Is Surrogate Motherhood Moral?

In October 1987, Pat Anthony gave birth to triplets. The infants, however, were not her children but actually her grandchildren. Nine months before, Pat Anthony agreed to serve as a surrogate mother for her own daughter's biological infants. Anthony was implanted with four embryos resulting from ova produced by her daughter and fertilized in vitro with her son-in-law's sperm. The reaction of doctors to this story ranged from astonishment to repugnance.

Surrogate motherhood and related birth technologies have continued to pose legal and ethical dilemmas. In 1989, a Progressive headline read: "Man Files Test Tube Embryo Suit"--a Tennessean divorcing his wife went to court to stop her from becoming pregnant with fertilized eggs they as a couple had put in frozen storage.

Another situation arose ten years later in Staten Island, New York. A couple announced that it would give one of its infant twin boys to a New Jersey couple because the doctor who performed the in vitro fertilization had mistakenly mingled the couples' embryos. The second boy is the biological child of the second couple, yet looks exactly like the child of the first couple.

Andrew Vorzimer, a Beverly Hills, California, lawyer, has heard of a lot of stories of unusual situations. But even he was taken aback by a client whose wife was left unconscious after a car crash; the husband said that her eggs should be "donated" in order to produce their genetic children. The hospital to which she was admitted refused the offer.

In San Francisco, California, a husband and wife used an egg donor to have a child. They then donated twelve leftover frozen embryos to Kathryn Finwall, a corporate audit manager, who then produced a child. Now Finwall and her child want to donate the remaining embryos to another infertile couple, but they are finding resistance from clinics.

In another city, a couple lined up two donors and produced twins, with each child having a different genetic mom. The donors visit for holiday dinners.

Stories of positive and negative outcomes in surrogate parenting can leave some people aroused with negative emotions--ranging from distaste to revulsion--while others would say that there is nothing wrong, in principle, with surrogate parenthood. Dictionaries define surrogate as a substitute for some third person--which in this case could be an infertile mother, father, or the missing mother or father in a same-sex relationship. The usual practice of surrogate motherhood involves a married couple who can't produce a child together and another woman who is able to do so, if her ovum is fertilized. The fertilization is accomplished by artificial insemination (that is, by the introduction of the sperm of the man into the uterus of the surrogate by other than natural means). If everything goes according to plan, the surrogate mother carries the fetus to term, delivers the baby, and gives it to the couple, who legally adopts it as its own. In this situation, the man is the biological father, the surrogate mother is the biological mother, and the married woman is the adoptive mother. The couple makes a cash payment to the surrogate in compensation for her services and to cover the medical costs that accompany the pregnancy. The term surrogate mother is somewhat inaccurate, since the woman to whom it refers is the biological mother of the baby: she supplies the ovum, carries the fetus, and gives birth. She would be called the regular mother--a term coined by Herbert T. Krimmel in his 1983 book Is Surrogate Motherhood Moral?

Infertile couples turn to surrogate motherhood as a method of having children, often with no knowledge of the fact that 20 percent of embryo transfer pregnancies end in miscarriage or don't result in a live birth. Regardless of the procedure used, for every given cycle the chances are one in five that the attempt will ultimately result in a live birth.

The United States as a whole hasn't collectively formed a conclusion as to whether surrogate motherhood should be legally allowed. States such as Arizona criminalize paid surrogacy, whereas other states recognize it, allowing for its practice. Still other states, like Kentucky and Oklahoma, stand in a position where it is difficult to categorize them as pro or con in regard to the morality of surrogacy.

Krimmel disapproves of the concept and argues that surrogacy is little more than formalized baby selling. On the other hand, Ruth Macklin argues that surrogacy is not baby selling because the husband of the couple receiving the child is that child's biological father. Concerning all controversial feelings that surrogate motherhood arouses, one often wonders: is surrogate motherhood moral?

Proponents of surrogacy feel that it is a good way to help infertile women satisfy a fundamental human longing and, therefore, should be permitted and even facilitated. Macklin points out that surrogacy fulfills an important biological and emotional need: couples in which the wife is infertile and often desperate to have a child with the father's biological inheritance look to surrogacy as the only way to make this possible.

