Monday, July 30, 2007

The Ultimate In Outsourcing

Apparently now you can have your baby carried by a woman in India and just delivered (literally!) to you when it arrives. That should cut back on discrimination at work.

Of course the article is really about surrogacy in cases where the mother has fertility problems. I still can't help thinking it would be better if we encouraged adoption more enthusiastically.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Surrogate motherhood squicks me out too. Especially outsourcing it to India? How many dystopian novels have been written where the lowest class are women who are the "breeders" carrying babies for the wealthy? Can we try not to enact that in real life?

I'd adopt before I'd ever consider surrogacy, but adoption is complicated, too. I'm not sure about the UK, but I do know a bit about adoption in America (I'm adopted). Here, there's thousands and thousands of children in foster care who will likely never be adopted because they do not fit the mold of the perfect healthy white infant. Most potential adopters here will not even consider adopting a kid who is not white (the race of most adopters), is older than six months, or has any medical problems at all. On the other hand, they'll pay up to $40,000, or more, for their perfect baby. Since healthy white infants are in such demand, healthy white pregnant women are targets. If you are single, young and white and show up to a hospital to give birth, they will pressure you to give your baby up for adoption whether or not you've ever considered it before. They'll tell you about "open adoption", where you'll get visitation with your baby. What they won't tell you is that in almost every state open adoption is completely unenforceable and in most cases you'll never see your baby again. They'll tell you that you'll have so long to change your mind after you sign the adoption papers, but they won't tell you that your paperwork to null the adoption will probably get lost in their bureaucracy (funny how the original adoption paperwork never seems to get lost) until after the deadline. There was a pretty famous case the in the media lately about a woman who was pregnant via IVF (it was a very wanted, planned pregnancy) but got very sick from the pregnancy and couldn't take care of her newborns (for about a month or so). Then an adoption agency pressured her to put her kids up for adoption (while she was still sick!). She signed the paperwork, but regretted it write away, but couldn't get around the legal hurdles to reverse it (while she was still sick!) in the 7-day period allowed by her state. She tried fighting through the legal system for her girls for awhile, but eventually snapped and grabbed them and fled for Canada. Last I heard she was going to jail for kidnapping.

What needs to be encouraged is not just adoption, but a healthy system of adoption.

Cruella said...

Interesting. I've not really heard much about that kind of stuff. In the UK I've actually heard the opposite - white couples desperate to adopt, happy to take a non-white baby, and the authorities refusing to place a child with a family that doesn't "match" ethnicity-wise. We certainly have lots of adverts around asking for more adoptive (and foster) parents and stressing the need for parents willing to take on children with problems.

Stan said...

What next - maybe get an Indian bloke to do the insemination and then the "father" won't miss the football and "mother" won't get stretchmarks.

Once the kid is repatriated, I'm sure it'll spend most of the time being looked after by a Polish nanny. Puh-leez : just how much of life is it possible for some people to opt-out of ?