Surrogacy for convenience

[ronandannette]

Personally I find surrogacy extremely cruel for the baby and incredibly unjust for the true mother, as it takes advantage of poor disadvantage women.

The only thing the baby knows when he is born is the sound of the voice/heart and smell of their mother. The baby stops crying once is give to their mother as he knows her and is reassured by her. He has spent 9months inside her. And here we have people separating the baby from who he knows to be his mother for Money and selfishness?

I can't believe this is actually legal is some countries.

Do you feel the same way about adoption?

 

[MrsPete]

You think it’s not realistic to say pregnancy can cause complications, sometimes severe and/or lasting, up to and including death? As discussed earlier in the thread, the medically recognized period of time for a body to fully heal from a normal, uncomplicated birth is a year+, so that alone negates your claim that pregnancy is over and done in less than a year. Each pregnancy will affect a woman for closer to two years time, and that’s assuming everything goes well.

In any case, it’s laughable to me that you think potty training and teaching your child to drive are the hardships of parenting, “more difficult than the most difficult pregnancy.” You’re seriously minimizing a lot of women’s (sometimes traumatizing) experiences when you try to argue that what they went through medically couldn’t have been worse than having to help a 3rd grader with homework or putting a 2 year old on the toilet.

You and I are not going to agree on pregnancy vs. 18 years of child rearing being more difficult.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), the majority of kids “in the system” are not available for adoption because they’re being held in foster care with the goal being reunification with their parent(s). The kids can spend years bouncing around, in and out of care, while their parent works on getting their life together so they can get their child back. If a parent doesn’t want to give up custody, they don’t have to. If it gets to a point where a court actually steps in and severs a parents rights, the court would look far and wide to place the kid with anyone even a little bit biologically related before allowing them to be adopted by a stranger. When I looked into domestic adoption, I learned only 25% of fostered children would ever become available for adoption. The rest are in a parental rights purgatory. And all that is only one of the hurdles to adoption. It’s not actually true that there are tons of available children just waiting for someone to come along and adopt them. Relatively few children are even available and it’s not an easy process, at all.

My mom is retired now, but she worked with adoptions for three decades:
- Yes, it's tragic that parents who've proven themselves incapable have more rights than children who need homes.
- The bottom line is that most adopted children are what's called "family adoptions", which means the grandparents adopt their daughter's child because she's on drugs /incapable of caring for them ... or a sister adopts her brother's children after he's killed in a car wreck ... or something similar. Those children are never available for general adoption.
- Quite a few children are available for adoption, but many of them are not babies /toddlers, are not white, or are not healthy. Those are the children who are are floundering in the foster care system.
- The child everyone wants to adopt -- the gold star baby -- is a baby born in jail. Mothers who deliver in jail have had limited access to drugs /alcohol, 3 meals a day, and access to medical care.

There is also embryo adoption. (Embryos cannot be sold, they must be donated.

I just had a conversation about this with a parent at Graduation yesterday. I didn't know it was "a thing".

To imply that pregnancy is dangerous and there was a real threat of death is definitely straw man fallacy. Now if we’re talking about a woman who has known health issues and is high-risk that’s a different story. But for a healthy woman to put fear in her head that getting pregnant is risking her life it’s a bit over done. Might as well tell that woman to stay home all day because driving to work would be deadly.

Exactly my point. It's not risk-free, but it's also not a high-risk choice for the majority of us.

Speaking of death, 861 women died as a result of pregnancy in 2020, the most recent year for which I can find info.

That 861 women dead in childbirth is a tragedy; however, Google (assuming you trust Google) says 3,659,289 babies were born in America last year. So .0002% of all pregnancies ended in maternal death. Yes, it's bad that any mother dies in childbirth, but it's not nearly the risk that some people on this thread are implying.
I'd assume that some of those who died were high-risk and had not received prenatal care.

The only thing the baby knows when he is born is the sound of the voice/heart and smell of their mother. The baby stops crying once is give to their mother as he knows her and is reassured by her. He has spent 9months inside her. And here we have people separating the baby from who he knows to be his mother for Money and selfishness?

My children definitely knew my voice when they were born, but they very quickly learned their father's voice. This is not a reason to avoid surrogacy.

Agreed. I also think many people are kind of in a willful denial about the impact pregnancy had on their body. Like, I imagine plenty of women would insist they had no lasting effects from pregnancy and then they pee when they sneeze.

Full disclosure: I am mid-50s, and I do not pee when I sneeze. I also don't have any stretch marks.
Lucky? Yes. Unusual? No.

 

[mousefan73]

Totally OT but I sometimes pee when I sneeze, but that started after a horrible 5 month whooping cough experience where I swore I pulled all bladder muscles... but I'll save that for a different thread lol.

 

[Elke1234]

Too busy to be pregnant, definitely too busy to be a mom! Lot's of actresses have babies and have amazing careers. She just didn't want to be bothered. Her choice but she, like Priyanka should not have bothered.

 

[Dreams&wishes]

Do you feel the same way about adoptio

Respectfully you have NO IDEA what you are talking about!

