Expecting another woman’s child
SIDRA KRANZ MOSHINSKY
AS our friendship developed over cups of coffee at work, I gradually came to learn more about her life: her childhood, her family, her husband and his career, their new home and efforts over successive weekends to give it the much needed face-lift, her gorgeous baby nephew.
Things got busy, she was away a bit, then back at work, but something wasn’t right and the light had gone from her face, despite her visible efforts to be cheerful. When we finally got to have a proper conversation, out the words came: “I’ll never be able to have children” – a weak heart; pregnancy would pose too many risks. Her grief and sadness hung in the air.
Flash-forward a couple of years and she now has a beautiful baby boy. Through a long and quite torturous process, involving multiple trips to India, various unsuccessful attempts and considerable expense, she and her husband have a child thanks to a surrogacy arrangement. Efforts to implant an embryo that would be completely biologically “theirs” failed and in the end, the boy is genetically made up of his father’s sperm and an egg of his carrier mother. Not surprisingly, he is considerably darker looking than his two fair-skinned parents.
Sensitive to the fact that this is not some “neat” surrogacy deal in which the carrier has no genetic connection to the child she is carrying, and as caring people striving to do right in this arrangement that takes place in an ethical minefield, my friend and her husband are raising the child conscious that he has an Indian family, as well as an Australian one. They have arranged to pay for the education of his half-brothers and sisters in India, in the hope that this will do something to ameliorate the stark differences in quality of life facing the two branches of the family.
The ancient assumption underpinning our society, that determining fatherhood can be difficult, but identifying the mother is a straightforward matter, unravels in this brave new world of assisted reproduction and quickly changing models of family. The vocabulary of mother and father (in the singular) becomes woefully inadequate.
Laws brought into effect in New South Wales last week (and already in place in Queensland and Tasmania) now make what my friend did illegal in that state. Commercial surrogacy is banned across Australia, with provision for altruistic surrogacy only. The rationale for banning commercial surrogacy arrangements made overseas is that they have the effect of subverting the principles and objectives behind Australian law, which are to prevent exploitation of women and to ensure that each child has the right to access their genetic origin and to form a relationship with their birth mother.
There is no easy way through this emotionally, morally and ethically charged landscape. Like a kaleidoscope, any way you turn it, new images and new complexities emerge. If, as a society, we have deemed commercial surrogacy illegal (unlike Israel, which in 1996 was the first country to introduce it within a carefully regulated scheme), then certainly there are issues with going to a Third World country to enter into what would constitute an unlawful arrangement here. Added to this are the inequities in terms of wealth and potential for exploitation, but these First World versus Third World injustices also arise in relation to tourism, dentistry and the delivery of ever cheaper goods without too much fuss.
Other issues to consider are who should have access to these schemes, wherever they are located: infertile heterosexual couples, single women, same-sex partners, gay men? What happens if the carrier changes her mind? Would the contract be enforceable? What if things go wrong with the pregnancy? What about the mental health of the surrogate mother, who willingly and with full consent entered into the arrangement, but whose body is not following what the mind dictates and finds herself grieving for the infant she has lost? On the other hand, do we wish to deny people the opportunity to become biological parents when we have the medical means to make it happen, but not the collective strength to set up frameworks, global ones, to ensure that it is done ethically?
This week marked the centenary of celebrating International Women’s Day. Since March 1911, when more than one million women and men attended events across Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, women’s lives have improved dramatically in terms of education, health, wealth, political and civil rights, albeit in a somewhat uneven pattern across countries. Nevertheless, in some respects, the more things change, the more
they stay the same, for who cannot hear echoing the voices, the anguish, the happiness and the tensions of Sarah and Hagar in the debate about surrogacy in the 21st century?
Sidra Kranz Moshinsky is head of Jewish studies at Bialik College and a freelance writer.