My Biggest Problem With Gestational Surrogacy

Out of all the troublesome issues France Winddance Twine raises in her book Outsourcing The Womb: Race, Class, and Gestational Surrogacy in a Global Market, the one that hurts me to the core is the fact that gestational surrogacy is replacing adoption as the go-to option for wealthy couples biologically unable to conceive children. According to AdoptUSkids there are currently 102,000 children in foster care waiting to be adopted, while 20,000 of them are aging out of the system every passing year. Over a hundred thousand children are living like nomads, moving from foster parent to foster parent, town to town, school to school every couple of months. Twenty thousand of them are 21 and considered adults, tossed out of the system without safety nets, never having known what it is like to have a permanent family who loves them and has the means to care for them.

It breaks my heart to realize that couples would rather rent the womb of an impoverished woman in India to incubate a semi-genetically related fetus than provide a home for a foster child who is already alive and in desperate need of their guidance. It says a lot about how people in our society envision the ideal family. What is it about the human condition in the United States that leads people to turn a blind eye to the growing number of children in foster homes even after realizing that having a child the natural way is impossible?

The same way race and class hierarchies underline the processes of gestational surrogacy, as Twine does an amazing job of explaining in her book, race and class hierarchies underline the decision making process of whether to foster, adopt or contract a surrogate. "In the United States assisted reproductive technologies are not accessible to the poor, working class, and many members of racial and ethnic minorities. Access to fertility treatments is available primarily to the wealthy, upper middle class, or those able and willing to borrow the money required. In other words, commercial surrogacy is limited to the economically privileged" (Twine pg. 8). The price for surrogacy is between $50,000- $100,000. In contrast, adopting a child from the foster care system costs between $0-$1000 according to adoptionhelp.org, which is far more doable for lower and middle class families. Furthermore, being a foster parent comes with monetary compensation, although it is never an exceptional sum. For this reason, most foster parents are usually people with modest economic backgrounds who often use fostering as a way to supplement their incomes.

The desire to have genetically similar babies can not be separated from the desire to have white babies. There is clearly a monetary hierarchy in place in the business (gag) of having children. Twine's arguments goes even further with the addition of the race component when she states "the demand for white babies increased while the supply decreased"(pg. 4). According to the Child Welfare Information Gateway's Foster Care Statistics, more than half of the children entering foster care facilities are either African American, Hispanic/Latino, mixed race, or other. The way the demographics are distributed depend on what part of the country one is located. At the same time, most of these children were taken away from their parents due to neglect or unsafe conditions, so on top of the fact that they are minorities, there is a stigma surrounding the idea that these children are traumatized or disturbed and are likely to lash out against authority figures. This stigmatization is enforced through all facets of these children's lives as there are people benefitting from their demise. Pharmaceutical companies probably benefit the most, since Doctors tend to prescribe foster children with an alarming rate of psychiatric drugs.

The AdopUsKids website is quick to address these stereotypes by having videos of the children themselves talking about what it's like to be a foster child. I cried while watching the videos when it became apparent how aware these teenaged children are of how they are perceived by society. They are seen as "bad" children, when really the only thing that's bad is the world they did not choose to be born in. What's interesting about AdoptUSKids is how they have a catalogue of their children online, and you can search for a child by filtering results based on race, gender and age. I'll never understand the need to have a child of a specific race, but it could be linked to the desire of having a child that looks like the parent.

I'm not sure if it's socialization or human nature to want to leave behind a trace of your DNA after you're gone. It seems like a lot of the time, people are more concerned with that than leaving behind a good deed for mankind, or something that's truly meaningful. It hurts my heart to read about all these children growing up alone and without homes after seeing things no child should ever be around to see. It breaks my heart that wealthy couples, who have the resources to change these kids' lives are ignoring them, and instead feeding into the egoist capitalist beaurocratic franchise that is surrogacy.

Most people like to complain about their parents and are completely unaware of how blessed they are to have people who want them, love them and cherish them. I would not be the person I am today if it weren't for my mother's love and that makes me feel really deeply for children in the foster care system. I firmly believe that a parent's love is something everyone deserves to have. A lot of the issues Twine talks about in her book seem very far away from me. I don't know what I have in common with Indian women in caste systems. I can sympathize but I can't empathize. I do know that there are teenagers just like me without homes, whose futures are bleak because it is impossible to have a good education when you're switching schools every two months. I see myself in a lot of these children. I feel their pain. My heart goes out to them.