Paradox or Contradiction?

There’s a core feature of surrogacy and ART more generally that strikes me as contradictory or, perhaps, paradoxical. (I’ve been considering surrogacy in the last few posts.)

We live in a time and a culture where pregnancy is seen as a tremendously important experience. (I just googled “pregnancy and came up with over 95 million hits.) Once it might have been a fairly ordinary (though perhaps dangerous) part of the female life cycle. Now it is at once mystical, sacred and romantic. Perhaps it is simply the ordinary excess of our commercial culture, but there seem to be no end of products and services offered for the pregnant woman. You can (and according to some advertising, you should) expose your baby, in utero, to Mozart and foreign languages. You can eat well, take all the right dietary supplements and do yoga for stress. You can even go to a pregnancy spa.

But we also live in a time when you can contract to have someone else have this mystical religious experience for you. (This way you can preserve your figure.) Better yet, you can get a someone to do it more cheaply on another continent. (Do they pipe in Mozart?) A woman who, according to the news story, you may never even actually see. And once she gives birth, the baby will be all and only yours.

These two ideas seem deeply contradictory. Given the status afforded to pregnancy, I’d expect that surrogacy would only be accepted if a woman could not get pregnant. I do realize that for many women it is this circumstance that leads them to consider surrogacy. But it seems the wider use of surrogacy is increasing. Similarly I’d expect that there would be some desire to have a relationship of some sort with the surrogate, to partake, however vicariously, of the experience of pregnancy. To honor the mysterious and sacred contribution to a new life.

Perhaps the use of distant, virtually anonymous surrogate foreshadows a cultural shift in our ideas about pregnancy. For now, it seems contradictory.

And there is yet another curious piece to this puzzle. Surrogacy is part of the larger industry of ART (assisted reproductive technology). I think the emergence of ART as a large-scale proposition has undermined the importance of genetic linkage as an element of parentage. Certainly it has lead to an extensive market where one can buy and sell eggs and sperm. And as I’ve said earlier, the only reason we accept that is because we are comfortable saying that being the source of the eggs or the sperm doesn’t make you a parent.

But then think of the individuals who use surrogacy. Why choose surrogacy instead of adoption? I think it is often because people want to create children who share their genetic material. So the two gay men from Israel in the post from a couple of days ago used their own sperm as well as a purchase egg. Or a woman who cannot carry a pregnancy to term uses her own egg as well as her partner’s or purchased sperm.

So ART at once undermines the importance of genetic linkage (by creating a vigorous market for genetic materials) and undermines the importance of pregnancy (by creating surrogates who will not be mothers). All this leaves parental status very much in flux, I think. And that gives me more to think/write about.