I love it when I stumble across a good article. I love it even more when it turns out the author is a member of ProWomanProLife. Brigitte Pellerin writes here about surrogate motherhood. My favourite part comes in the kicker:
What bothers me most about it is that it is part of a wider culture that promotes and aggressively encourages anything that lets adults indulge their every whim and fancy. On any given day, countless women go for an abortion while countless others go through invasive assisted reproductive techniques while other women wait to have their uterus chosen to carry someone else’s precious embryo or their ovaries plucked so they can sell their eggs. The only moral standard here is that whatever I want is right, and must be mine. It is not possible to build a coherently decent society on such a basis.
“What I want is right.” (And when I think about it, do I even know what I want?) This is the basis for our abortion-friendly culture. And we call it “women’s rights.” How very empowering.
by 
This is well said, and it applies to so many aspects of our culture today. I was trying to explain this to my teenage daughter last night. I shall refer her to this article.
My parents went through several years of infertility treatments to get pregnant with me (their only child), and even though they desperately wanted a baby they decided right off that they weren’t doing anything with surrogacy or in vitro fertilization. (My mom still holds resentment towards this doctor who didn’t want to entertain the thought of creating, say, three in vitro embryos and implanting all of them. He only wanted to do it if my parents created a whole bunch and left some of them to exist in that weird Twilight Zone of frozenness.) My mother thought the idea of someone else giving birth to her baby was unnatural-sounding. I think there comes a certain point while undergoing unsuccessful infertility treatments at which you ought to either give up and realize you’re not having kids or give up and adopt some. (My parents gave up on trying for Number Two when I was five.)
Carrying a baby for nine months, when you know you’re not going to keep that baby, is very tough on women who are planning to give the baby up for adoption. I don’t get why someone would voluntarily do that to themselves. Wouldn’t you have to maintain some basic level of disconnection just to get through it? Don’t most women feel some kind of emotional bond to the child they’re carrying during nine months of pregnancy?
On the topic of “what I want is right,” my dad works with this woman who (this is my opinion; he didn’t present it to me this way or try to convince me of this) is pretty ill-suited for motherhood but has one kid and is now having another because, as far as I can tell, she wants them as some sort of status symbols. This woman yells over the phone at her husband frequently during work and was unable to get through the first several months of the first baby’s life without a variety of “coaches”. Any time her daughter had some kind of normal baby problem, this woman would hire yet another “coach” to fix it. She also told her nanny she would pay for the nanny’s entire wedding if the nanny got the baby to be toilet-trained before the baby was a year old. As far as I can tell, she takes no joy in the ups and downs of child-rearing.
Note to Brigitte: Weirdly enough, I wrote about Uncle Tom’s Cabin as related to abortion here:
http://community.livejournal.com/feminists4life/256530.html
Unfortunately, I really did not enjoy this article. I actually read it about 3 times trying to level with the assertions therein, but the majority of it left a sour taste in my mouth.
My personal experience with miscarriage and the subsequent fear that perhaps I was unable to carry a child to term has opened my eyes to those suffering from infertility. Shortly after my loss, I was desperately trying to become pregnant again. I am not alone in my impression that women who have no trouble conceiving or have not experienced pregnancy loss seem smug and condescending towards those with reproductive problems. The “better you than me” attitude is widespread. It is a very lonely place to endure women complaining incessantly over morning sickness or potty training toddlers while I was weeping in secret over my lost child and the heaps of negative pregnancy tests. It feels as if womankind is happily marching on without you and is indifferent, even judgemental, of your pain.
My initial reaction to this article was “I hope no one suffering from infertility reads this,” as it seems to confirm the infertile woman’s fear that she is inferior to other women. Not only would it be complicated, emotionally draining and enormously expensive to endure surrogacy, but now she’s accused of having selfish motives for wanting what other women experience (and gripe about or electively dispose of) with minimal effort. She’s being likened to women who murder their babies in the womb. She’s being told that her difficult decision to place her unborn child in the care of another woman (who she also is deeply concerned about) lacks any moral standard beyond “whatever I want is right.” But she doesn’t want this in a flippant, entitlement-driven sense as the article implies – she really just wants her body to function properly and create life naturally. Not only does she feel like she has failed herself, her spouse, her family – now she reads that she is morally failing society. I doubt she feels the empowerment that is being mocked at the close of the blog post.
It seriously bummed me out (I was born in the 80’s so I’m unable to use a more articulate phrase) to think that the culture of life may not embrace women who’s response to infertility doesn’t appeal to the sensibilities of those blessed with natural childbirth. I do agree that discarding embryos is very wrong, but this does not always happen in surrogacy situations. Also, I do think that it is most unpleasant and somewhat crude that surrogacy involves a woman “renting out” her healthy womb. Still, I am quite certain that all parties involved struggle to reconcile all the emotional and physical complications that are an inevitable part of surrogacy. But I don’t equate difficulty and less-than-ideal circumstances with absolute moral wrong. To play devil’s advocate for a moment, it is often very difficult for all parties involved in an unplanned pregnancy, yet we recognize that even in cases of rape a life has been created and that life should not be compromised. Is not surrogacy another form of sacrifice for the sake of creating and honoring life despite unfortunate circumstances?
I can understand being opposed to the particulars of surrogacy. There is a definite “yuck” factor and traces of moral ambiguity. But it strikes me as cruel and judgemental to assert that surrogacy is reflective of the same pro-abortion culture that “lets adults indulge their every whim and fancy.” Taking costly (financially, physically, emotionally) measures in response to infertility is hardly indulging a whim and is not even in the same universe as elective abortion. It pains me to say it, but to those who struggle with infertility, this article doesn’t come across as pro-woman.
Oh, and to make sure I leave no one wondering, I was blessed with a son who is now 7 months old 🙂