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The Life of a Surrogate
Last week, we talked about how birth mothers who place their kids for adoption deserve more respect. What about surrogates who carry a pregnancy for another woman?
Sarah Jessica Parker’s twins were carried by a surrogate. A year later, Sarah and the twins are living the high life in Manhattan, and the surrogate who carried them is still living in the dumps on Ohio. Is that right?
Probably. Parker and her husband, Matthew Broderick, made a business arrangement with Michelle Ross to carry the babies for them. The details aren’t public, but it’s believed that she earned about $30,000, the going rate for a surrogate pregnancy.
The New York Post is trying to make a scandal here by highlighting how different SJP’s life is from Ross’, but just because the actress has a lot more than $30,000 to spend doesn’t mean she’s morally obligated to pay more than the market rate for fertility assistance.
It’s not as if Ross didn’t know what she was getting into. News reports say that she and Parker have a great relationship, and Ross is an experienced surrogate. She bore a girl for a gay couple in 2008 and is pregnant now with another couple’s child. She works for a surrogacy agency as a “surrogate development coordinator”, and says she moved to Ohio from Florida because the laws for surrogates were better in Ohio.
Certainly not all women are as sanguine about surrogacy as Ross seems to be. The news is peppered with stories of surrogate moms reluctant to give up babies they’ve carried and birthed, and the heartbreak that follows can mar all the lives involved.
Done right, though, surrogacy seems to be both a gift to families facing infertility and a reasonable professional choice for a woman who enjoys pregnancy and doesn’t want more kids. Giving more respect to the women who do it might well be another piece of the puzzle in accepting loving families in all their many diverse forms.
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