From Canada:
…The National Post reports surrogate mothers in Ontario are being billed for hospital services after giving birth even though they have provincial medicare coverage.
The reason: The babies were being taken out of the country.
From Washington State and Tennessee:
…when Byers was contacted to help a couple in China start a family following several miscarriages, she agreed.
“It was just pitched that they wanted a genetic child of their own. They tried and they had miscarriages,” Byers explained. She learned that many Chinese couples turn to American surrogates to carry a baby on their behalf.
It is expensive for the Chinese parents. The babies born here that return to China are called “million dollar babies” because the surrogate process, through delivery, really does cost the equivalent of one million U.S. dollars.Byers was flown to Chicago and the U.S. headquarters of Yulane, the international surrogacy agency managing the match. In Chicago she met the intended parents.It was during a subsequent visit to Chicago when Byers was inseminated with the embryo that she got worried.
She was supposed to be taken to cash an expense check, but said the man who picked her up was clearly drunk and had been out partying with a friend. The bank then wouldn’t cash her check from Yulane because the signature was invalid. She said the situation wasn’t resolved until a day later when the company sent her a money order. “So right then I’m like ‘well, now I’m pregnant so what can I do now? I’m like stuck in this situation,’” Byers said. “I knew right then this was going to be a crazy nine months.”Five months into the pregnancy a test showed the baby boy had a 90 percent curvature of the spine and his organs were growing outside his body. As instructed by the intended parents, Byers decided to not carry the baby to full term. “There were a lot of tears, a lot of tears,” she said. “You don’t get into it wanting to go through the death of a baby. You want to create a family.”
It was around that time that Byers discovered something disturbing in an email forwarded to her by the surrogacy agency. Tucked into the messages was a reference to someone named Shannon and Chinese characters. Using Google Translate, Byers learned Yulane was reassuring the intended mother in China.
“Shannon has an appointment for genetic testing during pregnancy and to know the problem as soon as possible, identify problems,” the email said. “I was like, who’s Shannon?” Byers remembered. Further detective work revealed that Shannon had been simultaneously contracted as a surrogate for the intended parents in China. Shannon was pregnant with twins in Tennessee.
From California:
…A former Modesto woman who ran a surrogate parenting agency pleaded guilty Tuesday to four felony counts of wire fraud in a $2-million scheme carried out through her agency and another business she owned, federal authorities said.
Tonya Collins, 37, carried out a scheme to defraud prospective parents, surrogates and financial institutions while she owned Surrogenesis and the Michael Charles Financial Holding Group, according to the US. attorney’s office in Fresno.
Categories: Motherhood, Reproductive Technologies, The Future of Parenthood
So wrong on so many levels, where could you even begin?
And it seems petty to quibble about the money when the whole process is such an affront to the human dignity of both mother and child, but seriously – surrogates were getting their hospital expenses paid by the government? I thought socialized healthcare was meant to guard the health and well-being of the citizens, not provide them with a nice marketable asset they can use to go into business with no overhead.
Anna, here in the US many surrogates are military wives so their health care is paid for by taxpayers too.
Yeah surrogates are on welfare typically but say that they are not. Either that or they have their own health insurance through their work and benefits through their work. What is disturbing about it going through work or going through the public is that insurance companies don’t typically bank on people making a profit from the ailments that they are having treated. Insurance is one of those things you pay into for your use in the event you need it because you got sick or a hurricane knocked your house down. Getting paid to be pregnant and having your Kaiser insurance foot the bill, is kind of like the same as when my husband got hit by a car and spent three months in the hospital – when we got his little settlement Kaiser wanted part of it because they were out a lot of money and they took some of his money. I am surprised that health plans are not taking some of the surrogates money because he was being reimbursed for whatever pain and suffering lost wages etc and so are surrogates the ones who are not on government aid.
It’s pretty much right next door to burning your house down to get the insurance there is an element of fraud to it. Like in egg donation, the patient is really the donor at least at first but the medication is issued in the recipient’s name because its her insurance paying for it if they don’t have insurance and if they do have insurance they are profiting off of being “sick” and needing medicine. How does that work?
None of this should be allowed because surrogacy places children as the objects of private contracts for custody of a child. The contract has terms that require performance by all parties after the birth of a child and those terms are illegal if you get right down to it.
