The XX Factor: What women really think.

I Don't Support Carolyn Savage Carrying the Wrong Baby to Term

A post from Double X writer Bonnie Rochman:

Call me egotistical, but I’m not lining up behind the well-wishers cheering on Carolyn Savage, the Ohio woman who, in the process of undergoing IVF, was mistakenly implanted with another couple's embryo. She decided to carry the baby to term and just passed the 35-week mark ... (Read more in Double X.)

In Surrogacy, A Deal Isn't Always a Deal

Thanks to Kerry for linking to her compelling personal story of the ovum marketplace. As for the question of market forces bearing on gestational surrogacy sticker price, I have two words to illustrate the right circumstance for the right seller: Debby Rowe. $4 million payoffs not withstanding, however, I do sympathize with Kerry’s and Sarah’s observations on the hazy protection surrogacy contracts offer to potentially exploited owners of host wombs.

Why Don't Surrogates Charge More?

An odd, not-quite-paradoxical consensus is forming in our discussion over surrogacy. There is the assumption that the sticker price of $20,000 is surprisingly low, along with the assumption that surrogacy is so astronomically expensive that it’s only available to rich ladies with billionaire husbands and baby nurses. Both might well be true, but I’m more convinced by the former than the latter. Is surrogacy really out of the reach of your average middle-class dual-income couple that can, at any rate, afford to raise a kid for 18 years? Traditional pregnancies are by no means cost-free, so the cost of hiring a surrogate over becoming pregnant is lower than it first appears.

Surrogate Motherhood: It's Not Just a Job, It's ...

In response to Meredith's request to the mothers among us to tote up the number of "billable hours" in a pregnancy: This sum seems inherently incalculable, not only because it would differ wildly and unforeseeably from person to person and pregnancy to pregnancy, but because the normal model of pay for work just doesn't apply to bearing a child for someone else in exchange for money ... (Read the rest of this post, or the whole conversation, in Double X.)

You Want My Body for 3 Bucks an Hour?

A post from Double X writer Meredith Simons:

Jessica, Kerry, and Sarah, your posts have me curious about the price of parenthood in surrogate situations, for both “intended parents” and surrogates. I crunched some numbers using the $20,000 payment that you mentioned, Sarah, and was shocked to realize that a surrogate making that much for a full-term pregnancy would earn less than half the federal minimum wage... (Read more in Double X.)

Is Renting a Womb Worse (or Better) Than Adopting?

Nina, I agree with you that the worst thing about Alex K’s New York Times Magazine article this past Sunday—about her surrogate pregnancy and motherhood—were the slyly critical pictures and Alex’s class-cluelessness. Moe suggests (as do many others) that adoption might have been less genetically vain than surrogacy. But that suggestion presumes adoption isn't exploitive—and, after a year spent investigating problems in international adoption, I can tell you that's not always so. 

Sometimes adoption is good for all concerned, especially if the child is older, sick, or has special needs. But not everyone is prepared to take on those needy children. Far more people are lined up for healthy infant adoption—which isn't easy, it turns out.

News flash: Worldwide, there are more families seeking healthy infants than there are healthy infants in need of new families. Some of the international adoption programs are arguably surrogacy in disguise—but without real payment or protections for the birth families. In some countries, a significant portion of women appeared to have been getting pregnant to sell the babies; in others, babies were being coercively purchased or defrauded or even kidnapped away from the birth families. (The big exception is China, where the adoption program is carefully overseen, but China has become more restrictive.) And that doesn't count the birth families whose children were defrauded, coerced, or flatly kidnapped away from them. (For detailed and heartbreaking stories about this, check my institute's Web site, where we've been posting our adoption documentation and research.)

Adoption depends on tragedy and loss of some kind—like organ donation, except with less oversight or regulation and with much more money to be made for the brokers. As with organ donation, in adoption there are more people on the list than there are children available. I haven't looked as deeply into domestic adoption but have heard enough to know there ARE coercive practices and serious regulatory failures; birth mothers DO get coerced, and adoptive parents get less consumer protection than if they joined a gym.

In surrogacy at least everyone goes into it with eyes open; the surrogates are screened for their emotional stability and are more or less fairly compensated. I’m guessing it’s less exploitive than renting out the body parts that Meghan and Hanna are discussing below. But maybe that’s just me.

So 25 Grand Gets You Nine Months in an All-American Womb These Days and That's OK?

I'm with you, Susannah, on Alex Kuczynski and her (college-educated!) rent-a-womb. There are worse villains to vilify at a time like this, Internet haters! Right? Why does it continue to be so profitable for self-respecting media institutions to incite reader rage over harmless rich socialites who are not asking for as much as a penny of TARP funds? (I mean, imagine if wealthy men got pregnant! Imagine what impoverished, uneducated communities they'd be outsourcing the job to. Oh wait, there's a thriving surrogate industry in India as it is.)  Which is to say, um, was there not something off-putting about the economics of it? In vitro, while certainly not covered by most health care plans, is covered by some—and in any case, it's certainly a tax-free expenditure of a hundred grand. And for a quarter of that, Kuczynski finds a whole woman—a college-educated woman!—willing to carry around Kuczynski's child in her own goddamn womb for nine months? Hey, and now she's written a story about it; she can write off that money, too! (Plus, she probably made about exactly $25,000 writing the piece anyway.)

God, so what does it mean? Well, on one hand, that's the free market at work, folks! And yet, on the other hand, Kuczynski—who wrote a book about cosmetic surgery and a regular Times column critiquing fancy retail "experiences"—has this way of positioning herself smack in the middle of industries that thrive off the most loathsome markets! Take in vitro and cosmetic surgery: Both draw in some of the nation's most talented doctors by freeing them from the migraine that is haggling with insurance companies, the same insurance companies that have helped make basic health care costs so expensive that regular college-educated ladies like Kuczynski's surrogate are willing to be implanted with alien zygotes and carry them around inside her for the better part of a year. (Oh yeah, and did I mention, quit drinking? While Kuczynski gets to … not quit drinking? ) It's just no faiiiirr, not to mention creepy, and while I'll gladly admit it's a bit of both to the anonymous cow whose teat to which I fully intend on outsourcing my milk production if and when I ever have kids, it's a little different when you're talking about people, right? And I guess I'd just feel better if it seemed like Kuczynski had thought about it this way. Because there are a lot of people in this country who are wealthy enough to spend 25 grand outsourcing their pregnancies, and there are hordes more who are desperate enough to rent out their wombs, but once upon a time we lived in a country where the former camp would have been more inclined to adopt from the latter half. At least, that's what I've always been told.