Father Of Multitudes?: Thai Surrogacy and More

There’s a story from a few weeks ago that I’ve been thinking about.   A young Japanese man, Mitsutoki Shigeta, hired a series of Thai surrogates.  He became a genetic father to at least 16 children this way, spending something like $500,000.   While is motives remain obscure, he apparently wanted to continue at something like this pace for as long as he could, presumably creating hundreds of children.

Now the obvious thing to talk about here–and one that has gotten a lot of attention–is what this says about the Thai surrogacy industry or surrogacy more generally.   Surely there is a lot to think about.   But I am not going to add to the welter of comments on that topic you can already find.

I want to think about this more broadly.  

New Oklahoma Case–Lesbian Parents, Legal Parents and Gender Neutrality

Add another case to the sadly long list of lesbian parents behaving badly. This one comes from Oklahoma and it also raises an argument that does arise from time to time–an argument that provides and opportunity to think about gender neutrality and the definition of parenthood.

You can read the actual opinion here, but I will summarize the facts.  I remind you, however, that I have no special knowledge of the facts and am merely repeating what the court says.  

Ami Dubose and Tracey North began to live together in a lesbian relationship in 2001.  North gave birth to a child in 2007.   This child was planned by the couple and conceived via assisted insemination.  (No information is provided about the source of sperm and I’m guessing anonymous donor.)   The couple lived together, coparenting the child, until 2012.   (By then the child would have been five or so.)  

Dubose never adopted the child and Dubose and North didn’t formalize their relationship.  While I’m not sure what exactly they could do in Oklahoma, the reason they didn’t take these steps is that both women were in the military.  Given the then-applicable “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy, any action to recognize their relationship of the relationship between Dubose and the child could have endangered their careers.    (This is actually a fairly common situation and one of the lesser known but more serious consequences of that now-changed policy.)

Of Sherpas and Surrogates and The Role Of Compensation

I’m sure many of you have read about the tragic deaths of 16 Sherpas on Mt Everest.   This story, about the local response here in the Pacific Northwest, caught my attention this AM.  And oddly (or perhaps not so oddly, given my general interests in all things ART) it made me think about surrogacy and surrogates.

I actually think surrogates and Sherpas have more in common than you might think even though there are obvious differences.   Both undertake difficult and dangerous jobs.   Most surrogates do so for money and Sherpas are paid, too.   And both Sherpas and surrogates are doing work which really, when you get right down to it, doesn’t have to be done.  No one has to climb Mt. Everest.   No one has to use a surrogate to have a child or even has to have a child, come to that.   (This last point is the subject of some of the discussion of my most recent post about social surrogacy.)    

The Never-Ending Quest for Gender Equality

I think we are rightly sensitive to issues of gender equity in parenting, but it seems to me it is also necessary to think critically about them.   This was brought home to me by this story in the newspaper today.  Does equality give a genetic father the right to be present at the birth of his child, just as the genetic mother will be?    Or does the different between being the one giving birth and not being the one giving birth justify different treatment?

For anyone who thinks hard about parentage gender equity is a difficult topic.    There are so many levels of sameness and difference that figuring out what amounts to equal treatment can be tricky.

On the one hand, men and women each contribute genetic materials to a child.  On that basis one could determine that they are similarly situated and so principles of equality would suggest equal treatment is appropriate.   But on the other hand, women are pregnant and men are not.   If in this regard they are not similarly situated, then equal treatment is not warranted.  How does one fit together the sameness and the difference?  

Some Thoughts On Surrogacy

This is spurred by a substantial article in this morning’s NYT.   I haven’t talked/written about surrogacy for quite a while and so perhaps it is time to circle back to the topic.  I’m well aware that there is some extensive discussion under the last post (the one about birth certificates), but I lost track of that while I was travelling and this seems timely.  I can only hope I’ll get back to the birth certificates shortly.

So surrogacy.  There are so many things to say about it, so much to discuss.  I’m going to pick a few points that leapt out at me reading the article.   There are many others.

1.   Surrogates prefer working with gay men than with straight couples (or I assume with single women.) 

A Round Up of Birth Certificate News

I have some hesitation about returning to the general topic of birth certificates as I know many people get quite wrought about it. But there’s a bunch of different stories out there on the topic so I’ll have a go on it. However, I want to try to set the stage first.