Next time the IAV wants to dump a bunch of resources into a study how about hiring a team of legal experts to see if you can make an actual difference by changing some of these laws. Psychological studies are going to change absolute zero. If the object of a contract is custody and control of a child when born and includes services to be preformed contingent upon the birth of a child that include things like not taking care of the resulting child, not challenging false claims of maternity or paternity with dna evidence or requires terms like giving a child up for adoption or step parent adoption if and when a child is born…..it should be unenforceable by law in the event that a child is born.
Wow, definitely, Canadian taxpayers will not be subsidizing this much longer. And so should the American taxpayers. Of course we should prohibit the practice all together, but certainly not let people get away with bilking the taxpayers for any intentional unmarried pregnancy costs. Of course we’d have to provide the needed medical care once a pregnancy happens, but we should take the baby away from all the parties, make her give birth in prison, if we catch wind of the intended transaction and fine everyone we can fine to recoup the costs.
And maybe now we will stop making all babies born here American citizens. The USA should change to the system used around the rest of the world that babies take on the citizenship of their father (or mother when that’s unknown). Children should have the same citizenship as their parents, it is a fundamental right not to snatch them from their country just because the parents wanted them to be American citizens. That should be true even if the parents have legally immigrated permanently. They should have to become naturalized American citizens for their kids to become citizens.
LOL!
I asked Kris Feron the donor from England exactly why she called it reimbursement for her expenses. She said she had to take time off work to go to the clinic etc and even used up her holiday. I said so your holiday was time you were already off work was that paid time off work? So you were not out any wages you did make money doing this you were not reimbursed for your lost wages. She said no it was unpaid holiday and I said but unpaid holiday is then days your work would have been closed and you would not be working anyway so you were not reimbursed for any lost wages you were paid for days you would not have been working anyway so you made money for doing this you were not reimbursed. This line of discussion I think she found frustrating as she is actually quite a nice woman I was just pushing my luck a little and pushing her to cop to reality a smidge. I felt like going do you have to turn in your train tickets and mileage receipts? If you did have to do that would it have been more? If its just a reimbursement how come they want you to file it with the IRS as income? Does a fertility clinic account for the money it spends reimbursing people for eggs and sperm, is that like handled tax wise as a business expence or are they considered a charity that received a donation and why are they spending money on something that they can’t sell or make a profit on?
I’m not joking Manny. I’m serious. I want them to do that. Why can’t they do that? What good are psychological studies? Study the laws that cause the problems they want to fix and go fix them. Why waste time and resources when they could be changing the world? They could help someone do something here like Olivia Pratten is doing in Canada. Their documentation swayed the judge in Canada that could work for an american who is donor offspring or an adoptee or someone who is the child of a woman who committed paternity fraud heck the list of people with f’d situations they could help is long and the kinds of legal prescient they could set would mean the world to lots of adopted people and people that got cut off from their rights and their families. I don’t think its funny at all Manny and I’m hurt that you would laugh at me because your kind of my blogosphere buddy Mr cranky. I can’t change the world but people with money can and I can stuff envelopes for them or make flyers something.
I just need to find a leader who knows how to take direction.
Sorry Marilynn and IAV, that was a little swipe at all the academic/thinktank organizations in general, not just IAV, that study and comment on family law and bioethics, they all seem to think they have some kind of star trek ethical directive never to actually get involved in changing any laws. They study and comment, and the public is supposed to feel something is being done about these outrages, but meanwhile the legislators are listening to the industry lawyers who apparently have some dirt on them or something.
Yeah, I agree it would be great and the IAV should hire lawyers and lobbyists and actually go about trying to change the laws. But so far they can’t even say what they think the laws should be, even that is stepping too far out on a limb for them.
The taxpayers should not be paying for this.
We live in such a culture of entitlement that everyone expects the government to pay for everything. A good example is now the Canadian healthcare system pays for gender re-assignment.
http://www.news1130.com/2012/10/06/msp-now-covers-surgery-for-transgendered-men/
Manny cut it out. There are people here who are trying to have an intelligent discussion, not rewrite the new and improved Orwell’s 1984.
My take is that a pregnant woman is a pregnant woman is a pregnant woman. Pregnancy is a normal medical condition that is supposed to be covered by insurances period. It makes no difference how the person got pregnant.
The IVF process however should not be covered.
Even systems that cover IVF, is my opinion they should do so only for women being implanted with their own embryos.
I find the middle example interesting. The way I understand it seems that the horrifying news is that the Chinese couple had simultaneously hired another surrogate. (or did I get it wrong?).
Why is hiring two surrogates somehow a betrayal? I don’t see it at all.
@ki sarita – I found it very interesting that the surrogate felt betrayed because the couple was using two surrogates at the same time. I would never have thought of that.
