So for those who don’t want to read the link…an Australian couple engaged the gestating services of a Thai woman. However many months into the pregnancy, it was found that she was carrying twins, and that one fetus had Down Syndrome.
The bio-parents asked that the affected child be aborted, but the surrogate mother refused. Upon the birth of both children, the Australian couple took the healthy child back to Australia, abandoning the disabled child with multiple health issues in rural Thailand with the birth mother.
This raises a whole shitload of ethical and legal questions (and if mods want to move this to GD, all good) but WTF?
If the story and reporting are correct, then the Aus couple should be named and shamed. The child with Down syndrome is (according to the reports) their flesh and blood, and now born I believe they have a moral obligation to care for that child. Given that they are wealthy enough to procure a surrogate in Thailand, they’re plenty wealthy enough to care for a child with a disability like Down syndrome, especially in Australia. Leaving the child in Thailand because he’s ‘damaged goods’ is fucking reprehensible IMHO.
Since the story broke, there’s been a huge fundraising effort and thus far nearly $130k (AUD) has been raised to help with the medical bills for the child, Gammy.
I don’t know how the bio-parents can sleep at night. Without wishing ill-will upon the child they did take home, I hope she’s not the perfect specimen of humanity they anticipated.
I don’t know, if the woman had been carrying her own child, no one would have blinked twice about aborting it (well, OK, people who are against abortion in general wouldn’t have liked it, but I think that’s really besides the point).
Does it change if you’re using someone else’s uterus? That’s an honest question. I don’t know what the laws are. Ethically, I don’t have any problem with it, provided the expectations in such a case were made clear ahead of time. I suspect that they were not, that everyone expected one healthy child, and when things turned out differently, they hadn’t agreed ahead of time what to do.
This is of course an important consideration in traditional pregnancies too. I think lots of people decide they want to get pregnant, but don’t think and talk about what they’re going to do if it doesn’t turn out as expected.
I totally agree the whole thing sounds murky, and who knows what provisos were written into the original ‘contract’. None of that info is available in the news reports. But I still feel that leaving Gammy with his birth mother, in a rural area without the financial ability to provide decent medical care is fucking awful.
You don’t want the kid? Fine. Bring him back to Australia to be adopted into a family who can access all the medical and social services that will make his life as healthy and as happy as possible.
Then I hope you can sleep at night afterwards. :: rolleyes ::
They wanted to abort the kid, and the surrogate opposed it. Why shouldn’t she be the one to take care of it? I’m sure that there are plenty of kids born to poor mothers in Thailand. Why is this one different? In my mind, once the biological parents pushed for the abortion, and the surrogate refused, it became her child. I don’t know what the law says. Who legally has custody right now?
Look, I agree it’s an ethical, legal and emotional minefield. But pregnancy is a game of chance at the best of times. Sometimes the kid you get is not the kid you wanted or dreamed about…whether evident at birth, or whether issues develop later on.
But these bio parents are in a much better financial and social position to provide the best possible care for Gammy. Leaving him behind while taking the ‘normal’ child is just scummy IMHO.
He’s born now. He’s not a hypothetical kid. He’s alive and breathing. After the obvious ‘issue’ when he wasn’t aborted according to the bio-parent’s wishes, the custody should have been moot.
Babies are not cars that you return to the dealership when they turn out to be a lemon.
We obviously have different views, and I don’t think either of us is going to change the others mind. From my perspective, it’s not really their kid anymore. I think when they decided to have it aborted, they gave it up, got rid of it. The fact that the surrogate didn’t, in fact, abort it, but rather took it herself, is immaterial, as far as the Australian couple is concerned. It’s the surrogate’s kid now, and while yes, it’s very sad, there are plenty of children being raised by people who don’t really have the means to.
My views are probably colored by my family - many of my relatives are adopted. While some of them know their biological parents, many do not. Their adopted parents are their “real” parents - it doesn’t matter that it was some other woman’s egg that they came from. For whatever reason, their biological parents didn’t want to or couldn’t raise them, and so they got parents who were willing to. Now, none of them came about in the way as described here, so obviously it’s not a direct parallel. I know that many people do put a lot of emphasis on blood relation, and I guess I don’t really have any qualms about that, but it’s not the way I tend to define a parent.
I see your point buddy, but I’m still of the view that a middle class couple from Australia is in a better position to provide the care and medical treatment necessary for a kid born with Down syndrome…whether they wanted that child born in the first place or not!
But I’m of the opinion that they wanted to dodge a financial bullet…instead it is now up to a poor mother in rural Thailand to pay the bills for Gammy, for however long he lives.
Yeah, it’s wonderful that folks have stepped up to the plate with donations…but what if that hadn’t happened?
I don’t think the couple should be able to require - legally or ethically - that the host mother have an abortion if she did not want to do so. Yes, I can see the arguments that the foetuses* aren’t hers. But the issue is murky enough that I feel the final decision should require the host mother’s consent.
Now that the children are born, I agree that morally the parents have a responsibility. But I’m not going to tell people how to handle their moral obligations. My question is what the legal obligations are. Suppose the couple had given birth to twins by the traditional means and they wanted to renounce their responsibilities to one of the twins. Couldn’t they do so under Australian law? I’m assuming Australia has some law that allows children to be turned over to the state and placed in foster homes or put up for adoption.
*Seriously, spellcheck, foetussen? I might have accepted foeti but I’m not using foetussen.