Proponents also argue that it falls under the heading of pro-choice. If women have the right to control their bodies in regard to reproductive freedom--such as the right to abortion or to control the number and spacing of their children--then why doesn't it similarly follow that they have the right to choose to serve as a surrogate? Women should be as capable of granting informed consent to carry a fetus to term and then relinquish it as they are to consent to the removal of a breast or uterus when diagnosed with cancer, or for an operation to reduce or enlarge their breasts. Detroit lawyer Noel P. Keane believes that surrogacy "permits the furtherance of a couple's constitutionally protected right to procreation" and points out that surrogacy should be promoted since it wasn't banned by the 1985 Surrogacy Arrangements Act.

Krimmel, on the other hand, believes that surrogate arrangements are really designed to separate in the mind of the surrogate mother the decision to have and raise the child. Through surrogacy, children are created from a desire to have them because they can provide some other benefit. Krimmel states: "To sanction the use and treatment of human beings to the achievement of other goals instead of as ends in themselves is to accept an ethic with a tragic past and to establish a precedent with a dangerous future."

Already, the Los Angeles Times has reported the decision of one couple to conceive a child for the purpose of using it as a bone marrow donor for its sibling. The ethics of such a plan are suspect. A feminist argues a similar position of a psychologist who asserts that "no child wants to live in a womb for hire." Instead of viewing children as unique individual personalities to be desired in their own right, we may come to view them as commodities to be manufactured because of their utility.

A recent newspaper account emphasizes the business aspect of an agency that matches surrogate mothers with barren couples: "Its first product is due for delivery today. Twelve others are on the way, and an additional 20 have been ordered." The "product" that has been "ordered" is a baby. An obvious reason for an agency to think in such a way about surrogate motherhood is the price for the procedure. A recent article in the New York Times explains how one couple paid $50,000 for an egg. This number literally clashes with New Jersey prices, which doubled from $2,500 to $5,000--not including the cost to retrieve eggs and transfer embryos, another $10,000 to $20,000. Although it isn't 100 percent certain that the procedure will be successful, couples would still provide the money, which compensates for the time and effort of donation, hormone shots to boost egg production, blood tests, and retrieval of eggs with a large needle.

Couples go along with the procedure in faith that everything will work out all right and a baby will be born the way they want it. But what happens when, unforeseeably, a child is born disabled? Since many defects can't be discovered prenatally, such a situation is bound to arise. In the surrogacy situation, neither the surrogate mother nor the adopting parents may feel responsible, and both sides may think they have a legitimate right not to assume responsibility for the child. The adopting parents desire a healthy, normal child, not one in the condition that is presented, so both sides feel threatened by the birth of a child they consider undesirable.

There is also the worry that the offspring of a surrogate mother will be deprived of important information about her or his heritage. In the case of Helan Rosenberg and Yahov Epstein of Highland Park, New Jersey, they now have a twin girl and boy--thanks to an egg donor, not to mention the teams of doctors, nurses, and lab technicians who helped them. Now that the twins Allegra and Nathaniel are six years old, their parents are trying to explain that their biological mother isn't the same person as the mommy who tucks them in every night.

When we begin to contemplate the possible consequences for the child born of surrogacy arrangements, and what is in that child's best interests, a new set of questions arise. Should the child be told, when old enough to understand, the pertinent details of his or her conception and birth? Should the identity of the surrogate mother be routinely disclosed? What if the surrogate mother wants to be known to the child? What if she doesn't? What if she insists on visitation rights or other ongoing involvement with the child? Should a child be deprived of personal information--information that not only might be important medically but can also affect the child's individual being?

In examining all these issues, I personally believe that surrogate motherhood is morally wrong. Not only does it affect the way people begin to view the birth of children but it is also highly expensive and not 100 percent successful. In the end, controversies between the adoptive and biological parents may develop, causing arguments over whose child she or he really is. The best decision, when biological parenting isn't possible, is to adopt one of the many children already in need of a loving family.

Elizabeth Pyton, now eighteen, is from Miami, Florida. This essay earned an honorable mention in the "thirteen to seventeen" age category of the 2000 Humanist Essay Contest.