The surrogate, the bio parents, and a "complicated" pregnancy- whose side are you on?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Early today, a feminist blog I read posted a link to a CNN article about what is a somewhat interesting situation. You can read the whole, long article here (the article is heavily slanted toward the surrogate, imho).

You should read the whole article if you’ve got a few, but in short, [spoiler] a surrogate gets pregnant for a family for a $22,000 fee and signs a contract agreeing to termination if there are pregnancy complications. Baby ends up having major problems (less than a 25% chance of having a “normal life”) and the bio parents request termination, but the surrogate refuses on religious grounds. Bio parents lawyer up and offer to pay the surrogate $10,000 to abort— the surrogate counters at $15,000. The bio parents reject the $15,000 request and the surrogate claims she immediately regretted offering that up, as she never intended to follow through for religious reasons.

Parents move to make sure they can take legal custody of the child when born, with the plan to voluntarily surrender the baby to the State immediately after birth. Surrogate doesn’t like that, so she moves to a state that will name her as the legal guardian (Michigan). Unable to care for her existing children and still unemployed, the surrogate gets on aid programs to finish her pregnancy, then adopts the baby out to a family that specializes in caring for special needs kids. Baby might still not live very long, but for now she’s living with her adopted family and has been visited by her bio parents.[/spoiler]

So, what are your thoughts here? For me, I think that the bio parents did attempt to strong arm the surrogate into aborting, but I can’t really say I blame them for trying. While I firmly believe that no woman should be forced into an abortion or pregnancy, this woman signed a contract agreeing to terminate if something like this happened. . . then didn’t. Ultimately, she then absconded across state lines with a child that wasn’t hers.

Then, of course, I can’t help but think it’s a bit fishy that she countered their $10,000 abortion offer, but when her counter was rejected, she suddenly hadn’t been serious. Beyond that, I’ve got a bit of an issue with the surrogate’s claims that the bio parents were attempting to play god with regard to termination, but she apparently had no issue with them playing god to artificially impregnate her. A secondary thing, but that just sticks out in my mind, too.

But that’s all neither here nor there. What about you? Do you agree with any particular party here? If you think one side was in the wrong, should there be penalties on them-- what and why?

2

If the surrogate had religious issues against abortion, she should have voiced it prior to being impregnated.

Countering at $15,000 makes her look like a money-grubbing hypocrite.

I think that the bio parents should adopt a healthy baby outright if they don’t want risks of complications.

3

What I wonder is, what if the surrogate didn’t want the child for herself? What if she were merely morally against abortion, and was going to give the child with severe physical problems to the couple who hired her, then walk away? Would she have been “allowed” to do that?

4

Leaper, she was going to do that— but then the family said they’d turn the baby over to the State, because they didn’t want to/ couldn’t carry for such a severely disabled baby.

It seems that the surrogate never actually wanted to keep the baby herself.

5

Concur fully. She signed a contract stating that she under certain conditions, she would terminate. That would have been the time to say, “Oh, wait, I can’t do that.”

6

First off, I don’t think anyone involved in this has covered themselves in glory, morally-speaking.

Second - I’m a bit more upset about the surrogate (despite the fact that I’m kind of happy the poor kid gets to live life for a while with a caring and capable adoptive family). If the contract that the surrogate signed stipulated that she agreed to terminate at the bio-parent’s request, and she SIGNED it, and then didn’t - then that’s more than a bit sticky to my mind.

  1. She signed it KNOWING that she was lying about the termination clause - having no intention of aborting regardless of the reason.
  2. She signed it without paying close enough attention to see that it HAD a termination clause and really did have religious objections to that.
  3. She agreed to terminate when she signed, then realized she had a shot to extort some extra money out of the bio couple, then fucked that process up royally, and fell back on “religious objections” to save her ass after it all went up in flames.
  4. She signed it, having no strong feelings one way or the other towards a totally hypothetical fetus (at that point) and then developed possessive emotions towards it during pregnancy, changed her mind, and called in the all-powerful “religious objection” card, since “I changed my mind because I’m hormonal and I’ve been carrying this baby for 8 months” perhaps didn’t feel like a good enough argument to her.

Regardless of which number above applies - none of them are really very complimentary towards her.

7

Hm, I must’ve misread it, then. I still wonder, though, if there was a way for the surrogate to “stick” her clients with the vastly increased expense of caring for the child, if, for example, the clients had a different set of priorities.

8

I’m opposed to both surrogate pregnancy and abortion (although as you might guess, I consider the latter far worse). So I guess I don’t have much to contribute, other than to say that I’m glad the baby lived.

9

I think it came out about as well as a shitty situation could have. No one should have to be a parent against their will, no one should be forced to have an abortion against her will.

