Yeah, but the "bio"parents (not really, since they used an egg donor as well) were going to abandon the infant, via the Safe Haven laws. Its some real bullshit to tell someone they can’t adopt out the baby, but if you get it, it goes into the foster care system.
I think it’s utterly ridiculous that the "bio"parents didn’t make their objections to a special needs child more clear up front. Since no one from their side would tell their story, it’s hard to know how things went down exactly, but if this was such a big deal to them they should have thought of it before they impregnated the surrogate. And, yes, I know it was in the contract, but that section was written vaguely and it seems obvious from the story that neither the surrogate not the "bio"parents discussed it.
I think everyone comes off looking like a bit of an asshole here, and I think the story really serves to highlight the moral and legal issues that can so easily pop up with this stuff. I think there needs to be some real federal legislation on this stuff like, yesterday. It’s a huge grey area, and here’s a newborn plopped into the center of it. Its disgusting and irresponsible. You can’t sell a baby, but all this nonsense is fine.
I have tremendous sympathy for the people who want to become parents and cannot do so in the traditional way. But I think the rules about surrogacy are a mess, and that things like this will continue to happen over and over again until we get serious and get some laws on the books about whose rights end where, and how. That these situations are allowed to continue in the absence of any real guidelines is petty messed up, in my opinion. Think of the children, indeed…
[QUOTE=Diosabellisima]
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.
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Yeah, I meant in the original scenario, sorry for being unclear. The part about fleeing to Michigan has me a bit weirded out frankly, but I guess it’s one of those beyond-good-and-evil things that just are; no is right, no one is wrong, it’s just what happened and everyone has to deal with it.
But it ties in with the nature of surrogacy: the baby is in the surrogates body, the surrogate has a perfect right to move that body to Michigan. It’s one of the chances you take when dealing with the fragmented nature of US legal stuff. If you want 100% security, don’t hire a surrogate in a legal climate where it is possible for her to do that. You may have to wait a while though.
BTW, a question: since one set of parents had the right to adopt the baby away in Michigan, but not in the original state, will the adoptive parents run into legal trouble if the travel to the original state? I.e. will they risk having the baby taken away because that state doesn’t recognize the adoption as valid? Or is that one of those “one state did it, so it’s a done deal”-things?
[QUOTE=Peremensoe]
I would venture to say that 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.
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Then they are negligent bordering on stupidity, because they don’t. Feelings got nothin’ to do with it.
I think I do. According to the article, they specifically referenced a “safe haven” law. Contrary to the article’s implication, “safe haven” laws do not allow parents to “voluntarily give up custody of a baby less than a month old without being arrested for child abandonment.” Parents have always been able to voluntarily give up custody of a child without being arrested for child abandonment. They simply had to go to the local department of social services and sign various documents. " Safe haven" laws allow them to do so anonymously by turning the baby over to specified persons at places other than the department of social services ( ERs, police stations, firehouses etc). Why is “anonymously” important? Because generally, children voluntarily surrendered will spend some time in foster care status (either while termination proceedings are going on or while an adoptive family is being sought) and the parents of a child in foster care can be billed for child support, as they are still the legal parents. This is not widely known, as the parents of most children in foster care don’t have the means to pay child support, but a couple who can afford to pay a surrogate $2000 a month has the means to pay child support. However, you can’t bill people who surrendered a child anonymously.
Some things are not legally enforcable. For example, you can’t sign a contract for a loan saying “if I don’t pay it back by next June I agree to rob a bank to get the money”. Likewise, no contract in the US can compel a woman to get an abortion. In other words, it was a badly worded contract.
Maybe the clause should have read “if there are severe complications or birth defects the bio-parents request an abortion, and if not, they may surrender custody to either the surrogate or the state” or some such.
Actually, that’s what surrogacy is - the woman carrying the child doesn’t want it for herself and yes, it is entirely legal for her to, indeed “give the child with severe physical problems to the couple who hired her, then walk away”. That’s what a surrogate is supposed to do, bear the child then hand it over to the bioparents. There probably have been instances where a child was carried by a surrogate but born with a problem yet still given to the bioparents. If there’s no dispute, though, you won’t hear about it.
It was wrong to write up a contract that had a legally unenforceable in the first place.
Frankly, if neither the bioparents nor the surrogate wanted the child then finding an adoptive mother was the best possible outcome here. I, too, am baffled the bioparents, who didn’t want the kid, also didn’t want the kid adopted.
There is the issue that they paid the surrogate a fee to deliver a baby and that’s not what they got, but that’s a risk you take.
They wanted four kids, I guess. Apparently biomom had fertility problems because they had all their kids via repro-tech of one sort or another. The embryos implanted it the surrogate had been frozen and were leftover from a prior in-vitro attempt.
