So far, I'm still mostly unshocked. Call me an irritating devil's advocate, but my position has always been and will remain that if regulations, even just trace amounts, are nowhere to be found and there's money to be made, money will be made. Ethics and morals be damned. The most surprising thing of all to me in the whole thing is that an attorney with such a prominent reputation would risk her career and color the rest of life for herself and her family... for what? But shocked that "such a thing" has occurred? No way.
Here's my dire prediction in black-and-white: Virtually any horrendous activity that you can imagine might happen within the reproductive medicine arena has happened (with or without everyone's knowledge) or will eventually, at least once. Life is long, folks.
You can call me cynical. I'm used to it.
But there's a point that I think is missing in some of the telling of this most recent Repro Med Gone Awry story.
I'm reading the LA Times' account that unfolds details of the surrogates' points of view in the baby-ring scam headed by Theresa Erickson.
[The prospective surrogate] found a couple nearby, but two attempts to get pregnant failed. That made her even more determined as she searched surrogacy want ads.
"I was responding to anything and everything," she said. "That's how desperate I was."
First, here's my bias, for those who don't already know: I'm on the kids' side. That's not to imply that every case of baby-making can be or even should be viewed as though it's a triangular and adversarial arrangement. But my professional experience with families tells me it's likely some percentage of family-building activities entailing third-party A.R.T. involves folks whose motivations are skewed toward uber-self-centeredness under the guise of self-sacrifice.
"Well, sure," I can hear most readers thinking, "isn't that the point of living -- to meet my own needs, go after what I desire and, well, win?"
I guess. Bottom line, sure. Survival of the fittest and all that. But if there's any place in the repro med arena where The Point really should be centered around the needs of that possible kid at the end of it all, it's third-party ART.
There was a "type" of foster parent that used to give me goosebumps: The Collectors, we called them. They never seemed to "have enough" children in their home, and often, hackles would raise when they wanted more than their sponsoring agency would allow. The line we social workers had to tread was thin and tenuous with these foster parents, because the need for more housing for more abandoned, neglected, and abused kids was always growing, never shrinking. Weighing the choice of which kid to place in which home was always huge, and The Collectors, with their -- yes, I'll say it -- pathological level of need to nurture children added yet another burden to our decisions.
I'll say it again. Pathological level of need to nurture children. And that's a clinically polite way of putting it. These weren't people who were scamming the system and trying to make "a quick buck" through foster care. Most, in fact, were wealthy enough to support as many kids as they could cram into their six-bedroom mansionettes. Their incentive was deep inside their psyches. And they were a good representation of the shadowy difference between love and need, although they were unclear themselves on that nuance.
When I read that this particular surrogate felt "desperate" to carry another person's baby, the word pinged around my brain. I've heard it before, the sense of desperation that (mostly) women feel about getting pregnant. But here we're talking about a woman who has all the children she wants, not a woman who desperately wants to finally be a mother.
What IS that desperation? Third-party advocates will tell you it's the very drive that makes a great surrogate. They "love being pregnant." So maybe it's just this woman's word choice in the article that's sticking in my throat. But I don't think so. As I've ranted about plenty in the past, word choice is a big deal, a window into our minds, often revealing what we "really" think even if we're saying what others find soothing to hear.
So here's another bold opinion in writing: Women who feel "desperate" to be a surrogate should be more carefully screened. Not just to avoid the potential "oops she changed her mind" scenario, but because it's the ethical thing to do. Third-party reproductive professionals are putting their own humanity on the scale, in addition to their reputation, if they do anything other than help prospective baby-carriers assess their own psychological base regarding parenting, tease out motivations that may belie deeper issues impacting choices and behavior, and refer some on to appropriate sources of help.
Admittedly, I don't wallow in the world of baby-making. I get in there, do my job, and get out to live My Life (which is currently awesome, by the way.) So perhaps I'm too out of touch to know if prospective surrogates are screened and then referred on to help if needed. Maybe this point is, in fact, being taking into consideration and to heart by the people in the business. I hope so. But I bet not so much.