No, she shouldn’t have signed the contract if she had religious objections to terminating at the time of signing. If those objections developed (if she “found religion”) during her pregnancy though, whatcha gonna do? I have to give her the force of her “no” - for whatever reason - above contract law. Abortion, like slavery, shouldn’t be part of contract law, no matter how the people entering the contract feel about it. Don’t ask me to defend that statement on a legal basis, it’s just how I feel.

Do I think she’s a filthy lying morally bankrupt excuse for a human being who was trying to extort money during an emotionally fragile time? Absolutely. But even a filthy lying morally bankrupt excuse for a human being deserves to not have an abortion if she doesn’t want one.

I sure hope the surrogacy agencies blacklist her from here on out, though.

10

The surrogate was completely wrong to sign a contract that she would abort if she wasn’t sure she could. But I don’t think she should have been legally forced to. And while I do understand the bio parents’ (actually the mom wasn’t the biomom) objection to her not aborting, I don’t understand their objection to the baby going to an adoptive home instead of being surrendered to the state. That was most likely better for the baby.

And I know this is way beside the point, but I don’t know why they would go through the risk of hiring a surrogate when they already had three kids anyway. That was pretty stupid.

11

Basically she did the same thing as the donor couple except it sounds like she found the adoptive family herself rather than relying on the state to do it. :dubious: Unless the State of Connecticut prefers to warehouse special needs orphans instead of trying to find families for them. Her story doesn’t make alot of sense.

All surrogacy or just commercial surrogacy? What’s your opinion if the surrogate is a friend or relative of the couple and not being paid?

12

I used to think the same thing until now. I think she should have been forced into an abortion. This is about property rights and contracts, and it seems the surrogate basically lied her way into it knowing all along that she wouldn’t abort if issues came up. I don’t believe her $15000 offer and regret for a second, I think that she thinks it makes her seem sympathetic and not out to screw people in the first place. The simple answer is that she was never going to terminate no matter what due to her beliefs, and therefore withheld that information to become a surrogate and force her beliefs on people.

I think the surrogate deserves whatever you get for violating a contract and should get the crap sued out of her for it. Then she can congratulate herself that she gave birth to a soon-to-be-dead baby while being financially unable to support her own.

13

If she should or could not have been compelled to honor the contract, doesn’t that mean it’s an inappropriate term to have in a legal contract in the first place?

I’m opposed to both surrogate pregnancy and abortion prohibition, for their similar assignation of rights in a woman’s body to others.

14

My views are pretty simple: the surrogate has the right to decide on abortion or not abortion, 100%.

I think it’s fishy and wrong to have a contract that even includes a “you must terminate” clause. That’s not the sort of contract that should even exist. I concede that it was wrong to sign the contract, but it also should not have any legal force whatever.

That’s what you do when you hire a surrogate. You leave these decisions to someone else, you cede that control, because you are not buying the other persons body. You have no rights over it.

Once the baby is born, the parents have the full right to adopt her away, just like any other parents. It’s a shitty thing to do, but thems the breaks: when you become a surrogate, you do not get to decide what happens to the child.

I really don’t see the controversy.

15

I’m completely with the surrogate here! That child deserves a shot at life, neither the bio parents or surrogate were willing/able to provide that, so the adoptive parents were the best solution.

16

But they don’t, because the surrogate moved to another state that would recognize her as the legal mother, allowing her to have the autonomous decision to adopt the kid out.

17

Yeah it does. They could and should put it into a written agreement, just to make sure everyone is on the same page, but not a legally-binding contract.

18

I can see why surrogacy outsourcing to India is so popular. Right or wrong those surrogates are subject to much tighter control than domestic ones and do not pull stunts like this.

19

The surrogate basically kidnapped the kid. She managed to do it legally because she moved to a state that recognized the legal rights of the surrogate over that of the biological parents, but it was kidnapping after a fashion. I mean, just saying “oh foster parents are evil” and running away to find her own hand-picked adoptive parents is really a bullshit move. How did she know that the bio parents of the baby wouldn’t see the baby, melt, say “fuck this ward of the state thing” and keep her? How did she know that her instincts about a good adoptive family were any better than her instincts in picking a family to be a surrogate for?

That being said, I am definitely not in favor of forcing a woman to have an abortion (or forcing her to carry a pregnancy to term), but if you’re going to be a surrogate, you’re going to have to keep that in mind, especially for things like selective embryo reduction. So hopefully she won’t be a surrogate again or will make it clear that she’s never going to terminate a pregnancy.

The counteroffer is definitely skeevy on her part. :dubious:

20

I would venture to say that I suppose virtually no ‘bio parents’ of a fetus presently housed in another woman’s body, by formal or informal contract, really believe they have no rights.