It’s a risk you take with surrogacy, IMHO. Similarly, if a man has sex with a woman and she falls pregnant, any desire he may have for her to have an abortion doesn’t magically make the child not his if it’s born.
The Australian couple were paying for a service, not buying the surrogate’s body. So they were in no position to dictate that she have an abortion. All they could do is discuss the possibility (preferably prior to making the arrangements).
I don’t agree with surrogacy (or IVF, for that matter). Part of the issue for me, is if you can treat a baby as a commodity in the beginning by choosing an affordable manufacturer and paying for its production, then at what point can you get all ethical when the product is deemed defective?
But kids are treated as commodities. At least in my country, it is generally accepted that the parents, or at least the mother, can terminate the pregnancy of an unwanted unborn child for any reason, as well as completely renounce the rights to recently born children, again for any reason. You’re right that this is not absolute: a father cannot generally unilaterally give up his responsibility for a child, but even there, he is under no obligation to “support” it, except in the financial sense.
Look at the adoption market, and tell me with a straight face that that’s not a market for a commodity. Certain children are much more desirable than others, and these children go more quickly, at a higher price. I bet that a child with Down syndrome, even if he’s white (which is just an assumption, I don’t know if he is) isn’t very valuable on this market.
Now, you can call that wrong, and whatever, but as long as that’s the paradigm we operate in, I think it’s silly to single out one couple’s actions.
I dunno. This doesn’t bug me at all. Basically the Thai lady adopted a kid, which doesn’t seem that remarkable. Plenty of Thai kids have Down Syndrome, and what do we do for them? Is this kid entitled to what millions of Thais don’t have because of his ancestry?
I would like to see Thailand have better access to top quality medical care, but I don’t think it’s particularly outrageous that a little white baby is living in ordinary Thai circumstances.
I hardly think the child would be better off with rich people that did/do not want him than with his loving-but-poor adoptive mom. She considers him her own child now, so I doubt she’d want anyone else to take him anyway. It’s nice that people are helping fund his medical care, so it sounds like he’s in the best place for him. You can’t put a price on a loving parent.
In the US, in surrogacy contracts, they usually are, but sometimes the surrogate mother balks when it gets down to it, and it may be in the contract that if she makes the decision not to abort, she is responsible for the child-- but, in the US, a child born of surrogacy belongs to the surrogate, and she must surrender it for adoption to the biological parents. So, if the parents have asked for an abortion, and the surrogate has refused, she can keep the child, or surrender it for adoption to an agency. The bio-parents are probably still on the hook for their financial obligation.
Also, when people use IVF, they usually are supposed to agree to selective reduction if they end up with a pregnancy of more than 3-- IVF clinics don’t like being responsible for those quint, sext, and sept pregnancies, that usually end badly, even tragically. Occasionally, parents who previously agreed, later refuse, though, and the clinic cannot force selective reduction on them.
I don’t know who is right or wrong here, but it is instructional for those considering surrogacy or being a surrogant. If a child with Downs is a no-go for you, then choose a surrogant who does not object to abortion. And if your finances are such that you can’t afford to take care of a child–disabled or no–and you object to abortion and become easily attached to children, then being a surrogant isn’t the smartest option for you.
I know I should feel sorry for the mother, but I don’t. The cynic in me says she was distraught for about five minutes, before she realized she and Gammy make perfect poster children for anyone looking for something to be outraged about.
This is much less likely to be the case anymore in the US. In pretty much any state that actually has laws in place permitting surrogacy, that law provides that the parties cannot use the surrogate’s eggs and that the intended parents are automatically the parents at birth, without the need for adoption. Some states require an order from a court pre-authorizing the surrogacy and declaring parentage, but in others it happens simply via the contract.
In states without laws addressing surrogacy, a different result may obtain, but I suspect that most people with the money to pursue surrogacy will do so in a state with clear and surrogacy-friendly laws.
Interesting to consider, too, that the reason this couple went to Thailand was likely because Australia prohibits commercial surrogacy and considers the surrogate to be the mother.
Suppose the surrogate agrees to abort the baby if medical issues are discovered, and then reneges once the event actually occurs? What options should the biological parents have?
About two years ago one of my online acquaintances who’s a surrogate had twins; one child has Downs and it hadn’t been detected before birth. After several weeks the biological parents made the decision to place that baby for adoption by a family in their area who specifically adopts children w/ DS.
Now, this is the US, where surrogacy’s legal most everywhere and so is abortion. As I understand it abortion on demand’s not legal in Thailand. Also, most states provide a stipend for an adopted child’s life when they have a disability like DS; Thailand may not so adopting a child w/ DS can be a greater hardship.
Where the AUS couple and surrogate failed (IMHO) are twofold; first, they commissioned the children, knew they had to provide either way for twins and failed to provide for one of their two babies. Frankly, the AUS gov’t should hold them accountable for abandoning an AUS citizen in Thailand.
The surrogate should have realized that a couple who’d go to another country to circumvent the laws of where they live will NOT be scrupulous w/ a faceless stranger. One doesn’t need to be older or all that sophisticated to see that. And if she didn’t bother to learn about surrogacy laws…I don’t know what to say about that.
I don’t think a bio parent that has hired a surrogate has the right to say “well, it’s a special needs child, so not my responsibility.” Or even, I don’t want the healthy child anymore, so not my responsibility.
The bio parents are complete fuckheads IMHO. Not sure what is right, but they shouldn’t get a free pass.