From the Calcutta Telegraph:
…Surrogacy has become a big business in Hyderabad []India] and its neighbourhood, causing fertility centres to mushroom over the past five years. Many women from Andhra Pradesh’s drought-hit districts choose to become surrogate mothers to earn a few extra bucks for their impoverished families.
“We get reports of at least 50 to 100 such births in a month,” the state health secretary said. Only about five per cent of the parents are foreigners.
“Most of the clients are women from well-to-do Indian families who want to avoid childbirth so that their lifestyle, or body shape, is not affected,” said Srinivas Prasad, a doctor at one of the city’s top 15 fertility centres.
Categories: Motherhood, Reproductive Technologies, The Future of Parenthood
I don’t think I saw FS report on the new law in India on surrogacy.
They just passed a law, it was last week or early this week that bans surrogacy services for same gender couples.
This is simply one more brick in the wall of discrimination towards sexual minorities.
Did you read the book? The surrogates were slaves who lived in the family home and had no rights. Indian women have rights you just don’t agree with how they exercise them. The fact you don’t credit them with agency doesn’t mean they don’t have any.
(Beginning with a staged terrorist attack (blamed on Islamic extremist terrorists) that kills the President and most of Congress, a movement calling itself the “Sons of Jacob” launches a revolution and suspends the United States Constitution under the pretext of restoring order.
They were quickly able to take away all of the women rights, largely attributed to the financial records being stored electronically and labelled by gender. The new theocratic military dictatorship, styled “The Republic of Gilead”, moved quickly to consolidate its power and reorganize society along a new militarized, hierarchical, compulsorily Christian regime of Old Testament-inspired social and religious ultra-conservatism among its newly created social classes. In this society, almost all women are forbidden to read.)
This kind of hyperbole does not help your cause. It just makes you seem unhinged.
@Mont D Law – I have read the book. It is true it is much worse than the current reality.
Although, I think it would be fair to say that the women in the Handmaiden’s Tale had some agency. They could have refused to cooperated and been sent to the bad lands. There is a parallel there – women in poor countries in our world may be facing a choice between extreme poverty and doing what people from a rich country want them to do.
So not as bad, but a bit of a parallel.
On the other hand, there is a chilling scene in the book and movie that resonates with me. One of the handmaidens goes through a grueling labor. When the baby is born, it is swept up and handed to its new “mother” who shows it off to everyone as her own.
Hi Mont–I did read the book years ago, and also today I read the same Wikipedia page you apparently copied and pasted from without quotation marks.
Another recent article on the ethics of surrogacy:
“Agency’s plea for egg donors and surrogate mothers sparks outrage”
http://www.nbc33tv.com/news/national-news/agencys-plea-for-egg-donors-and-surrogate-mothers-sparks-outrage
Does Mont D. Laws comment(s) pass the civil policy?
Quotes from the article:
First gut reaction, how on earth could you walk away and leave this child behind, even if frustrated? But more relevant to the law, what if she was charged with abandonment? Who would be next in line to a “right” to that child?
Hi Karen,
No, it doesn’t, and when I’m back home at a real computer I’ll delete it.
Mont D, you’ve got a good heart and I know you care. Please behave.
SMS, you’re right about the India law and we haven’t written on it. I don’t think India should be doing this for anybody, and I wish they hadn’t singled out gay couples. On the other hand, I’m glad their lawmakers are paying attention. So/but somebody at FS should start a thread on this.
Hi Karen,
I know. I’m so dumbfounded by the idea that she left the child behind that I don’t know what to do/say. I am telling myself it can’t possibly be true and that I should ask questions. But…
From the article, it looks like that really was what she did.
Clearly, she shouldn’t be a mother. The bureaucrats pissed me off, who care if the baby dies?
I think that it makes a kind of sense, though. She didn’t go through any of the bonding parents go through during pregnancy. She hadn’t had the baby long enough to develop an attachment to it as ordinary adoptive parents do.
I suspect that the reason the Indian government didn’t prosecute her was that they needed someone to take the baby now that it has been created.
Another troubling thing here – even when other countries don’t want to issue passports to children conceived this way, the Indian government has decided to allow the babies to leave without passports. I can’t help wondering if someone was bribed.
I agree with you that pregnancy is of great psychological importance regarding perceiving oneself as the baby’s mom.
This woman clearly perceived herself on an emotional level as nothing but a baby buyer.
It is also true that while most surrogacy arrangements work out fine, when they don’t, the commissioning parents are more likely to back out than the surrogate.
I have not seen whether there is any difference between commissioning parents who are genetically related and who are not. It would be interesting to know.
“I have not seen whether there is any difference between commissioning parents who are genetically related and who are not. It would be interesting to know.”
I agree. I would think it would make a difference, but people desert their biological offspring. I suspect that being around the child is part of the bonding.