I’m seeing an increasing number of articles about surrogacy being used by wealthy Chinese people in the United States. It’s the perfect kind of rage bait for a certain part of the United States population for political (and, in my opinion, racist) reasons I don’t want to get into. It’s how I feel about those who want to demonize gay people for using surrogacy when surrogacy isn’t a gay issue at all. As I wrote about in the linked piece in the prior sentence, let’s not push the blame to queer people at the cost of accountability for everyone, including heterosexual couples who have used these methods much longer (and likely more frequently). Let’s not do the same with wealthy people outside of this country when this country has done so little to actually change how surrogacy can be done by anyone at all. This is how I feel now when I see the fear mongering of foreign folks using surrogacy.
On one hand, it’s raising awareness on just how truly unregulated this industry is where someone can have/claim to have
more than 100 children born through surrogacy in the U.S and there’s obviously a scale of difference in having this many kids ethically:
Oversight of the industry is so scant that it’s almost impossible to figure out whether parents are working with multiple surrogates, across different agencies and law firms, people in the industry said.
From the WSJ’s “The Chinese Billionaires Having Dozens of U.S. Babies Via Surrogate”
Is it disturbing and upsetting to my soul to read these articles? Yes. I mourn for every child who will turn into an adult who will have to live through the trauma of what someone else chose for them. To me, this is not a loophole or a flaw of the system as many articles like to claim. This is the system as it’s designed, without regulation or limit or checks and balances. That’s the part that I don’t think people get. This extreme is still the system at play that has had decades to regulate and that still sees the status quo as worth it. What will need to happen for this to change? Will racism or homophobia finally make it feel worth it? I see fingers being pointed at those who used the system in this way but I don’t see enough conversation about how the system needs to be changed itself and who is responsible for the industry not changing so many years later. There have been numerous times and reasons for this to change yet let’s ask why it hasn’t when surrogacy is not new.
Add in the reality that folks within the United States will go to other countries for a discounted rate for surrogacy to the point that some countries are restricting surrogacy in various ways (look up surrogacy laws for Thailand or India). Does that sound familiar?! Where is that in the conversation about how wealthy folks from other countries are coming into the United States to have kids when our own citizens are doing the same to other countries? Where is the broader conversation about surrogacy overall through a broader, more critical lens? I only hope the folks reading these rage bait articles remember that even folks having one kid through surrogacy should not be let off the hook from the ethical concerns of what they are doing. We can all point to someone having a hundred kids as being beyond out of line but we can’t seem to hold in our hands the ability to question folks having just one kid using the same method. It’s not just the number of kids that makes this problematic yet the conversation rarely goes there.
I hope folks can see that this is the system working exactly as intended, and that even in its best-case scenario, it still needs to be changed. I hope folks can see how the desire to have a child does not trump the rights of the life that’s being created. I hope folks can see how much this all connects into a broader global issue filled with power dynamics and ethical concerns–shut down one avenue and another one will open up. I hope folks can see how no one has the right to a child, whether it’s one or a hundred.