The Changing Face of Surrogacy: Normalizing an Anomaly
A strange added twist to the horrors of the war crimes unfolding before our eyes like never before in Ukraine, are a reported 41 surrogate infants living in a nursery basement turned makeshift bomb shelter. AP News reports the Ukraine “has a thriving surrogate industry and is one of the few countries that allow the service for foreigners.” These babies, according to AP, were transacted for by Europeans, Latin American and Chinese. BBC reports:
“More than 2,000 children are born through surrogacy every year in Ukraine, the majority to foreign couples. The country has around 50 reproductive clinics and many agencies and middle-men who match couples — known as ‘intended parents’ — to surrogates”.
Ukraine is a popular choice for surrogacy because in many European countries, including the UK, the surrogate is “named as the mother on the birth certificate. If she is married, her husband will be listed as the father.” In Ukraine those who initiate and pay for the transaction, called “intended parents,” are named as mother and father of birth, making it easier to obtain a passport to bringing the babies home, albeit making impossible for the children to know the identity of the surrogate.
The BBC reports that in addition to the 41 surrogate-born babies being cared for, “Ukraine’s biggest agency currently has 500 surrogates at different stages of pregnancy.”
A little more than a decade ago surrogacy was written about as an anomaly; an odd and questionable practice. Anthropologist, Elly Teman who studied surrogacy in Israel from 1998–2006 noted that there are “assumptions” that women who act as surrogates “are engaged in a harmful, self-inflicted alienation from their bodies and selves.”
“Psychologists worry that surrogates are motivated by a desire for reparation for past actions, such as having an abortion or giving up a child for adoption. Feminists worry that these women are being dehumanized and made into victims of a patriarchal system. Ethicists and scholars of religion are concerned that what these women are doing is unnatural, part of the deconstruction of motherhood as we know it.”
Teman further noted, in 2010, that this was because the idea of surrogacy challenges traditional roles and our thinking about mothers, motherhood and family:
“Surrogacy doesn’t fit within the set of categories that we use to make sense of the world around us, and that is why it makes many people uncomfortable.”
Yet, here we are just a dozen years later and there are heart wrenching reports that the “parents” of the stranded Ukrainian surrogate-contracted infants — those who arranged for their creation often with anonymous eggs and a gestational carrier — are suffering and longing to be able to retrieve “their” babies.
In those twelve short years it seems the “anomaly” of surrogacy has become interwoven into our consciousness and laws, becoming normalized and accepted as just another reproductive “choice” and another LGBTQ+ “right” that we dare not question lest we be labeled homophobic. Celebs from Kanye West and Kim Kardashian to Anderson Cooper have played a large role in normalizing a concept once thought of as deviant — something only “stupid, crazy, desperate” or “psychologically unstable” women would do — to just another choice on a menu of family planning options for Gen Xer, aka the “me” generation.
Several glaring omissions jumped out at me as I read Teman’s My Bun, Her Oven (or: Surrogacy as a Cultural Anomaly). One is the absence of the fact that the cost of surrogacy makes it a “choice” not readily available to all. It is in fact out of reach for the majority of middle-class heterosexual couples who would be considering it after having already spent a great deal on multiple costly — and some say traumatic — rounds of IVF. Another issue is that In the hierarchy of choices for the pregnancy challenged, there is a marked preference to be genetically a part of one’s offspring, making adoption a last resort. Thus, surrogacy diminishes any social altruism adoption might have, leaving more than a hundred thousand children who could be adopted in high-risk foster care at the government’s expense, while those who can afford to, create designer babies.
Teman delves into surrogacy’s deconstruction of motherhood both from the view of the surrogate carrier and the intended mother and how they each work at convincing (or tricking) themselves into a peculiar role-reversal with those convinced the baby being gestating by another is “their” baby and the other believing the fetus growing and moving inside her is not hers. One surrogate descried her body in separate parts and two of the intended mothers in Teman’s study“spontaneously” produced breast milk. These mind-contortion games fit the somatic (if not the more serious delusional) form of the DSM-IV’s classification of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD). This ability to successfully convince oneself of an alternate physical reality might explain the medical mystery of why being pregnant with a totally unrelated fetus does not trigger an immune rejection of a foreign object one would expect.
While Teman provides an excellent review of the laws governing surrogacy, by looking at it through the lens of an anthropologist analyzing a cultural phenomenon, she claims that “[o]ut of approximately 25,000 surrogacy births in the United States alone, no more than 30 cases have ever reached a courtroom” as of 2010. However, one wonders if she is only referring to cases in which the hired surrogate petitioning for custody of the child while ignoring other legal disputes, some involving contractual agreements to “selectively reduce” (newspeak for abort) one or more of the multiple implanted fetuses.
Also ignored are the risks to the health and future reproduction capabilities of the egg “donor” and the risks to the surrogate, which include a U.S. maternal mortality rate of 23.8 deaths per 100,000 live births or 861 women who died of pregnancy or childbirth in 2020. Additionally, fetal microchimerism, a “silent chemical conversation” in which bits of genetic material and cells pass not only from mother to child but also from child to mother throughout pregnancy and remain in the maternal blood and tissues for years after pregnancy andmay affect the long-term health of the gestational mother creating risk of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis and other diseases, even decades after she has given birth.