Birth certificates—at least in the US–are rather peculiar documents. Some of what is on them at least looks like a historical record. So for example, birth certificates routinely list the time of birth. That would seem to be in the nature of a historical record–a formal noting of a particular thing happening at a specific time and place. (Place is also in that category.)

But then there are some other things on birth certificates that, though they look like the stuff of historical records, aren’t. One–and the one that has been discussed the most extensively here–is “parents”–or as it sometimes appears “mother” and “father.”   US birth certificates do not necessarily list the name of the woman who gave birth–which it seems to me would be the most obvious historical fact they might reflect.  

Stories We Tell–The Movie and More

Some time back I wrote about a documentary I wanted to see called “Stories We Tell.”  It was made by a young woman named Sarah Polley and it is autobiographical.   I’ve now had a chance to see it and it made me think.

Polly is the youngest of five siblings.   (I use this term loosely as you will see.).  Her mother, apparently a quite dynamic figure, died some years ago,   For many years there was a family joke that her mother’s husband–the man who Sarah Polley referred to as her father–was not in fact genetically related to her.   For whatever reasons, Polly decided to investigate.   The film is not so much the story of her investigation as it is the story of what all the players involved make of it all.

Actually, it isn’t really what all the players make of it. 

McKenna/Miller Custody Case Settles….And What Do We Know?

You may recall that just before Thanksgiving I blogged about a custody dispute between Bode Miller (famous US skier) and Sara McKenna.  They had a brief relationship during which she became pregnant.  Since there really wasn’t much of a relationship between the two, it’s probably not surprising that a custody fight followed.  But the particular course of the custody fight was somewhat remarkable.   (I’ll just link to the first of a string of earlier posts so that you can catch up if you want.)

The key thing was that one judge in NY seemed to think that McKenna had behaved badly because after she and Miller broke up and after she realized she was pregnant, she moved to NYC to take advantage of an educational program at Columbia University.   The decision, originally made in the spring, lead that judge to kick the custody case back to CA, where a judge awarded custody to Miller–I’m not sure on what basis.  Eventually a NY appeals court reversed the trial court in a scathing opinion–essentially recognizing that McKenna did have a right to travel even if she was pregnant. 

Is De Facto Parentage Anti-Male?

This post grows out of an exchange in the comments on an earlier post.   Ki Sarita (not sure about how I should capitalize that) and I have been having an exchange about whether I (or perhaps more narrowly, my opinions?) are anti-male.   In fairness, I think Ki Sarita’s views here are based on far more than that one posting as she is a long-time reader/commenter here.  But I’m going to focus on that post (which is about a case involving a doctrine called “de facto parentage”) in order to make a few points.    I realize they may not address the full scope of Ki Sarita’s argument but I want to make what is perhaps a subsidiary point.   I’m also going to have to cover some background before getting to my point, so some of you may wish to skim ahead.

The idea in de facto parentage is that the law should recognize and protect existing psychological/social parent/child relationships.   De facto parentage is probably most important where a legal parent co-parents with someone who, for whatever reasons, doesn’t gain status as a legal parent in any other way.   

More on How Pregnancy Matters (And What That Might Mean)

This piece was in yesterday’s NYT.   I’m in no position to comment on the science so, for the moment, I’m going to assume it is sound, though I do know there is plenty of bad science out there.  The essay (it was on the op-ed page, so I think of it as an essay rather than as news) is about diet in the very early stages of a child’s life and how it has lifelong effects–at least according to the study the essay is considering.

But the studies aren’t only about the effects of diet after the child is born.  Here’s the part that leads me to write here:

 Mothers who were fed foods like Froot Loops, Cheetos and Nutella during pregnancy had offspring that showed increased expression of the gene for an opioid receptor, which resulted in a desensitization to sweet and fatty foods. “The best way to think about how having a desensitized reward pathway would affect you is to use the analogy of somebody who is addicted to drugs,” Jessica R. Gugusheff, a Ph.D. candidate at FoodPlus and the lead author of the study, wrote in an email. “When someone is addicted to drugs they become less sensitive to the effects of that drug, so they have to increase the dose to get the same high,” she wrote. “In a similar way, by having a desensitized reward pathway, offspring exposed to junk food before birth have to eat more junk food to get the same good feelings.”

(One thing I think I should clarify first:  that passive voice thing at the very beginning– “mothers who were fed….’– I think read carefully in context it is actually about rats in a lab study.