is planned to take effect in March of this year. Michigan is the last state to decriminalize paid surrogacy, and some may say it ’s about time they “catch up ” to the rest of the country.
One surrogacy company lately posted that “choosing to hold a baby for another home is one of the most meaningful gifts of love and compassion. ” On the surface, infertility may seem this method, as what could possibly be wrong with helping people have children? It’s just when we swim beyond the emotion-motivated area that we can see ivf for what it really is: the abuse of women and the smuggling of children.
Through coaching and advertising, surrogacy agencies appeal to mothers ’ self-sacrificial nature by feeding on their emotional motivation to heed the call to use their generosity to “give back ” their gift of fertility to others. Surrogate mothers are often convinced that they’re “just babysitters, ” carrying “belly buddies, ” and that they’re simply “giving the child back ” to his or her parents. The kids they carried in their vaginas, they have been convinced, aren’t theirs in any significant way.
Anthropologist Kalindi Vora writes that “through counselling and conversation, health personnel encourage surrogates to see themselves as gestation-providers whose only connection to the infant is the hiring of a pregnancy imagined as an empty and often inefficient area. ” Feeling healthy attachment towards the kid you’re transporting does nothing to gain the 14-billion-dollar baby-commodifying industry.
Appealing to the Archetypal Mom
Polygamy companies know that it ’s the attractiveness to accomplishment and “greater purpose ” that drives people to become caregivers. Kajsa Ekis Ekman stated that “ … when pregnancy is made into work, it is too painful to see it as a job. It must have a protective, concealing facade … even if the structure of the infertility story is all about stating that the people ‘are not mother ’ to the kids they bear, these girls cultivate the idea that they become even more motherly by giving up their kids. ”
The quintessential family is one who generously offers herself as a gift to the world, sacrifices herself to gratify others, and identifies problems with goodness in the hope that something good may come from her sacrifice. These women believe that the pain and sacrifice they endure is the whole point of surrogacy.
Surrogacy also interjects a third person into the marriage union to assist in the very intimate aspect of child-bearing that is rightly reserved for husband and wife. The surrogate’s own marriage and family is also distorted, as she’s carrying the product of the non-sexual love of another marital union. This disfigurement is often recognized, and this is why surrogacy agencies try to combat this mindset by posting advertisements showing just how wonderful the families of these surrogates think the act is.
Primal Wound and Microchimerism
While surrogacy agencies emphasize that surrogate mother and child aren’t connected and that carriers are only “babysitters, ” babies carried by gestational surrogates don’t know that they aren’t genetically related to the carrier. Babies are biologically wired to recognize their mother’s scent at birth, her touch, and her voice. Severing the bond between mother and child at birth can lead to lifelong separation trauma, or what is referred to in the adoption world as the “primal wound. ”
Adoptee and researcher Dr. Catherine Lynch further states, “ … removal from the mother at birth has lifelong physiological, psychological and emotional impacts … the loss of the mother’s body at birth is experienced as a trauma which is felt at first as an inexpressible loss … and creates a lacuna of despair that never leaves the person despite a lifetime of adaptation and socialisation, and despite that fact that … the trauma is not consciously ‘remembered. ’ ”
Further, while surrogates are fed the idea that the children they carry “belong to someone else, ” through the process of microchimerism, these women are forever connected to the children they carry. Microchimerism occurs when fetal cells cross the placenta and enter the mother’s body, where they become part of her tissues. Given this fantastic knowledge, we can no longer say that gestational surrogates have no connection to the children. These children belong biologically to the women carrying them just as much as they do their genetic parents. We’re not designed, from our very cellular level, to be severed from our mothers, and vice versa.
Financial Incentives
Appealing to emotions may not be enough motivation for every woman interested in becoming a surrogate, so this is where financial incentives come in. Conceiveabilities boasts being the highest paying surrogacy agency at paying up to$ 72,000, while Pinnacle Surrogacy claims earnings up to$ 65,000, and Carrying Hope starts at$ 45,000.
While surrogate agencies claim that surrogates “don’t do it for the money, ” the offering of payment only shines light on the transactional process of an already commercializing industry, as, of course, mothers aren’t paid to carry their own children. Surrogacy also routinely targets poor and low-income women, and women certainly are enticed by money on advertisements even if they claim it is n’t their sole motivation.
There are no “substitute” mothers when it comes to carrying and giving birth to children because pregnancy is the first step of motherhood. These women are, in reality, biological mothers to these children. No matter how much the fertility industry tries to distort this reality to appease adults who feel that children are objects that they’re owed, as opposed to gifts, surrogacy is the commissioning and human trafficking of children and must be eliminated to protect human rights.
Katie Breckenridge works for the children’s rights organization Them Before Us and is the author of the book Silent Sorrows: Let’s talk about abortion, reproductive technologies, and adoption.
