Generally speaking, the 20-week anatomy scan is a blast.
You’ve reached the halfway mark, and the baby is usually up and around, looking an awful lot like a tiny human being. This is (typically) the grand moment of a gender reveal, and your daydreams usually take on a distinctly pink or blue aura from this moment onward. As the ultrasound tech busily takes measurements, you watch in awe: sometimes the baby’s thumb drifts upward toward his little mouth, and your heart just kind of melts.
No parent wants to get bad news from that ultrasound, but for the two gay dads who’d hired a Canadian surrogate mom, bad news it was. Their son had a cleft lip, possibly a cleft palate, and probably a heart defect. To be sure, the genetic issues were minor and could be, in the words of Juliet Guichon, a bioethics professor at the University of Calgary, “completely overcome by surgery and therapy.” But perfect was apparently the standard, and so the gay couple told their surrogate to abort the 22-week-old baby. (RELATED: The Spectator P.M. Ep. 221: YouTuber Couple Aborts Their Baby for Having Down Syndrome)
To her credit, she refused.
So, the pair went to the doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, where they were told that, yes, the baby had a cleft lip, but was otherwise healthy. Finally, they agreed to keep the baby. Then things went sour again.
The mother wanted to have a home birth, something the gay dads had agreed to before the discovery of the cleft lip. They weren’t comfortable with that anymore, but she went ahead with it anyway. While “the baby had breathing problems on delivery,” he seems to have made a full recovery. “The midwives administered oxygen, and called an ambulance to take him to hospital,” according to the National Post, which originally reported the story.
The “dads” got their baby, and all seemed well — except that they never reimbursed the surrogate mom for some of the receipted out-of-pocket costs she had incurred. Surrogate mothers in Canada aren’t paid for their pregnancy. They essentially volunteer to carry someone else’s baby out of the kindness of their hearts, and government regulations merely require that the intended parents cover the financial burden of the birth. So, our surrogate mother took the gay “parents” of the child she had carried and advocated for to small claims court. They promptly served her a separate civil lawsuit that she says the plaintiffs have indicated could be worth up to $600,000.
“You know I’m a single mom, you know I have a daughter, and you’re basically suing me for my house. It seems very s—ty, it’s just awful,” she told the National Post. “I just feel used … They didn’t get the perfect child they wanted and they threw me away.”
And there it is: “I just feel used.”
Because when we realize that the Divinely ordained plan for the continuation of the human race doesn’t quite align with our demented daydreams and decide to circumvent it, we do have a nasty tendency to use people like commodities rather than like the infinitely valuable human beings they really are. This, of course, is the problem with surrogacy. (RELATED: When Parenthood Becomes a Purchase)
Pregnancy and birth are beautiful, mystical, and even sacred experiences that all of us, in one way or another, are subjected to. There is the moment in which man and woman give of themselves to one another freely, and God enters in and breathes the gift of life. Then there are the many months during which the woman carries that life and its eternal soul within her, her heart supplying its blood, her body supporting its life. Finally, there’s the moment the mother pushes the baby out and into the world, and the workings of the hand of God are suddenly revealed.
Sperm and egg meet on a petri dish — not as the result of a selfless gift, but as part transaction and part selfish desire.
Surrogacy is totally different. Sperm and egg meet on a petri dish — not as the result of a selfless gift, but as part transaction and part selfish desire. With the help of a bunch of needles and a bit of luck, the resulting life (which God still deigned to breathe) successfully finds the womb of a woman who is not his mother. The baby’s life might be ended if his intended “parents” determine any genetic abnormalities to be too inconvenient. The mother’s gift of self is (usually) given a monetary value. The precious connection between mother and child is immediately severed at birth as the child is handed over to his purchasers.
There are times when an aberration of the natural order is necessary; we live in a fallen world, after all. But we should not bend the whole beautiful process to our own selfish purposes just because we think we’re entitled to have offspring.
Two guys who have mistakenly come under the impression that they can somehow make up a “family” should not be able to simply throw cash at the problem until a baby appears. A celebrity eager to preserve her perfect appearance for the red carpet shouldn’t be able to use another woman to carry her child (and by the way, Anne Hathaway is currently doing a great job of proving that red carpet duties can be elegantly done while pregnant). Even couples suffering from infertility do not necessarily have the right to use another woman to incubate their biological offspring.
The whole practice of surrogacy is predicated on the premise that children are a right, not a gift. But the fact that the children, biological parents, and surrogate mother are dehumanized and commodified in the process should tell us that there might be something wrong with that premise.
READ MORE from Aubrey Harris:
Just Defund Planned Parenthood Already
The King Is the Defender of ‘the Space for Faith.’ Here’s Why That Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone.
Socialism Just Had a Shocking Come Back. We Need a Better Response