If you knew that very very few disabled foster kids are ever adopted, that almost no one wants such children, then it makes more sense. The surrogate making a personal effort to find someone willing to adopt this child really was going above and beyond (although I think many of her other actions were highly questionable). If the kid had gone into foster care the kid likely would never have been adopted. Heck, there are kids who have spent their entire lives in hospital wards because they can’t even find foster parents for them.
You can not have a legal contract that compels someone to commit either a crime, or imposes an unenforceable condition. As it has been firmly established you can not compel a woman to abort, not even when her own life is in danger, that clause was entirely unenforceable and should never have been in the contract.
It is not at all certain that this child will “soon be dead”. The girl could live a near-normal lifespan, albeit with on-going medical problems. You know what? Not everyone would find that intolerable. My spouse was born 50+ years ago with his spinal cord hanging out of his lower back yet here he is, a half century later, and very much happy to be alive despite on-going chronic medical problems. It’s not like he’s been stuck in a corner or a bed, either, he’s done quite a few wild and crazy things and had adventures.
Or yeah, the baby could die soon. That’s a risk you take when you have a child, Bad Things can happen even to children born healthy. No contract can guarantee a perfect child. No parent can guarantee a perfect child growing up to perfect adulthood. I think the bio-parents may have had unreasonable expectations from the get-go.
Clearly they did want (at least) four kids, but I think it was stupid. But I’m not one of those people who believes having kids is some sacred, unquestionable choice that is above reproach either (not saying you are). They should have been happy with their three kids. Why use extraordinary, risky means when you already have several kids? It would really suck to not get the first kid when you really want one. It wouldn’t suck at all to not get the fourth. They took a stupid gamble.
I think the surrogate mom may have had a change of heart once she was carrying the child. Same reason many moms who arrange to adopt their baby out to a couple often changes their mind mid stream or after the babys born. This is a big reason there can be big problems arising in a situation like this. A contract is one thing for selling a car etc but when you think a contract can mandate everything stays nice and neat in a case of a birthmom not having any changes of heart, well…its easy to see how the baby was a hypothetical before she carried it. As far as the bio parents, I dont agree with them trying to strongarm or force her to have an abortion and its unfortunate this wasnt considered before making the terms of the contract. On that subject of parents wanting a guarantee of a perfectly healthy baby it would make a lot more sense to adopt a perfectly healthy baby rather than getting surrogate mom preggo with the demand she abort if the baby isnt perfect. Of course there are no guarantees of health for anyone,so even if they adopt a healthy baby they could very well at some point be facing their child having some serious health condition… I dont think people who want some type of guarantee with a child to have a problem free health should become parents bc there are no guarantees…
The bio parents had, I think, a reasonable starting position: they want to have a baby, but they’re not prepared to care for a baby with severe birth defects. If it were their baby, they’d handle that by abortion. So far, that’s a respectable position. They can’t have the baby themselves, so they find a surrogate. Still fine. They want the same conditions, i.e., they don’t want to be parents to a baby with severe birth defects. Okay, that’s a defensible set of desires.
But I don’t think (from my total amateur knowledge of the law) there’s an enforceable contract that sets up these conditions.
And this is reasonable, unfortunately. I can’t imagine any contract to enforce these conditions that doesn’t either compel the surrogate to an abortion, which is a horrifying idea, or else neglects the child’s welfare.
What the bio-parents could do, without the contract, is to give the newborn child to the state immediately. Would they be on a financial hook? Sure, but that’s a risk of any pregnancy. The fact that they can’t use abortion to avoid that risk is an inevitable byproduct of surrogacy, I think.
At the end of the day abortion is one of those things that can be what you think you’ll do vs what you can actually do. The very fact they tried to make it a contract shows they knew it was a possibility and they should have known it wasn’t enforceable.
So I don’t judge the surrogate too harshly - if money was really thier main aim, id have thought she would have settled for the 10k once the 15k attempt failed.
This is really not much different to a couple where they had an agreement to abort if there were defects and then the woman finds she cant go through with it, it’s just one more person in the mix.
My understanding is that a properly written contract should not say “If event A happens, party B must take action C.”, but rather “If event A happens, party B must either take action C or pay penalty D.”. That is to say that party B is totally within its rights to pay penalty D and refuse to take action C; it’s not truly a violation of the contract, but rather an alternate way of fulfilling it.
Regardless of whether having an abortion is a legally enforceable action C, it sounds like whoever drew up the contract fucked up royally.
I live in the neighborhood where the infamous “Baby M” trial took place. Basically, Mary Beth Whitehead agreed to carry a child for William & Elizabeth Stern, then refused to hand the baby over to them, even when the Sterns got a court order. The whole thing was a mess.