Who is the real mother? What makes someone a real mother? What about fathers? Adoptive parents? Foster parents? 2 mom or 2 dad households? Those who carry but use donor eggs/embryos? What about grandparents, aunts and uncles, or anyone else who opens their home to a child in need? You don’t become a parent in the hours that it takes to deliver the child. You become a parent in the days, months, and years you spend caring for the child. Holding them, loving them, crying their tears, cheering on their victories, etc. To somehow diminish that because a woman didn’t happen to be the one to carry said child is ignorant, insulting, and just plain rude.

And would it be better for my daughter to never have been born (because my cousin certainly wasn’t looking to have another child)? Or should we have rolled the dice and buried another baby - and maybe me too - just so that we didn’t take advantage of someone volunteering to do something out of the goodness of her heart? I don’t know if my daughter will make the world a better place someday, but she certainly makes OUR world - and the world of those around her - better for her being in it.

Look I think I have more of an idea than what you think.

I'm adopted, I have had 6 pregnancies and four children with me today and I'm also a foster mother.
I have just given my opinion because this is what this post was asking for.

To me surrogacy makes a baby "a product" and takes advantage of more disadvantaged women and I don't agree with either of those things.

Obviously your situation was different as you had a relative doing it for you out of good will, but this post wasn't about your situation it was about surrogacy in general which is mostly done as a financial transaction.

Anyway I didn't want to offend anyone I can accept different options from mine without getting angry or aggressive, but obviously not everyone can.
Cheerio

 

[Living42Day]

Actually yes. And I can appreciate that but have enough self-confidence to not care what anyone thinks of my choices. I don’t care what ppl do, but I do think it’s vain & speaks to the type of mother one would be. That is much different from all the other reasons ppl can’t carry a child that you mentioned. Wouldn’t give it a second thought other than hypothetically discussing it on this board for lack of anything better to do with my time today.

I'm curious of your opinion on medicated vs unmedicated births? I'm guessing if you feel there must be a sacrifice, pain goes along with that sacrifice? Pain management is a vain endeavor that only those who are weak choose.

Breastfeeding? I'm guessing breastfeeding is the only way. If a woman is unwilling to breastfeed, she must be too vain to ruin her body and should not have had children.

Cesarians? Why enjoy the convenience of modern medicine when vaginal delivery is always an option. If it risks the life of both the mother and child, at least it proves that a mother actually loves her child rather than women who choose to be vain and not push.


It's a slippery slope in determining which sacrifices make parents more deserving.

 

[mom2rtk]

I'm curious of your opinion on medicated vs unmedicated births? I'm guessing if you feel there must be a sacrifice, pain goes along with that sacrifice? Pain management is a vain endeavor that only those who are weak choose.

Breastfeeding? I'm guessing breastfeeding is the only way. If a woman is unwilling to breastfeed, she must be too vain to ruin her body and should not have had children.

Cesarians? Why enjoy the convenience of modern medicine when vaginal delivery is always an option. If it risks the life of both the mother and child, at least it proves that a mother actually loves her child rather than women who choose to be vain and not push.


It's a slippery slope in determining which sacrifices make parents more deserving.

So someone who questions hiring out carrying a baby for convenience should be compared with someone against pain relief in delivery. You do yourself a great disservice with ridiculous comparisons like that.

 

[LSUmiss]

I'm curious of your opinion on medicated vs unmedicated births? I'm guessing if you feel there must be a sacrifice, pain goes along with that sacrifice? Pain management is a vain endeavor that only those who are weak choose.

Breastfeeding? I'm guessing breastfeeding is the only way. If a woman is unwilling to breastfeed, she must be too vain to ruin her body and should not have had children.

Cesarians? Why enjoy the convenience of modern medicine when vaginal delivery is always an option. If it risks the life of both the mother and child, at least it proves that a mother actually loves her child rather than women who choose to be vain and not push.


It's a slippery slope in determining which sacrifices make parents more deserving.

Not for me. It’s the vanity of it that strikes me a ridiculous, shallow, & selfish.

What’s funny to me is how many ppl are saying things about how society is still so primitive that we judge a woman’s choice of how to start her family. But, what’s worse to me is that being pregnant or having been pregnant is still considered unattractive enough that it could ruin someone’s career. That’s a much bigger issue imo.

 

[BadPinkTink]

Not for me. It’s the vanity of it that strikes me a ridiculous, shallow, & selfish.

so basically too posh to push.

 

[luv2cheer92]

Not sure why I'm surprised that some people are so judgmental and opinionated on what other people do with their lives and bodies. My goodness.

If it's legal, you do you.

 

[Mokat76]

I think she’s shallow, entitled and maybe exploitive. Let the “little people” do the hard work so she can keep her figure. Ugh.

 

[abdmom]

That 861 women dead in childbirth is a tragedy; however, Google (assuming you trust Google) says 3,659,289 babies were born in America last year. So .0002% of all pregnancies ended in maternal death. Yes, it's bad that any mother dies in childbirth, but it's not nearly the risk that some people on this thread are implying.

Your calculations are off by a factor of 100. It's 0.02% of all pregnancies. I knew someone who died shortly after giving birth. The US has a maternal mortality rate 3-12 times that of other developed countries. https://medium.com/illumination/you...-highest-maternal-mortality-rate-50e23384c39a

About 2% of mothers end up in the ICU.

I have a whole host of problems caused by childbirth that have cropped up decades later. I wouldn't judge anyone who chooses not to go through it.