QUESTIONS ON SURROGATE MOTHERHOOD: I thought about writing a long post about this, with much quoting of Maggie Gallagher and such, but I don’t have time for more than some scattered thoughts.

How is surrogate motherhood better than infidelity? A man is using a woman for pleasure–in this case, the pleasure of children, not the pleasure of sex. But sex and reproduction can’t be so easily unhooked. The Church identifies a unitive and a reproductive purpose for sex–it unites two people, shows their love for one another, and it also makes babies. But actually the reproductive function of sex flows out of the unitive purpose. When we give ourselves to one another in sex, a child can be produced, who further unites his parents and stands as a visible symbol of their unity. The man who procures the services of a surrogate mother is creating a lasting union with a woman whom he does not want to act as the mother of his child. His tie to her will last longer than most adulterous liaisons. We have created a hygienic separation (in our minds, but not in the real world!) between sex and reproduction–but they’re both about the union of two people.

What happens if the surrogate changes her mind? What if she signs a contract saying she’ll hand the baby over, but then refuses to relinquish her child? What if she decides she wants to abort the child? What if the father and his partner decide to move or cut off contact between mother and child? Gallagher discusses the 1986 “Baby M” case, in which a surrogate mother reneged on her agreement to relinquish her baby after the child was born. Cops had to come to wrest the baby from Mary Beth Whitehead, the mother. She was allowed to see her baby for two hours twice a week, but she could not breast-feed the child even when the baby sought her milk. At one point, right after the birth, and right after Whitehead’s decision that she could not part with her child, the childless couple who’d bought her services came to get the baby; Whitehead’s husband fled with the child out the back window; the cops pulled up; Mary Beth, still recovering from giving birth, blood running down her legs, rushed out to plead with the couple. “Look at me,” she begged.

Some excerpts from Gallagher’s Enemies of Eros: “Behind the logic of valorizing contract in this case is an attempt to escape the messy, fleshy reality that we are not only gendered, we are embodied. ‘Nobody, including [Mary Beth Whitehead], ever intended her to be the mother,’ said Gary Skoloff, the Sterns’ lawyer. ‘So you’re not terminating a mother.’ If intention is the key, then, parenting is no longer a thing of the flesh, subject to involuntary processes, outside of our control. Reason has tamed its most stubborn opponent, not, of course, by actually controlling the body, but by the simple expedient of refusing to recognize anything that falls outside reason’s domain. Our bodies cannot make us parents, we make ourselves mothers and fathers in the most respectable of all fashions, by making deals.

“…Intent would be a practically fool-proof defense in paternity suits, for example. After all, the average guy rationally intends only to put peg A in hole B. Or maybe, if he’s a really nice guy, he intends to express his deep affection and to give his woman rapturous pleasure. In other words, put peg A into hole B. If a baby comes out nine months later, that’s not his fault, is it?…

“If surrogate advocates are correct about the source of parental obligation, then it is not only difficult, but also morally wrong to impose financial buderns on the growing ranks of absent fathers. If it is choice that makes parents of us all, then it is wrong, unjust, and unnatural that a man should suffer for a baby he did not will and to whom therefore he is unrelated.”

The father of these children wanted a surrogate mother so that he could be the kids’ biological father. He clearly believes that there’s something unique about physical generation, physical fatherhood–DNA, in short. He maybe wanted kids that looked something like him, or had some of his traits. That physical connection would solidify his fatherhood. So OK, if his DNA is so important, why isn’t the mother’s DNA important? Why is he the father while she’s, what, an aunt, or a friend of the family? If physical fatherhood is important, isn’t physical motherhood at least as important?

It’s funny (sorta) how many people are willing to pretend–or, I don’t know, maybe they really believe this–that getting pregnant and giving birth are just like any other job. After all, don’t they call it “labor”? When I work for a temp agency, or wherever, aren’t they “renting the use of my body”? Isn’t it all the same thing really?

I’ve never given birth. But I have a sneaking suspicion that the answer to these questions isn’t really “No, it’s not the same,” but more like, “Are you out of your ever-loving mind????” “Renting a uterus” means paying a woman to undergo a biological process that is designed–or evolved, or whatever, it really doesn’t matter–to produce emotions of bonding, mother-love, and intense, tigress-like passion for her baby. But the surrogate mother is expected to repress this tidal wave of emotion as easily as if she were turning off a tap. Because she’s not really the child’s parent. Because she and the people who recruited her didn’t want her to be the child’s parent, and she put her signature on some papers. The people who recruited her are the real parents, because they “conceived” the child–they thought it up. She merely provided temporary housing and DNA.

How can we rely on ferocious, constant, necessary mother-love–the fact that women usually fall in love with their babies–to sustain society, but then expect surrogate mothers to shut it off because they signed a contract saying they would?

How is attempting to base family life on contract any better than Antioch “Can I unbutton your top button? What about the next one?” College’s attempt to base heavy petting on contract? Obviously, sometimes contract-type arrangements are needed to form families–adoption papers are the most obvious example. But isn’t that contract-model a sign that something’s broken down in the family, a last resort done for the best interests of the child, not a model that we should emulate in cases where the best interests of the child clearly aren’t the driving force (since no child even exists before the surrogate contract is signed)?