The Moral Legal And Economic Impediments Of

The Moral, Legal, And Economic Impediments Of Surr Essay, Research Paper

“Blimey!” I exclaim. “Sounds like a plant!” “It was,” she replies without the slightest irony. (Handel 3) In this country, the last trait in a mother that needs to be supported stands as the attribute of being able to let a baby out of her hand at the drop of ten grand. The fact that surrogate motherhood demands a mom give up her infant at any point remains immoral. Most aspects of surrogacy are also illegal. Any contract that constrains a woman to forfeit her child is considered a void contract. Recruiting females to execute the task of bearing a child for compensation is selling children. The motivation for surrogacy is economic, and it constitutes the sale of children. This division of reproductive technology is wrong. Surrogacy itself is not new. Evidence of surrogacy has been traced as far back as the Old Testament. The Bible transcribes two occurrences in “Genesis,” and further implies that surrogate motherhood was an accepted exercise in the Ancient Middle East. As printed in Time Magazine, about 300,000 artificially assisted pregnancies have taken place in the past 20 years (Golden 1). Although it is quite old, surrogacy is, without a doubt, the most contradictory of the reproductive technologies. Surrogate mother’s fee vary between $10,000 and $100,000 per pregnancy (General 2). In many cases, the surrogate bears the child for the contracting couple, willingly gives up to them the child she has borne, and accepts her role with no difficulty (Rae 7). Many surrogate mothers are friends of the impoverished couple; however, the practice of commercial surrogacy has increased greatly in the past ten years. The difference between what was practiced over 2,000 years ago and today’s arrangements is the presence of lawyers and intense contracts. The surrendering of offspring to a contracting couple is immoral. When the mother gives her child up to his new parents, she forfeits all her rights to a genetically linked creation from herself. Many avenues of alleviating infertility are available, such as artificial insemination by donor, artificial insemination by husband, or surrogate motherhood. The implement in the arsenal of procreation technologies that interjects a third party into the reproductive equation is surrogate motherhood. By definition, a surrogate is a substitute mother. She will carry the fetus of the male in the relationship, and most likely donate the egg. The new addition who donates an egg is now supplying genetics. In distinctive circumstances, the wife’s genetic matter is injected into a donor egg inside the surrogate mother. When injection cannot take place, the situation can also be paralleled with a surrogate mothers providing the egg from which the baby will begin formation. Having a donor egg raises significant moral issues dealing with the custody of the child after he is born. The Bible outlines a story in “1 Kings” about two women who were prostitutes. They lived in the same house, and each of them bore a child within three days of each other. One night, one of the women laid on her son and he died. When she discovered that her son was dead, she took her dead son and placed him in the other woman’s bosom and put the child that was alive in her own. When the victim rose in the morning to nurse her son, behold, he was dead; but when she looked at him carefully in the morning, behold, he was not her son, whom she had borne. Then the other woman said, “No! For the living one is my son, and the dead one is your son.” But the first woman said, “No! For the dead one is your son, and the living one is my son.” They took their issue before the king to judge the situation. Then the king said, “The one says, This is my son who is living, and your son is the dead one’; and the other says, No! For your son is the dead one, and my son is the living one.’ The king said, “Get me a sword.” So they brought a sword before the king. The king said, “Divide the living child in two, and give half to the one and half to the other.” Then the woman whose child was the living one spoke to the king, for she was deeply stirred over her son and said, “Oh, my lord, give her the living child, and by no means kill him.” But the other said, “He shall be neither mine nor yours; divide him!” Then the king said, “Give the first woman the living child, and by no means kill him. She is his mother.” (1 Kings 3:16-28) True motherhood is not possessive. A mother, in the sense of the word, need not be related to the child by blood. A mother cares for and protects like a mother. Like the true mother in the story out of the Bible, a matriarch of a child should care for and protect her child until the end. Surrogacy demands that a female give up her natural rights to her baby. The Bible assumes the concept that only husband and wife will be parents of children. The Christian Research Journal relays that there is a continuity between the genetic and social roles of parenthood (Rae 3). Surrogacy, however, disrupts the process and clearly separates the two roles of a parent. It demands a birth mother forfeit her rights to her young. Contracting couples may want a child simply to have a child, and in that way infertility may be considered a disease used supernaturally to limit a couple’s ability to produce offspring. From a moral point of view procreation is deprived of its proper perfection when it is not desired as the fruit of the co