A game of musical uterus
Would you abort an unborn child? What if it wasn’t yours?
Believe it or not, this is the question faced by a group of surrogate mothers in California this past week, and by a woman in Japan the week before that.
If you read Slate, you may have been following William Saletan’s commentary on these stories, which all have to do with the mixing of modern technology and age-old questions of body and ownership (personal organ sales anyone?).
In one case, couples in California working through a broker company hired surrogate mothers to have their children. The company lost all the money to bad investments, and found themselves unable to pay the already-pregnant surrogates.
By previous court ruling, the surrogate women, if they wanted to, could simply abort the fetuses. This would void their contract, but they weren’t being paid either way, and as emotionally gratifying as it may be, carrying their child to term could come with all sorts of expenses and dangers that they were no longer being compensated for.
What should the surrogate mothers have done? Do they have a moral obligation to continue bearing someone else’s child?
Would your answer change if the “surrogacy” was unintended? What if a woman undergoes in vitro fertilization (a way to get around infertility, among other uses) and the doctor implants the wrong embryo inside her? Is this woman obligated to keep her child? If this question seems easier than the one above, why?
In case you’re worried, all of the surrogates did decide to keep the children, although the woman with the mistaken embryo did not. The question stands, however — even if the women decided to terminate their surrogate pregnancies, would that have been wrong? Is this example a reason to disallow surrogate pregnancies altogether?
–Jue Wang
April 17th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
The decision to continue a pregnancy ultimately is that of the woman who is carrying the pregnancy, she incurs all the risk associated with pregnancy and therefore is the only one capable of balancing the risk:benefit ratio in any given circumstance. A woman may factor in any number of issues in deciding whether to continue a pregnancy or not. Is this an intended pregnancy or unintended? Is there a support system for raising the child? Is the pregnancy the result of a non-consensual act? Are there medical conditions that increase the health risk associated with carrying a pregnancy to term? Is there a genetic disorder in the fetus or other malformation?
The issues raised in the cases presented are really no different than any other case where a woman struggles with the decision to carry a pregnancy to term or to terminate. Had either of the surrogates opted to terminate, we can no more say that decision was wrong than any other decision to terminate.
The larger ethical issue that arises out of these cases is the appropriateness of paid surrogacy. Is paid surrogacy any different from an ethical standpoint than buying a kidney for transplant? If a woman can rent out her uterus for financial gain, why can I not sell one of my kidneys for the same reason? Certainly there is a role for surrogacy as there is a role for organ donation, but it should be an altruistic gift. Donors or surrogates should not have to incur expense for their gift, but nor should there be financial profit for the donor/surrogate.