surrogacy

Why There's No Such Thing as 'Surrogacy Gone Wrong'

Why There's No Such Thing as 'Surrogacy Gone Wrong'

In the 22nd week of surrogate Brittney Pearson’s pregnancy, she was diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer. Because the necessary treatment could harm the baby, her doctors recommended inducing labor early and allowing the baby to be cared for in neonatal intensive care while she started chemo. However, the gay couple paying Brittney Pearson to serve as their surrogate did not want a premature baby with potential developmental or health problems. They wanted her instead to have an abortion.

Pearson offered to put the baby up for adoption, but the men refused because, according to Pearson, they did not want a child who was genetically related to one of them somewhere “out there.” According to Pearson, the men threatened both her and her doctors with a lawsuit if she did not abort her child. Because of California’s radical surrogacy laws, which allow financiers of a surrogacy arrangement to be granted legal parental rights of the baby before he or she is born, they likely would have prevailed.

Unconscious Surrogacy? A Shocking Proposal Should Prompt Introspection

Unconscious Surrogacy? A Shocking Proposal Should Prompt Introspection

Last month, in the journal Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, philosophy professor Anna Smajdor from Norway proposed that the global medical community should consider what she called “whole body gestational donation.” Women in a permanent vegetative state or who are declared brain dead could be used, she suggested, as unconscious surrogate mothers for people who, as the paper states, either “wish to have children but cannot, or prefer not to gestate.” According to Smajdor, though what she is proposing may sound shocking, it is really no different, at least not in any qualitative ethical way, from organ donation and other assisted reproductive technologies.

Surrogacy in the Time of War

Surrogacy in the Time of War

In recent years, Ukraine has become “an international surrogacy hub.” In the last few weeks, amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, surrogate mothers across Ukraine have been forced to choose between doing what’s right for themselves and their families, and following the contractual demands of paying “parents” thousands of miles away. Many of these women have refused to move since that would separate them from loved ones in harm’s way. Others fled after the clinics in charge of their pregnancies were forced to shut down.

We Need to Talk about Assisted Reproduction

We Need to Talk about Assisted Reproduction

Many Christians and pastors avoid talking about assisted reproduction, but the moral stakes are too high to remain silent. Embryos are abandoned in freezers right now with more added every day. Couples are hiring surrogates to carry their babies today. Some Christian women even think of it as their mission field. States are passing legislation to turn the practice into a full-blown industry. Christians are in church pews today, tempted, and even pursued by segments of assisted reproduction industries at risk of making uninformed but serious moral mistakes.

Adoption Is Beautiful, Surrogacy Isn't: Responding to Concerns and Questions

Adoption Is Beautiful, Surrogacy Isn't: Responding to Concerns and Questions

Adoption is proof that physically bearing children is not the only way a woman becomes a mother. Among the darkest evils of surrogacy is that it treats a mother as less than a whole person, wanted for her procreational parts that are increasingly treated as consumer products, especially as commercial surrogacy becomes more common.

Anderson Cooper and the New Normal: Why Surrogacy Is Oppression

Anderson Cooper and the New Normal: Why Surrogacy Is Oppression

We’ve repeatedly pointed out the many ethical problems with surrogacy on BreakPoint: it assumes “children” are a right that God never promised; it assumes a Gnostic view of human bodies and relationships; it denies children the opportunity to be raised by their biological mom and a dad; it treats children as products instead of image-bearers; it poses a significant risk for women to be exploited financially.

Women Are More than Wombs: NY Debates Commercial Surrogacy

Women Are More than Wombs: NY Debates Commercial Surrogacy

New York is considering two bills that would legalize commercial surrogacy in the state. Like in Washington State, where commercial surrogacy is already legal, the push in New York is being made with “heartstrings rhetoric and celebrity endorsement.”