By Decriminalizing Paid Surrogacy, Michigan Is The Final State To Commercialize Babies
The “Assisted Reproduction and Surrogacy Parentage Act,” which decriminalizes surrogate motherhood in the state of Michigan, is planned to take effect in March of this year. Michigan is the last state to decriminalize paid surrogacy, and some may say it’s about time they “catch up” to the rest of the country.
One surrogacy agency recently posted that “choosing to carry a child for another family is one of the most profound gifts of love and compassion.” On the surface, surrogacy would appear this way, as what could possibly be wrong with helping couples have children? It’s only when we dive beyond the emotion-motivated surface that we can see surrogacy for what it truly is: the exploitation of women and the trafficking of children.
Through coaching and advertising, surrogacy agencies appeal to mothers’ self-sacrificial nature by feeding on their emotional motivation to heed the call to use their generosity to “give back” their gift of fertility to others. Surrogate mothers are often convinced that they’re “just babysitters,” carrying “belly buddies,” and that they’re simply “giving the child back” to his or her parents. The children they carried in their wombs, they have been convinced, aren’t theirs in any meaningful way.
Anthropologist Kalindi Vora writes that “through counseling and conversation, medical personnel encourage surrogates to see themselves as gestation-providers whose only link to the fetus is the renting of a womb imagined as an empty and otherwise unproductive space.” Feeling natural attachment towards the child you’re carrying does nothing to benefit the 14-billion-dollar baby-commodifying industry.
Appealing to the Archetypal Mother
Surrogacy agencies know that it’s the appeal to fulfillment and “greater purpose” that drives women to become surrogates. Kajsa Ekis Ekman stated that “… when pregnancy is made into work, it is too painful to see it as a job. It must have a protective, concealing facade … even if the superstructure of the surrogacy myth is all about stating that the women ‘are not mothers’ to the children they bear, these women cultivate the idea that they become even more motherly by giving up their children.”
The archetypal mother is one who selflessly offers herself as a gift to the world, sacrifices herself to satisfy others, and identifies pain with goodness in the hope that something good will arise from her sacrifice. These women believe that the pain and sacrifice they endure is the whole point of surrogacy.
Surrogacy also interjects a third person into the marriage union to assist in the very intimate aspect of child-bearing that is rightly reserved for husband and wife. The surrogate’s own marriage and family is also distorted, as she’s carrying the product of the non-sexual love of another marital union. This disfigurement is often recognized, and this is why surrogacy agencies try to combat this mindset by posting advertisements showing just how wonderful the families of these surrogates think the act is.
Primal Wound and Microchimerism
While surrogacy agencies emphasize that surrogate mother and child aren’t connected and that carriers are only “babysitters,” babies carried by gestational surrogates don’t know that they aren’t genetically related to the carrier. Babies are biologically wired to recognize their mother’s scent at birth, her touch, and her voice. Severing the bond between mother and child at birth can lead to lifelong separation trauma, or what is referred to in the adoption world as the “primal wound.”
Adoptee and researcher Dr. Catherine Lynch further states, “… removal from the mother at birth has lifelong physiological, psychological and emotional impacts … the loss of the mother’s body at birth is experienced as a trauma which is felt at first as an inexpressible loss … and creates a lacuna of despair that never leaves the person despite a lifetime of adaptation and socialisation, and despite that fact that … the trauma is not consciously ‘remembered.’”
Further, while surrogates are fed the idea that the children they carry “belong to someone else,” through the process of microchimerism, these women are forever connected to the children they carry. Microchimerism occurs when fetal cells cross the placenta and enter the mother’s body, where they become part of her tissues. Given this fantastic knowledge, we can no longer say that gestational surrogates have no connection to the children. These children belong biologically to the women carrying them just as much as they do their genetic parents. We’re not designed, from our very cellular level, to be severed from our mothers, and vice versa.
Financial Incentives
Appealing to emotions may not be enough motivation for every woman interested in becoming a surrogate, so this is where financial incentives come in. Conceiveabilities boasts being the highest paying surrogacy agency at paying up to $72,000, while Pinnacle Surrogacy claims earnings up to $65,000, and Carrying Hope starts at $45,000.
While surrogate agencies claim that surrogates “don’t do it for the money,” the offering of payment only shines light on the transactional process of an already commercializing industry, as, of course, mothers aren’t paid to carry their own children. Surrogacy also routinely targets poor and low-income women, and women certainly are enticed by money on advertisements even if they claim it isn’t their sole motivation.
There are no “substitute” mothers when it comes to carrying and giving birth to children because pregnancy is the first step of motherhood. These women are, in reality, biological mothers to these children. No matter how much the fertility industry tries to distort this reality to appease adults who feel that children are objects that they’re owed, as opposed to gifts, surrogacy is the commissioning and human trafficking of children and must be eliminated to protect human rights.
Katie Breckenridge works for the children’s rights organization Them Before Us and is the author of the book Silent Sorrows: Let’s talk about abortion, reproductive technologies, and adoption.
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