It shows how it can be very emotional to carry a baby, even if it’s not your biological child. The woman in the story was very upset that the child had died and she felt the couple who had arranged the pregnancy were not that upset.
I think she may also have had some altruistic motives for going through the pregnancy and then the horror of a defect and an abortion. So it might feel like a betrayal to find out that she was just one of two people they had on hand to make babies for them. In Canada you can’t pay the surrogate, so someone who agrees to it is trying to help someone.
So as I think about it, it makes some sense to me. If you agree to go through nine months of hard work for someone in order to help them have their dream baby and then find out that they are getting someone else to do the same thing, you might feel angry. She really didn’t have to do what she did for them and she wouldn’t have gotten anything out of it.
It does highlight, though, that surrogacy is not just a job.
I think an ethical agency would have to use full disclosure with surrogates so that they don’t feel used.
@ki sarita –
“Pregnancy is a normal medical condition that is supposed to be covered by insurances period. It makes no difference how the person got pregnant.”
I would have to disagree here. In the US (although not in Canada where this happened), the surrogate mother can make money. That may be why she is doing it. I doesn’t make sense for taxpayers or insurance companies to pay for her care.
Even without the surrogate mother making money, I don’t think it’s reasonable for someone to come from another country and have a baby made and then expect your country to pay for it. They should be responsible for all medical costs.
Ki sarita, you just proved my point. I don’t think an intelligent discussion is enough, studies aren’t enough, books aren’t enough, because we need to actually do something about this, we need to at least say what the laws should be and then work to change them. I don’t know what you mean by 1984, do you think it’s oppressive to have laws, or to punish people for breaking laws and seriously violating human rights and dignity? Was it the “make her give birth in prison and take her baby away?” I think that is much more humane than giving the baby over to the criminals who conspired to purchase the baby, who might not even be related (and even if they are, so what, that doesn’t give a right to legal parenthood.)
While I have you on the line, isn’t it true that you have proposed some kind of Civil Union compromise based on banning 3PR and surrogacy? Could you provide some details on what you have in mind, or is that not intelligent?’
Agreed that all pregnancy should be covered, insurance or no insurance. Same for all basic health care. Agreed that IVF should not be considered basic health care and should not be covered. It should only be legal for married homologous IVF, 3PR should be illegal.
Is that the extent of your Civil Union compromise, just to not cover 3PR with health insurance, but to leave it legal? I agree that SSM and the claim to have a right to procreate with someone of the same sex is essentially a demand for IVF and 3PR to be covered, not just legal, so it is on the right track to deny that there is a right to it.
Oh, forgot to point out, that though pregnancy is of course cared for, that doesn’t mean the bill has to be paid for by tax payers or insurance companies, the bill (plus punitive fines) should be paid for by the people who intentionally conceived with third-party gametes. (3PR is the same thing as intentional unmarried conception.)
@ Manny says “doesn’t mean the bill has to be paid for by tax payers…”
Exactly. Sadly, in Quebec, it’s already happening. Other provinces are being pressured to do the same due to numerous excuses (moves patients out of the system faster which saves taxpayers money, infertility being deemed as a medical condition, etc.)
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/story/2010/07/13/quebec-ivf-treatment.html
I doesn’t make sense for taxpayers or insurance companies to pay for her care.
Wait, where did insurance companies come into this? I wasn’t aware that the proper role of insurance companies was only to provide health coverage if you incurred health costs on a charitable basis.
The proper role of insurance companies is to mitigate risks and spread the costs of unpredictable health care needs, so that we all pay a little bit but are covered for a lot more in case we get sick. It’s not for forseeable, intentional, unnecessary and avoidable expenses.
@zztstenglish There are currently “only” 15 states that also mandate IVF coverage. Massachusetts also covers it in its MassHealth plan for unemployed people. It is not currently mandated by the ACA (“Obamacare”), so in the other 35 states coverage is optional (but determined by the employer, so many people are required to subsidize it in those states too). Quebec seems to have very comprehensive coverage, including PGD, but Massachusetts is close behind, with no limits on the number of cycles a person can try.
I read somewhere once, that 1% of the total spending on health care is for IVF, which is quite a bit, considering it is unnecessary and unethical and elective and not really a cure for the health problem but just a way to get around it.
@Manny – Interesting. Thanks for the info.
And I totally agree with you when you wrote “[I]t is unnecessary and unethical and elective and not really a cure for the health problem but just a way to get around it.”