Oregon births a boom in surrogate babies

Interesting article, if you pay for it , they will come (if you click on the print option, you will get the full article, but cancel the print).

Oregon is on the leading edge of a new fertility frontier.

Decades after artificial insemination became commonplace, would-be parents are testing the ethical boundaries of surrogacy here, partly because Oregon is one state in which it is legal to pay surrogate mothers.

Gestational surrogacy, as it is known, allows infertile and gay couples to hire a woman to carry a baby to term. Surrogates earn $20,000 to $30,000 to become impregnated and deliver a baby for couples they have met briefly, through agencies or over the Internet. The baby might be biologically related to the would-be mother, father, both or neither.

Because few women will endure nine months of pregnancy for strangers without pay, the practice is growing in Oregon and California, where the legal climate attracts prospective parents.

“No one wants to call it this, but surrogacy — along with adoption and egg and sperm donations — is really an unacknowledged market,” said Debora Spar, an expert in the fertility business.

Nothing like free enterprise. I’ve also heard of similar in Maryland. The old ideas of family are falling apart, though I question their veracity, since in the old days usually one of the parents died a horrible death, and the other remarried in order to safeguard the family. My family goes back to 1612 in North America, and most of my ancestors had more than one spouse due to death. We do NOT need federal regulation in this (I’m anti-Commerce Clause BTW).

Although based on a complex contract, the relationship between a surrogate and prospective parents is also very intimate. Its etiquette and terminology are still evolving.

Keri is a Portland wife and mother of three who last month gave birth to another family’s twin daughters.

Keri, 31, and the intended mother met often; the families developed a warm friendship. “But it did start out kind of funny,” Keri said. “No one had ever interviewed me before to see if they wanted to use my uterus.”

The father of the twins agreed. During the pregnancy, he sometimes wondered how Keri’s husband, Scott, felt about his wife being pregnant with another man’s children. He never asked, though. “We’ll all talk about intimate details of Keri’s body. But the truth is, we don’t really know each other.”

Wise is the man who knows his own father. And I view this as a great gift from the surrogate. See the linked article for more on the legal and moral aspects, but I greatly respect the women who decide to become surrogates.

These children will have loving parents. Parents that can afford children, and can afford the time children require.

HT: orbusmax

FILED UNDER: LGBTQ Issues, Uncategorized, , , , , ,
Richard Gardner
About Richard Gardner
Richard Gardner is a “retired” Navy Submarine Officer with military policy, arms control, and budgeting experience. He contributed over 100 pieces to OTB between January 2004 and August 2008, covering special events. He has a BS in Engineering from the University of California, Irvine.

Comments

  1. Christopher says:

    How much to raise the kids, too?

  2. Bithead says:

    So is the story here that our market-based economy is able to respond to an artificial demand, or that our misguided social policies have created it?

  3. Anderson says:

    What does it mean to be “anti-Commerce Clause”? You want the Constitution amened to remove the clause, or you just think it’s been wrongly applied beyond the proper bounds of “interstate commerce”?

    If the latter, would you for example agree with the old Supreme Court holding that “manufacturing” isn’t “commerce” and thus falls outside the clause?