A Season of Surrogacy Scandals
The summer and fall of 2014 have been a season of surrogacy scandals revealed. Media reports describe disturbing practices taking place in one country after another, including Thailand, Australia, China, and Mexico.
A front-page series in The New York Times by Tamar Lewin seemed to kick off a run of high-profile coverage. Lewin’s lengthy July 5 story focuses on people who come to the US for contract pregnancies because their own countries prohibit them. It gives plenty of play to surrogacy “success stories,” but also includes sharply critical comments by women’s health advocates from Canada and Germany, neither of which permit commercial surrogacy.
“Just like we don’t pay for blood or semen, we don’t pay for eggs or sperm or babies,” said Abby Lippman, an emeritus professor at McGill University in Montreal who studies reproductive technology. “There’s a very general consensus that paying surrogates would commodify women and their bodies. I think in the United States, it’s so consumer-oriented, so commercially oriented, so caught up in this ‘It’s my right to have a baby’ approach, that people gloss over some big issues.”
“We regard surrogacy as exploitation of women and their reproductive capacities,” [said Dr. Ingrid Schneider of the University of Hamburg’s Research Center for Biotechnology, Society and the Environment].
On July 27, Lewin followed up with another front-page feature, this one about the notorious Los Angeles-based surrogacy agency Planet Hospital, which recently declared bankruptcy after defrauding dozens of intending parents and women working as surrogate mothers.
A few days later, the sad story of “Baby Gammy” hit the headlines and ricocheted around the world. An Australian couple was accused of abandoning their baby son, who has Down syndrome, with his Thai surrogate mother and returning home with his twin sister. It was then discovered that the husband had been convicted of multiple child sex offenses that took place between the early 1980s and early 1990s, against girls as young as five. Stories echoing one or another aspect of Baby Gammy’s situation soon surfaced, including:
- several separate incidents of children born in the US, the UK and India from contract pregnancies and rejected because they had Down syndrome or were the “wrong” sex
- an Australian man who was charged with sexually abusing twin girls he fathered through surrogacy
- a Japanese businessman who fathered 16 children in a little over a year with Thai surrogate mothers, claiming that he wanted a large family
- a Thai surrogate mother who had second thoughts about relinquishing the baby she was carrying, and was threatened by the surrogacy clinic and police working for them.
August and September also saw accounts in prominent news outlets about surrogacy free-for-alls in China and Mexico. A New York Times article about the “shadowy world for Chinese surrogates” revealed a “booming underground market in surrogate motherhood” that produces more than 10,000 babies a year. The cost? Up to $US 240,000 for “a baby with your DNA, gender of your choice, born by a coddled but captive rural woman.”
A similar story in the South China Morning Post provided additional detail about the money involved in these transactions: $US 80,000-160,000 in total costs; sex selection for just another $500; and, as specified by contract, “if the surrogate mothers become infertile as a result of obstructed labour, customers only need to pay a compensation of 50,000 yuan” ($US 8152). Some of the Chinese women who work as surrogates are taken to Thailand for delivery. The reporter explains that a broker reassured journalists posing as clients that this was perfectly safe by telling them, “Even the police wouldn’t dare to intervene there.”
A cross-border surrogacy boom in Mexico was covered in late September by The Guardian, in an article about “tales of missing money and stolen eggs.” Some surrogacy arrangements go smoothly, the report says, but “there are horror stories of unscrupulous or mismanaged agencies stealing money and eggs, subjecting pregnant women to psychological abuse, and cutting corners on their payments.”
Commissioning parents’ embryos are sometimes created and implanted in the resort area of Cancún, but surrogate mothers give birth hundreds of miles away in the state of Tabasco, where the civil code permits gestational surrogacy. However, these surrogacy arrangements are supposed to be altruistic, so the entire commercial surrogacy industry is operating in a “legal grey area.” The Guardian reporter points out that this means that
the surrogacy boom in Tabasco is theoretically rooted in a groundswell of poor women from a relatively conservative culture who are motivated by a generous urge to give affluent, often gay, foreigners the chance to become parents in return for little more than thanks, and the payment of their expenses.
Are these troubling incidents, all of which surfaced over two short months, just anomalies? Or are we starting to see what cross-border surrogacy really looks like, in contrast to the heart-warming images of happy babies and parents on fertility clinic websites?
Previously on Biopolitical Times: