Is surrogacy still cool if it’s for bucks?
India is continuing their attempt to conquer the world through outsourcing. This time? Outsource their wombs.
So Jess, you say fake babies are creepy, how about this?
Every night in this quiet western Indian city, 15 pregnant women prepare for sleep in the spacious house they share, ascending the stairs in a procession of ballooned bellies, to bedrooms that become a landscape of soft hills.
A team of maids, cooks and doctors looks after the women, whose pregnancies would be unusual anywhere else but are common here. The young mothers of Anand, a place famous for its milk, are pregnant with the children of infertile couples from around the world.
I do have to question whether their circumstances are quite so rosy. But, at least they did give some consideration to the surrogate’s situation. Still, creeps me out.
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This reminds me of last week’s New Yorker article about guinea pigging. Just because you can find someone willing to do this stuff for money doesn’t mean it’s ok.
Although, now that I’m re-reading David’s headline: isn’t pretty much all surrogacy for bucks?
I think some people opt to become surrogates for friends or relatives without pay, but I have no idea how often it happens.
There’s something sort of reminiscent of the organ trade in this kind of large-scale baby brokering. I have the same objections to this that I do to buying and selling organs. It is inevitably an inequal exchange and someone’s being grossly exploited.
We had a class discussion about the organ trade and one of my classmates had no objections to it, so long as it was a consensual transaction… this is the same girl who voiced vitriolic objections to people wearing *fake* fur (because it looks like real fur and encourages people to buy the real stuff). Huh?!
Interesting reading these responses. Staci was a gestational surrogate years ago, just before we got together. She didn’t do it for pay. (Although she got compensated, it wasn’t a career move and she still had to work to keep the bills paid.) She basically did it because she had a heart for couples who couldn’t have children on their own. Staci has actually built a lasting friendship with that family, and the child still refers to her as “Aunt Staci”.