It’s hard to advocate for commercial surrogacy in Australia when we are exposed to so many stories about how it can go horribly wrong.
Recently, we heard about a U.S. man who has demanded that his commercial surrogate abort one of three babies she is expecting, threatening her with financial and legal ramifications if she doesn’t comply.
California-based surrogate Melissa Cook is 17 weeks pregnant with three babies on behalf of a man who paid her approximately $45,000 AUD. Three viable embryos were created using his sperm and a donor egg from a twenty-year-old.
When all were successfully implanted, the man then demanded the abortion.
Cook, 47, initially refused his request, saying she’d bonded with the babies and didn’t understand why he would ask her to go through a reduction procedure.
She wrote him a heartfelt letter, saying, “The doctor put in three healthy embryos. The chances were high they were all going to take. You knew I was 47 years old. If you knew you only wanted two babies, then why put in three embryos?”
It was after discovering she was expecting triplets at around eight or nine weeks that the father began pressuring her to “reduce” them, a term used to abort selected fetuses during multiple pregnancies to allow the remaining ones a better chance to thrive.
The father “almost immediately” began pressuring her to abort one of the fetuses and his lawyer contacted her just a few days ago, warning that she must abide by the terms of the agreement or will face, “loss of all benefits under the agreement, damages in relation to future care of the children [and] medical costs associated with any extraordinary care the children may need.”
Top Comments
Why government is always try to make life of people more complicated. There are too many things which harden our lives. All of us are equal and deserve to care our own babies, Unfortunately I don`t have even 1 % to feel the happiness of being pregnant . I`m married for the second time but unfortunately we don`t have children. The problem is in me. We got divorced with the previous husband because of this. He was completely healthy. So I visited a lot of doctors. As it turned out I have premature menopause. It happened because of genetics. My mother told me that my grandmother`s sister had the same problem. A lot of years ago the medicine was not as highly developed as it is now. That`s why she had no children, her husband died at the age of 35 because of cancer. She spent
the rest of her life alone. I don`t want to have the same fate. I decided to do everything to become a mother. The doctors told me that I have only two ways out: adoption or surrogacy. When my first husband got to know about this, he refused at once. I was shocked. We had constant quarrels and scandals. And this
all lead to our divorce. But I didn`t give up. Firstly I decided to visit some orphanages and to decide whether I`m ready to adopt someone`s child. I visited some of them and I understood that I`m not ready for this. It was unacceptable for me to choose the child. I wanted to help them all and I was defeated because of the fact that I can`t. I almost abandoned hope. After a divorce I
didn`t even think of new relations but once my friend invited me to her birthday party and there I met Nick. He was so attentive to me, he invited me on a date. Firstly I had doubts but my friend persuaded me to agree. Everything happened very fast. I did not even notice how he asked me to marry. I loved him but I didn`t want to make him unhappy because of my infertility. But he said
that he is not against the surrogacy. Moreover he is healthy and in this case the child will be his genetically. We got married and began to gather all the information about surrogacy. We found a lot of different variants. The prices vary so much that we were puzzled. Moreover the laws in different countries also vary. We couldn`t even think that there are so many clinics of reproductive medicine all over the world. Now we are confused. Time goes by
really fast and we don`t even know what country choose.
We may be morally squeamish about some aspects of commercial surrogacy - but making it illegal in Australia doesn't mean the difficult questions go away. All it does is force Australians to access services in countries where surrogates are frequently desperate women who are mistreated and underpaid - meaning we are essentially outsourcing the problem, and contributing to very troubling practices overseas. It's not good enough to simply turn a blind eye to it - we need to recognise that as a country, we are producing significant demand for dubious international surrogacy arrangements, and we need to take responsibility for developing a domestic solution.
People are only morally squeamish about surrogacy because they continue to believe what is portrayed in the media. So way off the truth and I strongly suggest a more balanced and thorough research into the subject before comments are made.