Wombs for Rent

In "Outsourced Wombs" an essay in the NYT, Judith Warner sees clearly the inhumanity of the surrogacy business but can't bring herself to condemn it completely because of the "good" it does by providing the poor with much needed cash and the infertile with babies.  What do you think of her analysis?

HT:  Maria Ruiz Scaperlanda

Here is an excerpt:

“... [W]hat’s going on in India – where surrogacy is estimated now to be a $445-million-a-year business — feels like a step toward the kind of insane dehumanization that filled the dystopic fantasies of Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” and Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale.” (One “medical tourism” website, PlanetHospital.com, refers to the Indian surrogate mother as a mere “host.”) Images of pregnant women lying in rows, or sitting lined up, belly after belly, for medical exams look like industrial outsourcing pushed to a nightmarish extreme.

I say “feels like” and “look like” because I can’t quite bring myself to the point of saying “is.” And in this, I think, I am right in the mainstream of American thought on the topic of surrogate motherhood.

Unlike in France, where commercial surrogacy is banned, or in Italy, where almost every form of assisted reproduction is now illegal, laws in the United States are highly ambivalent on this most drastic use of reproductive technology. Commercial surrogacy is legal in some states, illegal in others and regulated differently everywhere, and little that’s clear and conclusive about where a birth mother’s rights to a baby end and where the fee-paying mother’s rights begin.

Perhaps that’s all as it should be – murky, ambiguous and confused. The confusion, at least, acknowledges that there is more to the process of carrying a baby and giving birth to it than being an incubator on legs. It acknowledges that there are physiological and psychological factors that bind a mother and baby together at birth and a violence — perhaps temporary, perhaps not — that is done to each of them if you sever that unique bond.

“The human body is not lent out, is not rented out, is not sold,”

France’s highest court ruled back in 1991, when it outlawed surrogate motherhood. In the United States, lip service has long been paid to the notion that women can’t be instrumentalized as baby-making machines. …

But our rules of decency seem to differ when the women in question are living in abject poverty, half a world away. Then, selling one’s body for money is not degrading but empowering. …

Which brings us back to the fertile question of the “feels like” rather than the “is.” In an awful world, where many women are in awful circumstances, how do you single out for condemnation an awful-seeming transaction that yields so much life betterment? …

Maybe when greater steps are taken toward improving international adoption procedures, maybe when more substantive steps are taken to improve the health, status and education of women world-wide, it’ll be easier to say with a clear conscience that what feels like callous exploitation really is just that.”