The Children
While all of this is troubling, there is for me, a far more troubling issue. Teman makes no mention of the effects of all of the pretense and mental contortions has on the baby being created. While the two females play an intricate and intense game of emotional role reversal, what happens to their hormones? If the mind-body connection is powerful enough to produce location in some cases, what is it doing to the gestational carrier’s oxytocin, necessary for labor and delivery, but also thought to play a significant role in the maternofetal relationship, aka “bonding”? If a gestational carrier is intently invested in convincing herself that the fetus in her womb is not hers, what effect does that have on the developing brain of the fetus? Does it not sense her emotional distancing as rejection?
It is well established that maternal stress, which results in increases in cortisol, is associated with poor birth outcomes including preterm birth, infant mortality and low birthweight. Studies have also indicated that if depression, for instance, is experienced during pregnancy, the fetus receives these emotional signals through the placenta, altering the course of fetal neurobiological development. Imagine the stress of ignoring the physiological indications of impending motherhood and maternal bonding. Imagine the stress felt by the fetus’ forming brain.
While most preliminary studies find no differences in the development of surrogate-born children, there have been few long-term studies. A study of donor-conceived children (Burke, et al, 2010) found that “[n]early 74 percent said that they often or very often think about the nature of their conception and 62.2 percent felt the exchange of money for donor gametes was wrong.”
British researchers, led by Susan Golombok, of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, found that children carried by a surrogate may have more adjustment problems — at least by age 7 — than those born using “donated” eggs and sperm. The study, published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, suggests that surrogate born children have more difficulty dealing with the idea that they grew in an unrelated woman’s womb, than with the concept that they are not biologically related to one or both parents, which might be because the children studied were ages 3, 7 and 10. And yet we know that donor-conceived adolescents and adults seek out their biological progenitors. The researchers recognized that trouble could crop up later as surrogate children hit their adolescence, underwent identity crisis and understood the role of genetics.
Image Source: The Donor Sibling Registry https://donorsiblingregistry.com
The words “donor” and “donated” are used in quotes because the eggs and sperm used in third part anonymous conception and surrogacy are in fact bought and sold usually through businesses that are part of a mega-billion dollar industry that exists to exploit the pain and suffering of infertility. Surrogate businesses aggressively market campaigns for egg and sperm “donors” at colleges in universities in order to procure more highly desired products offerings. Many medical students have reportedly financed their education selling sperm. A retired math teacher from the UK says he is the “world’s most prolific sperm donor”. Clive Jones claims to have fathered 129 children — with nine more on the way as of January 2022. But Mr. Jones has a long way to go to catch up with Dr. Philip Peven, and OB-GYN in Detroit Michigan who may have “fathered” as many as 9000 children of his patients with his own sperm, causing potential great risk of unintentional incest for his offspring.
What will the future hold for these manufactured children intentionally made to suffer the trauma of an emotionally stress pregnancy and maternal-infant separation? How will it affect the long-term feelings of connectedness and belonging when these surrogate children reach adolescence and beyond and deal with issues of having been bought, sold and grown inside a stranger?
Rather than guess or wait, we have ample research and anecdotal material about outcomes for adoptees to glean from since both cases involve a lack of genetic connection between social parent and child. Adoption and surrogacy also both involve having been in the womb of another woman not legally or socially recognized as one’s mother and both experience the trauma of separation from the smells, sounds and rhythm of their womb-mother at or soon after birth that is known as a primal wound, which is known to cause neurological changes to the neonate brain. But there are differences, too. Adoptees have a biological connection to their birth mother and often have a strong desire to know her and learn why they were given for adoption in addition to seeking their medical heritage. The surrogate-born child does not have the same physiological connection but will they likewise want to know in whose womb they began? Who felt their first movements?
What we know about the effects of primal wound on those who are relinquished and adopted is that adoptees of all ages — even those adopted at birth — are over-represented in mental health and substance abuse treatment facilities (see Bohl and Marich, Sunderland and Kaplan) and have a four times higher rate of attempted suicide than non-adoptees. This is due to neurologic changes observed on MRI imaging in two studies (Schore 2001a and 2001b) that found the senses of trust and attachment, imbedded in the limbic layer of the brain, are initiated in the womb between infant and gestational carrier.
Given all of the risks — with no redeeming societal advantage — why would we seek to normalize this “cultural anomaly” which exists to serve the desires of the wealthy and same sex couples to have a child of their “own” rather than adopt a child from state care? How ironic is it that those who choose hiring a surrogate to experience parenthood do so in order to be at least partially genetically related to their offspring, while denying their children the opportunity to know all or half their genetic heritage and any right to know the “mother” in whose womb they spent their first nine months and transferred emotions, hormones and genetic material with? Those who prefer surrogacy to adoption, also want to avoid the challenges of a child with special needs, while inflicting possible unknown neurologic and/or emotional challenges on the child they are bringing into the world with pre- and perinatal trauma.
Russia’s unwarranted vicious attack on Ukraine has garnered worldwide compassion and support for the extraordinarily brave Ukrainians. Yet what will become of the newly born and undelivered tiniest human commodities now caught up in epicenter of a possible third world war? Will they reach their “intended” homes? Have the women whom risked their lives carrying and birthing them received their due compensation?
As we hope for an end to the brutal, inhumane devastation let us think, too, about these innocent parentless and stateless infants languishing in a bomb shelter and the fact that what put them in this bizarre limbo is surrogacy — the contractually paying for, creating and selling a human commodity — which is why surrogacy is illegal in most of the world.
