Surrogacy regret - from a single man

[OhHolyJesus]

Once the baby has been born the regret of what he had done lead him to giving the baby up for adoption.

The woman who had her eggs harvested to make the baby and the woman who carried the baby through pregnancy and gave birth to the baby have not been told this.

twitter.com/jenniferlahl/status/1417527064895254531?s=21

I am reminded of the DNA stories and Long Lost Family type stories where mothers and children are reunited and the mother is just so happy and relieved that the child had a good life.

Imagine being either woman, found by the child as an adult who explains that after being commissioned into being because they are 'so wanted' they were actually adopted because the shame was too much for the commissioning father.

This child was not rejected because of a disability but rejected because it was just all too much for him and he wanted to cancel his order.

It's like reverse social surrogacy.

Its very sad, but essentially no different from a birth parent who just can't cope and walks out, or puts the child into care. Or, a failed adoption. Somewhere between 3% and 10 % of all adoptions break down and the child goes back into care.. That's despite all the years of planning, hoping, vetting and training by parents desperate to adopt. For some people their dreams about becoming a parent are more fantasy than sustainable. Lone parent hood is always going to be tougher, with everything on one pair of shoulders.
Parenthood by surrogacy, adoption, AI, IVF is far harder to achieve than the traditional method, but there's no more guarantee of parenting success in every day life.

You might even consider that the sheer desperation that drives people to such measures, carries the chance that the huge emotional pressure of expectation will ever match the reality. Plenty of adoptive parents come close to crash and burn after placement.

2bazookas

Except that this child was ‘commissioned’. Two women’s bodies put at risk to produce this child because someone ‘placed an order.’ This is not an isolated case, of course. It just has the added complexity that it was a single man placing the order that required both egg donation and a surrogate to be involved.

It’s completely different - for all the reasons @Helleofabore says above.
What a terribly sad situation for the poor child. I hope it has a successful, loving adoptive family.

@RedDogsBeg

This is what happens when you treat a child like a product you can buy off the shelf / a lifestyle accessory.

Absolutely SirSamuelVimes, the whole thing is reprehensible, immoral and unethical, turning babies into commodities to be traded and women's reproductive capabilities into items for hire.

Dreadful.

Can't top this comment for accuracy.

Tragically we will see this (and far worse) repeatedly in the next years.

I think it is significantly different to a birth mother giving up a baby, because someone who is removed from the mechanics of pregnancy, of childbirth, of the hormones and physical changes... that person is not bonded to the child in the same way. This man did not experience pregnancy, he didn't bond with the child before it was born, it is not even remotely comparable with a birth mother giving up her baby because she couldn't cope.
I would also argue that there is a huge element of misogyny in this too, or at least a lack of understanding about the unpaid workload of parenting, which is normally borne by the mother. If you've not been groomed into putting yourself last all the time, since birth, in order to be a caretaker of other, you would probably find the transition to parenting a newborn (without the building up of pregnancy or even caring for a pregnant partner) really challenging.

And this is what happens when buying babies is legal. You can return or pass on products you aren't happy with. Try again later etc. That poor child, and those poor women.

I’ve seen enough stories on here (and known a few in real life) of men who aren’t prepared for the emotional or physical drain of having a newborn.
I can’t say I am that surprised

That's so well put ForgotAboutThis

I tried to say similar on Twitter but the character count beat me and anyway it wasn't as well thought through!

Its better he decides now than two or three years down the line.

Its better he decides now than two or three years down the line

Wouldn't the deciding have been better done before he put 2 women at risk of moderate to severe health problems.

It doesn't appear we are talking about a couple who's marriage fell apart in the.mean time or who got sick or disabled or lost their job etc that meant circumstances changed dramatically.

We are talking about someone who went to the effort and the expense of bypassing all the usual obstacles that adoption would have thrown up who seemingly didn't put equal thought or research into what having a baby would have been actually like.

Of course it would have been. But he didn't. You are right re if a screening process had been in place he might not have gone ahead with the surrogacy. But I have heard of adopters giving a child back.

Anyone remember the case of the man who prevented a woman from having an abortion and tried raising the child himself? 18 months in and he just sounded angry and resentful.

''I am burned out and hate being a single parent. I love my son but I resent him.''
archive.is/OLFik

It males you wonder how much the chance to have power and control over a woman drives this.

Focusing on their perceived "rights" to have a child or stop a child being aborted. As opposed to the actual child who never asked to be hear but at least deserved to be wanted for the right reasons

@Viviennemary

Of course it would have been. But he didn't. You are right re if a screening process had been in place he might not have gone ahead with the surrogacy. But I have heard of adopters giving a child back.

Bit of a difference though in that the adopters didn't intentionally create the child to put them in that situation first.

Or put two women at risk in the process of commissioning that wanted child before experiencing buyers remorse.

