Consummate consumers
Source: NYTimes.com
Link: http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/03/outsourced-wombs/index.html
Title: "Outsourced Wombs", by Judith Miller
Date: January 3, 2008
Author and XM Radio host Judith Warner posted this commentary yesterday:
They couldn't hear Julie speaking in her awful, entitled tone. And if they had, would they have cared? "From the money I earn as a surrogate mother, I can buy a house," said Nandani Patel, via a translator. "It's not possible for my husband to earn more as he's not educated and only earns $50 a month."
We, however, can hear the imperious tone, so much more audible in radio than in the troubling print reports that have surfaced lately on Indian surrogate mothers' "wombs for rent." And we should care about how things sound.
Because what's going on in India – where surrogacy is estimated now to be a $445-million-a-year business — feels like a step toward the kind of insane dehumanization that filled the dystopic fantasies of Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" and Margaret Atwood's "Handmaid's Tale." (One "medical tourism" website, PlanetHospital.com, refers to the Indian surrogate mother as a mere "host.") Images of pregnant women lying in rows, or sitting lined up, belly after belly, for medical exams look like industrial outsourcing pushed to a nightmarish extreme.
I say "feels like" and "look like" because I can't quite bring myself to the point of saying "is." And in this, I think, I am right in the mainstream of American thought on the topic of surrogate motherhood.
(
Warner)
Perhaps most distasteful about "Julie", the American client seeking a surrogate in India is the thought that, in traveling abroad, she is merely shopping around for the best price:
"The legal issues in the United States are complicated, having to do with that the surrogate mother still has legal rights to that child until they sign over their parental rights at the time of the delivery. Of course, and there’s the factor of costs. For some couples in the United States surrogacy can reach up to $80,000 ....
".... You have no idea if your surrogate mother is smoking, drinking alcohol, doing drugs. You don’t know what she’s doing. You have a third-party agency as a mediator between the two of you, but there’s no one policing her in the sense that you don’t know what’s going on."
(ibid)
Warner asks the obvious question: "Would you want this woman owning your womb?"
And she also points out that the surrogate mothers in India don't seem troubled about such thoughts. Available for between about 7.5 to 12 per cent of the cost, Indian surrogates are an attractive option for cost-conscious American consumers.
But Warner is not wholly condemning. While I question her choice to invoke a recent
Newsweek story about overseas adoption, she does make a point about the emotions driving these American consumers:
Being infertile when you deeply desire a baby is one of those heartbreaking, life-altering trials that an outsider to the experience cannot begin to appreciate; I appreciate that. Adoption is complicated; just how fatally complicated some of the cases of children adopted from orphanages in Russia and Eastern Europe turned out to be was chronicled, devastatingly, last month in Newsweek. And poor Indian women don’t have an awful lot of choices so far as real money-making – to pay for school, to pay for a home – is concerned.
(ibid)
Additionally, Warner raises a certain issue that Americans tend to shy away from. After citing a French court ruling from 1991 that outlawed commercial surrogacy in that nation, she notes,
But our rules of decency seem to differ when the women in question are living in abject poverty, half a world away. Then, selling one’s body for money is not degrading but empowering ....
.... In its perverse way, surrogacy does seem to bring a measure of empowerment to the poor Indian women who take part in it. Dr. Nayna Patel, the director of a popular clinic that draws dozens of poor rural women as surrogates every year, houses them and provides them with constant monitoring and medical care, told Marie Claire magazine last summer that she takes steps to ensure that each woman who contracts with her as a surrogate keeps control of her money afterwards. “If she wants to buy a house, we’ll hold her money for her until she’s ready. Or if she wants to put it in an account for her children, we’ll go with her to the bank to set up the account in her name,” she said.
Which brings us back to the fertile question of the “feels like” rather than the “is.” In an awful world, where many women are in awful circumstances, how do you single out for condemnation an awful-seeming transaction that yields so much life betterment?
(ibid)
So it seems that one of the central arguments we must face is whether, while dignity is certainly a variable standard related to prevailing conditions, we should exploit it as such. It is easy enough to say that I would never wish such an enterprise on my own daughter, from either side of the equation. But we are Americans, and no matter how poor a father I might turn out to be, it is unlikely that, barring unforeseen cataclysm, she will ever have to make such decisions.
As an adopted child, I do object to surrogacy on the grounds that there are many existing children in need of homes, and the only thing that separates them from the surrogate offspring is a matter of pride. Consumers like Julie can say that a surrogate-born child is "theirs" in a way that they cannot if they adopt a child. Perhaps this is an evolutionary trait, but it is ugly nonetheless. While Julie shops around for the best price, thousands of children who have already arrived on planet Earth will languish in need of a home; perhaps it is best that they not go home with such callous consumers. My own adoption seems to have worked out for the best. Not everyone can say that.
Lastly, I'm curious about the long-term effect. American women are largely accustomed to complaining about the effects of pregnancy on their bodies. And many adulterous husbands would agree. Perhaps in twenty years, when someone brings forth a broad study suggesting the effects of low-cost surrogacy on the surrogates' health and quality of life, we will be in a better position to understand the implications of what this process is doing to people. To the other, since we Americans are consummate consumers, it is likely that the only quality of life indicator that matters will be the one preceded by a dollar sign.
