As  I read the latest news on surrogacy regarding the two Australian couples who have reportedly been stopped from leaving Thailand with their babies amid a crackdown on surrogacy laws in the country, I can’t help thinking how we’ve well and truly let the ‘genie out of the bottle’ on this issue. But we were warned. Radical feminists have been busy researching and writing about the abuse of women and their wombs for many years now.  And so it has come to pass.

In 1991 Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein published Angels of Power and other reproductive creations, a book where imagination, vision and a sense of the absurd came together and demonstrated that women can resist the power of god-like scientists who long to create monsters and angels. Sadly the resistance has weakened and the scientists appear to be winning. 

Reading from Angels of Power:
Marta: I went into the hospital to have our baby, but Thomas has transferred Helen’s baby into my womb.
Mary: Why would he do that?
Marta: To see if he could do it.– Sandra Shotlander

The current flurry of reports about surrogacy have come in the wake of the story of Thai surrogate mother Pattaramon Chanbua and Gammy, the six-month old twin who was left with his surrogate mother after his Australian biological parents returned to Western Australia taking only his twin sister.

The 21 year-old mother of two was struggling to pay debts last year when she was offered the equivalent of $11,700 to be a surrogate for the Western Australian couple. The story we’ve been hearing about Gammy, his surrogate mother, and his biological parents has worsened every day. Baby Gammy, who has Down syndrome was very unwell, and required hospital treatment and it might be that he will require expensive medical treatment throughout his life; David Farnell, his biological father turned out to be a convicted sex offender; and according to Pattaramon Chanbua, Farnell, completely ignored his son Gammy as he lay beside his sister in the hospital nursery.

The case of Gammy, the abandoned twin of David and Wendy Farnell forces us to face some ugly truths about surrogacy. One of these is that it is easy for the surrogate to forget the child she has carried and nurtured for nine months.

The idea that giving up the child who lived, grew, and moved inside you for nine months is easy, is untrue and strongly repudiated by Pattaramon Chanbua: “I chose to have him, not to hurt him. I love him. He was in my tummy for nine months, it’s like my child. I treat him like my other children, never think you are not my child and I don’t care for you, never.”

Pattaramon Chanbua has shown that she has great love for the child as have other women who have become surrogates. In Being and  Being Bought : Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self , author Kajsa Ekis Ekman reminds us of the woman who gave surrogacy a face in the USA. In 1980 Elizabeth Kane became the USA’s first legal surrogate who declared she wasn’t doing it for the money but to help a childless couple. Kane was the surrogacy agency’s ‘perfect poster woman’ who said that she was not at all troubled by giving up the child. ” The joy I had received from seeing him in their arms would last a lifetime,” she said. However after the excitement of the pregnancy and the birth came the waning attention, and Kane became depressed. Kane explained her experience as a ‘terrible mistake’: “I now believe that surrogate motherhood is nothing more than the transference of pain from one woman to another. One woman is in anguish because she cannot become a mother, and another woman may suffer for the rest of her life because she cannot know the child she bore for someone else.” Kane later founded the National Coalition Against Surrogacy.

And it’s the poor and vulnerable women who become surrogates. On ABC TV’s ‘Foreign Correspondent’ program July 8, reporter Jane Cowan took a critical look at commercial surrogacy. The Last Resort was filmed in Cancun, Mexico, where poor women often from rural villages came to the popular tourist city hoping to become surrogate mothers.This is abuse and exploitation of women and especially of the poorest, most vulnerable of women who have little job prospects and need this money to improve their families’ lives.

This particular case of Gammy highlights the plight of the baby who is not considered perfect. As we have seen his biological parents chose to take his healthy sister while rejecting him. How many more cases of children with disabilities produced by surrogacy have occurred? What do we know of them? Thankfully for Gammy his surrogate mother and her family have bonded with him.

Surrogacy is an industry that only exists because increasingly society seems to believe that everyone is owed a child, while in reality there are plenty of unfortunate children who need the love and attention of rich, childless people.

There were times when babies were conceived or not; and not every woman became a mother; those who didn’t went on to do other creative things with their lives. But now it seems that everyone has to be a parent even to the extent of renting a womb for nine months.

I implore you good women,

posed in supplication,

do not be so good.

I implore you would-be man-made women to fight the man-made forces.

I implore you native women to return from your forced exiles back to your homelands.

I beseech you to beg not for the lives of the unconceived.

I implore you to claim your own life.

-Cait Featherstone, Angels of Power

 

• Baby Gammy forces us to face some ugly truths about surrogacy
• 54 women killed by partners so far this year – but have we counted the children?

Categories: books, feminism, health, media, politics, surrogacy, womens rights

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.