If you’re wondering how much two healthy babies, lab-conceived and gestated by surrogates, will set you back in this economy, the bill is $120,000 in Mexico. I know, that does sound rather high. But it’s really quite a bargain—after all, it is over double that stateside. Although you could just take out a loan. Simply add one more payment to your regular monthly bills—you know, don’t forget to pay your mortgage, water, gas, baby, car, electric.
Shocked? Think it sounds crass and unethical to speak of human beings this way? I do too. And yet, we are living in a world where pricing human life happens on a daily basis, and the combination of IVF and surrogacy is just one example. In fact, the scenario I just described of purchasing two babies in Mexico is perfectly legal, as long as you can afford it. Yet we as a society, and Christians in particular, should be asking more questions about this process of buying and selling babies, especially as the ongoing scientific advancements in egg freezing, genome editing, embryo screening, and artificial wombs will only introduce further bioethical quandaries.
But for the moment, let’s talk about the best babies money can buy—because Mother’s Day is coming up, so what better time for this frank tête-à-tête?
Recently, SNL aired a curious skit. A gay couple brings a newborn with them to a social gathering with two heterosexual couples. The latter are understandably confused and repeatedly try to ask the question in various permutations: Just where did this baby come from? How is this possible? The happy new parents are evasive and repeatedly feel insulted, accusing their friends of discrimination. Questions like “who’s the mother?” get answers from the two men, each vying to explain why he is the mother in this relationship. “I’m more emotional, and I love shopping, so I guess it’s me,” one says. “We both kind of are,” the other one concludes. “Did you steal her?”—follows another exasperated question from their friends. “Well, she kind of stole us,” follows the response (accompanied by giggles), as if this all were the most natural thing in the world. The mystery of the baby’s origin is never explained by the end of the skit.
Much social media discussion ensued over this skit: What does it suggest about SNL’s views on marriage and family? Does it mean (as a few conservative Christians floated hopefully) that the tide is changing and conservative views on family are coming back? Most likely, the answer is no. Rather, the skit only shows how normalized in some circles the notion of a family of two dads has become. It’s normal enough to laugh at it. (Happy Mother’s Day, ironically!)
The skit’s jokes all revolve around biology—one side in the conversation is sex-realist in its assumptions about human reproduction, whereas the other side attempts to ignore that reality. The gay couple exclaims indignantly at one point, “Gay people can’t have a baby?” Of course, everyone knows the biological answer: no, they cannot. But modern scientific advancements have made work-arounds possible—cue the practice of surrogacy.
The same week the skit aired, I came across a similar news story to the scenario in the skit, but this one took place in real life. A male couple wanted to have two children with a biological connection to each of them. So they commissioned an egg donor, then used the eggs from the same donor for fertilization, resulting in seven embryos for one of them and nine for the other. Finally, they hired two surrogates—one for each of them. Things worked out about as well as possible: The two surrogates became pregnant just two weeks apart, leading to the birth of healthy babies this January. And the happy American dads did all of this in Mexico, where the bill for creating their ideal family was half of what it would have been in the US. It is their baby-making bill that I describe in opening this piece.
So how did this happen? These two dads’ story, garden variety surrogacy that it is, offers a response to the questions that went unanswered in the SNL kit.
Let’s begin with the nuts and bolts before anything else. Just how do you normally get a baby—biologically speaking? First, basic science requires an egg and a sperm to create an embryo. Since men do not have ovaries, they cannot produce eggs. This means that this particular couple’s journey to have children started with egg retrieval from two different donors (because the first donor’s harvesting did not yield enough eggs at the end).
If you have grown used to the nonchalant way people speak or write of egg donation or egg retrieval today, think again. As journalist Natalie Lampert describes in her book The Big Freeze, the process of preparing to harvest eggs and then the harvesting itself is quite complex and takes a toll on a woman’s body–only the latest cost our society is willing to exact from women to go against their biology in order to play the fertility game (as it becomes in the process) by men’s rules. Indeed, the most recent data on the abortion pill reveals “one in ten patients experiences a serious adverse event.” The story of the early research on the Pill is no less ethically fraught. But back we go to egg-harvesting. The heavy use of hormones in this process, Lampert discovered, has resulted in the rise of certain cancers for women who had willingly frozen their eggs. Because of the egg freezing craze, however, insufficient research has been done into this connection at this time. Egg freezing, after all, is a lucrative business, largely fueled by women trying to extend their childbearing years. But it is also fueled by men who decide to have children without, well, ever marrying a woman. (Happy Mother’s Day, ironically.)
