IF YOU STOP PAYING A SURROGATE MOTHER, WHAT HAPPENS TO THE FETUS? I should really make you guys go to MarriageDebate for this stuff, but I thought this would be of interest:

If you’re angry about the AIG scandal or Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, check out what’s happening to the infertile couples and surrogate mothers involved in a California womb brokerage. It’s a familiar tale of vanishing funds and defaulted obligations. But this time, the potential loss is bigger than property. It’s pregnancy.

Whose pregnancies are at stake? That’s a tricky question. Through in vitro fertilization, a fetus can have two mothers: a genetic one and a gestational one. Last week, for example, we looked at a Japanese case in which a doctor mistakenly put one woman’s embryo in another woman’s uterus. Weeks later, the second woman was told of the error and aborted the pregnancy. The first woman wasn’t told about anything for two and a half months.

That’s what can happen when you separate pregnancy into two stages. One woman can abort another’s offspring.

And that’s not the only way it can happen. Thousands of women have hired themselves out as gestational surrogates. If you’re the child’s genetic mother, you can put a clause in the contract stipulating under what circumstances the surrogate can abort the pregnancy. But no court will enforce that clause, because you aren’t the one who’s pregnant. The surrogate is. She can choose abortion unilaterally. All you can do is stop paying her for carrying the child.

But what if it’s the other way around? What if you stop paying her first? If you had hired her to sew booties for your kid, she could respond to your nonpayment by halting work on the booties. But her job wasn’t to deliver booties. It was to deliver the kid. If she responds by halting work on the thing you’ve stopped paying for, that thing is your child.

Presumably, if you care enough about the baby to have hired a surrogate, you’ll pay what you promised. But what if you don’t control the payments? What if you delivered the money to a broker, and the broker lost, stole, or squandered it? You did your part, but the surrogate is no longer being paid. And she has every legal right to end the pregnancy.

That’s the scenario unfolding in California.

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