Motherhood deals risk deeper anguish

How do you critique Australia’s latest surrogacy case without looking heartless?  A politician and his wife are now the happy parents of a baby girl, born on November 6. Of course, no one begrudges her birth.

But the surrogacy arrangements raise serious questions which have to be faced.

The first is the fragmentation of motherhood, with a genetic mother supplying the egg that was fertilised, the gestational mother who carried the baby in her womb and the parental mother who will raise the child.

Children born this way can suffer genealogical bewilderment and the confusion of not being raised by their birth mother, of having been conceived to be relinquished.

Surrogacy views women as disposable uteruses, merely containers, suitcases or public utilities for someone else’s babies.

On the Australia Talks Back program on ABC Radio National, November 9, Canberra IVF specialist Martyn Stafford-Bell, who facilitates up to nine surrogacy arrangements a year, said “gestational carrier pregnancy” was the preferred term to describe a surrogate mother.

Stafford-Bell said surrogacy was a good solution for women “unable to house a pregnancy”. He said that a woman carrying a child with no genetic connection understood, “this is not her child, that she is, in fact, an incubator”.

This dismantling of motherhood sees no essential bond between a woman and the baby she carries under her heart for nine months. There is nothing of significance in the fact that the baby knows his or her mother’s voice, that it is her blood and the nutrients it carries that causes the baby’s body to grow, that it is her body which experiences the movements of the baby and which eventually delivers it to the world.

As Australia Talks Back caller “Suzanne” from the Blue Mountains said, “You can’t just erase the mother”.

Many surrogate mothers have described the strain of having to distance themselves from their child. Canberra surrogate mother Donna Hill, who experienced a toxaemic pregnancy followed by a traumatic induced labour which she hoped to forget, said, “ I told myself I was just an incubator … I was just going into an operation and not giving birth.”

Sydney surrogate mother Shona Ryan told a conference in Canberra: “I had to forget I was pregnant. There was not the same joy and wonderment.

“In some ways I felt sorry for this baby that it didn’t receive the same attention [as my others]. I had to deny the pleasures of pregnancy.”

The emotional impact worsened on the birth of the baby.

“My subconscious, my body, my emotions, knew I’d given birth and were screaming out for that baby. I kept having the urge to tell people, ‘I’ve had a baby!’ The physical symptoms, the hormones, [it was] all pain, no gain.

“I had no motivation, energy, I’d sleep most of the day, was teary, [gained] enormous weight, was out of control, my life falling apart.

“I still react to newborns, still have bad days. My extended family didn’t understand why I couldn’t just get over it.

“The personal cost to me and my family [was too high]. I came to the conclusion I couldn’t recommend surrogacy to anyone”.

Perhaps Shona just needed some “cognitive adjustment”. Overseas surrogate agencies help surrogates reconcile their maternal thoughts and feelings, by “cognitively restructuring these feelings to match their behaviours” - the behaviour being relinquishing the baby.

The paper, Surrogacy: the experiences of surrogate mothers, published in the journal Human Reproduction in 2003, is frequently referred to as evidence that surrogacy is a good arrangement for everyone involved. It took its sample from the UK surrogacy advocacy group, COTS, which also facilitates most surrogacy arrangements.

The study only included women who had given birth and handed over their babies, thereby excluding anyone who (a) baled out during pregnancy, or (b) refused to hand over the baby.

And some mothers can’t bear to part with the child they birth.

Mary Beth Whitehead, surrogate mother in the famous Baby M case in the US, said: “Something took over. I think it was just being a mother”.

Jane Smith from Sydney said of the son she carried: “I couldn’t let him go.”

Another surrogate mother has said: “In the beginning it is easy to see things in an unrealistic way. When there is no real baby, it is easy to be idealistic.”

In 1997 “Evelyn” became Australia’s first litigated surrogacy case when her surrogate mother couldn’t give her up.

We now accept that mothers who have relinquished their child for adoption - once told to forget any attachment to their child - can suffer terrible grief. We cannot make this central human experience "disappear."

Children born from donor egg or sperm can also suffer from a severing of the genetic parental bond. Writes Joanna Rose, originally from the UK but now living in Queensland, “I have spent my life living with the consequences of short sighted solutions to infertility. This solution has given me and others like me life-long burdens of our own. With third party conception there is an intentional trading away and fracturing of the child’s parental kinship.”

For the egg donor, surrogacy also involves health risks which should not be glossed over: ovaries swollen to the size of grapefruit from the super ovulatory drugs used to hyper stimulate the ovaries to produce as many eggs as possible, stroke, organ failure, ovarian cysts and, in the long term, infertility and cancer. Some women have died. Many women are surprised at how intrusive and stressful the process is.

In the US commodification of a child has become an art form. A journalist, Bill Wyndham, pretending to be a single, HIV-positive gay man, was told by a surrogacy company he’d make a perfect dad and that arrangements could be made immediately for “insemination and delivery” of a baby. He was, however, not allowed to adopt a puppy from the dog pound.

The national trend in Australia has been against the legal recognition of surrogate motherhood for a reason. Of course we want the senator and his family to thrive. But we cannot deny that for many surrogate mothers and their children there is no happy ever after.