Surrogacy and its victims

Gone are the days when parents were just grateful for a healthy child. In California, Albert and Anthony Saniger, a gay couple, are upset that a surrogate mother delivered a girl, rather than the boy they meticulously paid and planned for. So incensed, the couple is suing the fertility clinic they worked with on several grounds including breach of contract, medical malpractice, negligence, and fraudulent concealment—all because the baby turned out to be a girl.

The fertility clinic has pushed back, urging the couple to accept that “every child has value and limitless potential regardless of gender.”

Frankly, that’s a tough sell for a business that commodifies children and promises customers a particular kind of product. When human reproduction is commercialized and disconnected from natural, embodied law, human dignity is essentially lost to the greed, entitlement, and narcissism of a business deal.

According to NBC, the couple spent over $300,000 for their elaborate plan to father two sons, whose names and gmail accounts have been chosen and registered for over 7 years. That the men pre-planned to rob their children of a mother was their first offense. They arrogantly assumed two fathers could replace one mother—and that’s a real blunder.

“Maternal love is our first experience of what love feels like,” writes Kelly McDaniel in her book, Mother Hunger. “The maternal care we receive informs how we feel about ourselves throughout life.” Absent this foundational, maternal bond, we are ever-hungry for that missing parent.

But the Sanigers made many missteps in their journey toward parenthood. Their second errant move was participating in the exploitation of women through the “renting” of their bodies and “purchasing” of their children.

Clearly, reproductive technology has given humans an unprecedented god complex. The miracle of life’s conception, though not yet entirely replicated in a lab, lends the illusion that we have ultimate control over exactly what kind of life can and should be created.

Most people do not use surrogate eggs and wombs, but in the case of gay men, it’s the only option if they want any genetic tie to the baby. The genetic bond between mother and child is irreparably broken, leaving one’s genetic identity a mystery. Surrogacy is anything but a consequence-free way to create families.

“To deny a child an uninterrupted relationship with the mother who both conceived and carried him or her,” writes Jennifer Roback Morse, “is to deny the child’s birthright, literally.”

The little girl in question has been denied her birthright and rejected by her fathers. They may not be giving her up, but a national news story and the sexist obsession with raising boys won’t quietly melt away. The case also raises the issue of the ethical implications of frozen embryos.

The very fact that these embryos have genders makes the case that life begins at conception. There are millions of snowflake babies frozen in clinics across the nation. They are unrecognized girls and boys who will probably never see the light of day. The Sanigers’ daughter, now alive because of a fertility clinic’s “accident,” represents the silent voices of so many who will never get that chance.

Having a girl disrupted the Sanigers’ perfect plans and they now lament they will have to raise “three children instead of two sons.” Apparently, only the unborn sons deserve the dignity of a gendered recognition. The obsession with a specific biological sex also clashes with the presumably progressive views the Sanigers hold. What if their child one day identifies as trans or non-binary, as so many claim these days? What if their child has autism or another unexpected illness? Surely those things would also disrupt their carefully laid plans for the perfect family? Who will they sue then?

The lawsuit states that the fertility clinic “negligently, recklessly, and/or intentionally transferred a female embryo,” as if the daughter they are now raising were some kind of infected parasite, rather than a person with infinite value. The Sanigers are angry that they spent so much money for a specific kind of human product and got something else.

To be sure, the American medical establishment has been more than happy to normalize surrogacy and make “reproductive healthcare” as enticing as possible. But the same people who shove references to “rent-a-womb” services into your hands are the ones who conveniently offer “selective reduction” if your surrogate gets pregnant with multiples.

Fertility treatments have been a miraculous way to start a family for many. Taken to their most extreme ends, however, human beings become part of an expensive, itemized wish list. The foundations of one’s life matter more than anything else, which is why God gave us the natural family as an archetype to be respected, valued, and honored.