The filicide comments are irritating; its a problem in the US because they don't have health visitors checking new mothers, or mother and baby psychiatric units.
When I talk to people in the US about health visitors they are horrified and consider it an intrusion by the State. Many of them haven't heard of PPS.

''Resnick's review of the world psychiatric literature on maternal filicide found filicidal mothers to have frequent depression, psychosis, prior mental health treatment, and suicidal thoughts.''
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2174580/

There are cases of adoptions not working despite all the checks being carried out over a long period of time, from everything from an individual or a couple being financially secure to having a big enough home and their medical health records being checked, along with counselling and support. It can still go wrong but adoption if very much centering the child and trying to find the best permanent home, hence why the process is a thorough one.

A recent international adoption has been discussed here (Myka and James Stauffer and little boy Huxley). Each situation is different, but Huxley was not made to order and then rejected based on the guilt Myka and James felt, he was 'rehomed ' (vile word to describe what happened to this child) because his adopted parents couldn't cope with his learning difficulty and developmental needs and they regretted their decision and wanted out.

The Twitter thread confirms this man changed his mind based on guilt, or as is referred to on the thread, shame. He couldn't undo the conception, pregnancy and Labour and he didn't want to continue so he bailed and needs others to step in and raise his kid. He is genetically related to this child. He is one of many, many men in America and around the world who have absolved themselves of responsibility for a human being they helped create, and in this case he very specifically took steps and funded the process, buying the pieces of the genetic puzzle and hiring medical professional help to make this child a real human, not an idea, not a bunch of cells in a Petri dish.

It is not at all the same. Abortion is not the same. A man abandoning on his kid/s is not the same.

He commissioned a child into being, felt guilty, changed his mind and called in for others to clean up his mess. He has not only created a person, he has created a traumatised person. The only upside is the child will hopefully receive love and is hopefully less likely to receive abuse and neglect by being adopted, than had the child stayed with him.

If he himself has a heart he will also be traumatised for life, if he doesn't he will walk away and forget about the whole sorry affair.

Why the disbelief?

People like the idea of puppies all the time, but when the get it, the expectation isn't like they imagined it.

So they rehome it.

We know that adoptions have a certain level of failure rate, even after a huge amount of vetting. The child ends up back in care.

Why would it be any different for surrogacy?

Why would we assume that because someone has bought a baby its all going to end happily ever after? Because the celeb magazines have made it out to be a wonderful thing thats a solution to the heartache of infertility or the logistics of being gay and not being able to carry your own baby?

Seriously?

The fact that there is very little oversight / monitoring of the long term success / failure of surrogancy and no desire to look into this in terms of how it affects all parties concerned, tells you all you need to know.

Surrogacy is viewed as a positive because rich people want to traffic babies for their own selfish desires and don't want to be scrutinised for it.

Really good points @OhHolyJesus and @RedToothBrush
I might need to write both those down for future use.

[quote Thelnebriati]The filicide comments are irritating; its a problem in the US because they don't have health visitors checking new mothers, or mother and baby psychiatric units.
When I talk to people in the US about health visitors they are horrified and consider it an intrusion by the State. Many of them haven't heard of PPS.

''Resnick's review of the world psychiatric literature on maternal filicide found filicidal mothers to have frequent depression, psychosis, prior mental health treatment, and suicidal thoughts.''
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2174580/[/quote]
Wow really? I knew US was a bad place to be pregnant but thats really shocking. You'd think a country so obsessed with controlling women's fertility would at least take some responsibility too

Many years ago, a colleague interviewed Robert Winston who said he had come across several couples who had spent years trying to conceive and, when the pregnancy was confirmed, had subsequently terminated it. It was as if the battle to become a parent had become their focus/obsession rather than the baby itself. So, yes, I can believe this man has fallen out of love with the idea of fatherhood.

Once the baby has been born the regret of what he had done lead him to giving the baby up for adoption.
What an absolutely travesty.

That reminds me of a woman who got pregnant just to see if she could, she had every intention of terminating the pregnancy, she conceived on a one night stand to test her fertility.

What was worse was that I heard this from a mutual friend who had long-standing fertility issues.

The only upside to this is adoption at least screens the parents ahead of time. Let's home that means this little one gets a loving home. I wonder if the adoptive parents will even be told of their child's conception story.

.

Examples like this don't always speak to people because they don't really know whether they are uncommon exceptions in terms of outcomes, or somehow intrinsically related to the process.

Everyone knows that no system is perfect, there are failures even in the best set-ups. Something like this might be completely true, and yet if you looked at the numbers, surrogates might overall lead to much better outcomes than natural pregnancy or adoption. People have become very used to others trying to manipulate their views through inaccurate representations of data or use of anecdotes that don't reflect the real situation. They aren't wrong to query this kind of thing.

The strongest criticisms around surrogacy and gamete donation are philosophical or ideological, IMO. But if you want to base objections on poor outcomes, anecdotes alone without comparisons to other scenarios aren't going to be convincing to many.

Fair point @SmokedDuck