Anyways, the lower court judge ruled in favor of the contract, except for the abortion clause. Only the pregnant woman has the right to decide whether to abort or not.
Patty Nowakowski and a Michigan man contracted for a girl. Nowakowski delivered twins, and the man took only the daughter. Patty was left to take in the foundling child as her own son, although legally she had no obligation to. A maternal instinct saved this child from the adoption agencies. But as the man stated, “I ordered a pink one not a blue one." Nowakowski sued and won custody of the girl baby, as the legal father had broken the contract.
That seems like it should have been settled before the contract was drawn up. The bio parents should have gotten a lawyer to look at the contract and if he were competent, would have probably said that the abortion thing is unenforceable. For the record, I don’t think that amounts to a crime, despite whatever idiot state she fled to. We can compel people to eat and not harm themselves while in custody and we can certainly take her into custody, drug her up, and scrape out the fetus
Not trying to be insensitive here but if your spouse had died, it wouldn’t have mattered to him (since he’d be dead and unable to worry about it).
No, actually we can’t. Not legally. In the US there is NO legal way to compel a woman to abort a pregnancy. Sure, we can “take her into custody, drug her up, and scrape out the fetus” in the sense that you can take someone into custody and have her raped or tortured or killed without trial… it’s physically possible but not in any way legal.
In addition, by the time the abortion question arose in this pregnancy it was past “scrape out the fetus” stage, it was more “induce early labor and give premature birth without attempting to save the fetus” stage.
No YOU are missing the point. The point is that even severe birth defects do not always result in a life not worth living, do not automatically result in a life the disabled person finds intolerable, and should not result in summary execution.
Aside from that - from the rationale “it doesn’t matter to the dead person” you’re saying it’s OK to kill anyone because, once dead, it doesn’t matter to that person. Please think about the moral implications of that thought.
Yogsooth, you cant compare eating to an abortion…and forcing a woman to have one? Whats next…selling women into slavery? I think any man who wants to force a woman should have.one, should go ahead and have one himself
Respectfully, I think your synopsis omitted some quite pertinent information. 1) According to the article (we don’t have the exact provision) the contract said the surrogate agreed to aborint he event of “severe fetus abnormality,” without defining what that meant; and 2) the diagnosis of cleft palate, some heart abnormality, and possibly other sproblems (not very clear fromt he article) was not made until the pregnancy was at 21 weeks.
To many people, severe fetal abnormality would mean a condition incompatible with life (i.e. anencephaly or a universally fatal genetic problem); to others, something like Down Syndrome or anywhere in between. Also, for many people the idea of an abortion at 21 weeks is quite different from one during the first trimester.
So I’d say there is a lot of gray area suggested in the article itself that is not included in the short version. I think lots of women would have refused to abort under the circumstances.
If I were the surrogate, I would have probably had an abortion in this case.
However, I think it is completely up to the woman carrying the baby. If she has moral objections to an abortion, or she just doesn’t feel like it, or she would only get an abortion at an earlier stage, or the fetus’s abnormalities were not quite severe enough, then she had every right to carry the baby to term. I am pro-choice and am glad that abortion is legal, but it needs to remain solely the decision of the pregnant woman, regardless of whose genetic material is involved. If we were just going on the basis of DNA, then every father would have the right to decide whether the fetus he helped conceive would get aborted or not, and that’s kind of a bad idea.
Anyway, this case worked out pretty well in the end. Infertile couple doesn’t need to take care of a baby they don’t want, surrogate mom doesn’t have to go against her conscience, adoptive couple gets a kid, baby does not get stuck in the foster care system forever. Could have been a lot worse.
I’m on the baby’s side and I think the couple in question are despicable. So many good people out there who can’t get pregnant with one child and they have THREE, essentially commission a 4th and then want to throw the child away because it’s not perfect?
De. Spic. A. Ble.
I also think this story is a good example of why surrogacy can be a Very Bad Idea™.
With regards to abortion, we certainly should be able to
It wouldn’t matter to the dead. The dead lose nothing
I’ve given it a lot of thought. Dying matters to people. And certainly the living would miss the dead. I don’t think we should be able to kill anyone we want but neither do I think that the actual dead people are sitting around worrying about how dead they are. Once you are dead, all worrying ceases. You lose nothing because there is no “you” to miss it
I’m being morally and logically consistent. I don’t consider the fetus to be a person. It is no more morally repugnant to me to force an abortion than to force the cutting of hair. You can always just make another one, not like fetuses are rare
Yogsosoth, if that is how ¥ you¥ feel, that an abortion is like a haircut then you are free to undergo as many abortions as you like…just dont foist one on a woman who doesnt want one. Are you also in favor of forced impregnation? If you are, go ahead and get impregnated but again, dont try to foist it on others