Views on the surrogate who refused termination after foetal heart defect

[Soubriquet]

I did look for a thread but I couldn’t find one.

what are we thinking about the surrogate who refused to terminate because the baby had a heart defect, despite the “parents” insisting on a termination.

The baby has now been born, and she didn’t even get a chance to hold him, before he was taken away.

I don’t agree with surrogacy, and I feel very sorry for this baby

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Willingly.
Many women who sign up for surrogacy are poor. They aren’t often well off or rich.
Occasionally relatives. Sometimes people who are addicted to being pregnant ( which in itself raises questions of exploiting a person with a mental health issue).
When the majority of women do it because of poverty it is not willingly.

It is horrendous. I watched a programme about a surrogacy in India. The women there do it because they have no money. No NHS. No means to survive. Bills to pay.

When the baby was removed the mother ( because that is what she was) was distraught and depressed. The organisation just told her she would get over it. And to come back when she was ready to do it all again.

You would have to have no soul to consider buying a baby in this fashion okay.

I dont really understand why they forced the removal of the child from her when they didnt want the pregnancy to continue? Is it because they paid for it?

Whose sperm and egg was this baby formed from?

Why did she continue to want the care of the child when the original plan was for her to hand the baby over? They appear to now want to care for the baby and have provided treatment for him, so why is she now wanting custody?

Its a mess and I dont agree with surrogacy like this. I can see an argument occasaionally where for example one sister agrees to have a baby for another even thought I still dont really understand it.

Im not even keen on IVF type interventions. I think people see having children as a right and I dont agree with this.

This. There's really not much more to say on the matter.

Babies aren't commodities.

All this slavery reparation on one hand, on the other, treating women like breeding incubating units and babies like a lifestyle purchase on the other. It's obscene. In fact, and I think this might be the first time I've used this word in about thirty years - it's evil.

Agreed.

The double standards are breathtaking.

So quick to see the faults of previous generations, but so blind to the faults of our own.

It's really the fake mother in Solomon's Trial in the Old Testament.They won't have it but they won't let anyone else have it either.

Compare to the real mother, who wants the child to live above all.

How can it be legal to sign a contract to give away her autonomy? You're saying that she signed a contract to agree to be a slave. This can't possibly be legal, can it?

In a civilized country one should not need to pay up front for heart surgery on a baby. What a crap country. Is this the USA? So anyone poor who has a baby with a heart problem should abort it? You are totally in the wrong here.

Surrogacy contracts appear to be a form of slavery. The body is being used by the purchasing parents. The baby is a slave/commodity too. This all needs to end.

I dont know how anyone rationalises it. Taking a baby from its mother!

I don't care if she did something legally wrong, it was definitely morally right.

I'm not so sure. It's the child that has to live with the consequences.

That's true of surrogacy generally.

So many people just bought and sold, but at the heart of it a baby living and growing up with the consequences of human trafficking. Of course all sorts of risks to the (sometimes two different) women paid for ovum and to hire their bodies - egg retrieval is risky, gestating an unrelated foetus is more dangerous than your own.

The baby is is a human being who grows up either not knowing their history (potentially including genetic background if a donor or purchased egg) or knowing they are bought. There are also attachment issues possible when a baby is removed from the mother who carries the baby - exacerbated obviously when there's an interval during which the newborn is removed but not handed over to the buyers (as in the Ukrainian mass abandonment scandal and the hundreds of babies not collected during the pandemic).

Who is going to enforce that contract and hold her down to abort the child?
You obviously are up for that, and the disgusting misogynistic men who obviously felt entitled to such Gilead levels of control over women’s bodies.

Presumably she was under tremendous pressure from all concerned to have an abortion in a very asymmetric relationship. It’s pretty obvious they would have sought an enforcement order and got told No>> who’s legally incorrect?

Dreadful.

Maybe I should have been clearer: it's morally right to let the mother decide not to abort the baby.

Whether it's morally right to not abort the baby at all is a whole different question, and a far reaching one (should society compel the abortion of all fetuses diagnosed in utero with Down syndrome ?), but has nothing to do per se with surrogacy. Especially as the baby would not have been given up to an orphanage and the mother had offered to have custody (her brother was ready to adopt him).