But harvesting eggs is only the starting point. Next, the eggs need to be fertilized with sperm to create embryos. The two dads were happy to contribute their own sperm for the lab, getting seven and nine embryos respectively. Next they hired two surrogates, and one embryo from each dad was implanted. The story does not mention what happened to the remaining fourteen embryos, by the way. There are two options: They were frozen in storage or they were discarded. Since the couple in the story is not planning to have any additional children, the second option seems likely. Keeping embryos in storage is, after all, quite pricey, so why do it if you don’t plan on having any additional kids?
On we go to the gestational surrogates, who carried these babies and gave birth to them—one vaginally and the other via caesarean. Having experienced both of these types of birth, I can attest to the lifelong scars and complications that attend these. An emergency c-section delivery for my oldest son resulted in unexpected health complications for the entire year that followed, including an extreme reaction to anesthesia. I opted for unmedicated natural births with a midwife for my younger two children in order to avoid a repeat experience, and both of those births were much easier. But still, even when everything goes according to the textbook, childbirth is no walk in the park. And yet, mothers ever since Eve have done this. Why? Because there is no delight in the world that compares with holding your own newborn for the first time—and then raising this child with your husband, day after day, year after year. (Happy Mother’s Day—unironically!)
But what if you don’t actually get to take that baby home with you after carrying him or her and then giving birth? There are additional emotional costs that are involved in carrying a child for nine months. Pregnancy is the ultimate bonding process for mothers with the baby in utero. The surrogate’s body, hormones, emotions—all these combine to treat the baby as her own, because that is how pregnancy is naturally designed to work. During any pregnancy–including surrogacy–”genetic material from the prenatal child crosses through the placenta and can be found in her mother’s circulation,” explains medical doctor and bioethicist Kristin Collier in her overview of this phenomenon, called fetal-maternal microchimerism. No wonder some surrogates have gone to court to try and claim the children they have carried as their own–they always lose, of course. (Happy Mother’s Day, ironically.) Legal concerns around surrogacy largely revolve around this very possibility—and surrogacy contracts try to make it ironclad that the baby does not legally belong to the human womb carrying it—and whose hands had signed away any rights to this baby after birth.
In third-world countries, however, women sign up to be surrogates out of sheer desperation, as a way to earn money. The practice is unethical, to say the least. The lack of substantial regulation of surrogacy in Mexico means that surrogates are often subjected to caesarean delivery against their wishes—a delivery method that is much riskier, has a longer recovery time, and could carry with it a lifetime of complications. Besides, exploitation of surrogates is common. This is, by the way, why the cost of surrogates and the rest of related services in Mexico is less than half that in the US.
That’s how it is with all transactions. Wise consumers should indeed price their options and choose the most affordable. Sometimes the most affordable, though, is the least ethical. And, of course, as with all businesses, this one too is driven by supply and demand. Without demand, there would be no need for supply.
At least, the ethical issues related to using human surrogates will probably at some point disappear. Surrogacy will yet be rendered obsolete by such medical advancements as artificial wombs (now in development) or Whole Body Gestational Donation—a still theoretical utilitarian practice whereby the body of a brain-stem dead patient is used to gestate a baby. Because why waste a perfectly good body just because the brain of its owner is dead? (Happy Mother’s Day—ironically, for sure.)
But the ethical issues related to creating babies in labs and purchasing them as cattle will not go away as easily as the ethical concerns revolving around the larger practice. Deep inside, we know this, which is why in the SNL skit, the very progressive friends of the gay married couple could accept their friends’ union for granted, but asked all those awkward questions about the baby, including “who’s the mother?”
Ignore and fight it as some might at times, there is no denying the power of nature and natural law. Mother’s Day is, at its most basic level, a celebration of both. It is a proclamation even in our confused culture that yes, of course, mothers matter—and no baby would possibly exist without one.
Happy Mother’s Day (unironically)!