While surrogacy is largely used for parents who are struggling with infertility, there are other reasons one might use a surrogate — and they border on the dark.
Perinatal nurse Kallie Fell, who started her professional career as a scientist in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, is deeply concerned with the ethics of surrogacy, as well as IVF.
She warns that it’s not just sunshine and rainbows and that the reasons one might hire a surrogate can get a little creepy.
“A recent study that looked at data from prior to 2020 saw that most of these transactions were above 32, 34% from independent parents outside of the United States, predominantly from Asia, predominantly male, and predominantly over the age of 40,” Fell explains.
“Alarm bells should be going off,” she continues. “Why are we letting women in the United States sell or rent their wombs to foreign nationals so that those children can then be sent or taken overseas to men over 40?”
And it’s not just single men to look out for.
“As a labor and delivery nurse in San Francisco, I’ve had women — not surrogacy cases, but women from Asia — that come over to San Francisco and deliver their babies so that they can have a baby that has United States citizenship,” Fell tells Shanahan.
“And so, the same thing is true of couples, or single people, men or women, that might purchase a child from a surrogate in the United States, that those children are United States citizens,” she continues.
“And that’s their own path to citizenship,” Shanahan chimes in, noting that there are no laws regulating this.
Gay couples are another demographic that tends to use both surrogates and IVF to have children and start their own families.
“Two men who are wanting to have a family, they’ll often use an egg donor as well as a surrogate mother,” Fell explains. “They’ll use two separate women, so then there’s no claim who really is the mother. It’s on purpose that this is done.”
“So, they’ll use an egg donor, and so this woman is healthy,” she continues. “We’re going to put this really healthy young woman on high doses of medications and hormones to extract really as many eggs as they can from her. There are supposed guidelines for how many eggs they can extract, but in my conversations with egg donors, that’s not followed.”
According to Fell, some egg donors have had upwards of 50 or 60 eggs extracted.
“It’s going to affect each of these women differently, these drugs, but one of the risks is ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which can cause its own myriad of issues, including stroke, infertility,” Fell warns. “A lot of these cases aren’t reported. Women who are egg donors, once they give their eggs, they are, we like to say, ‘lost in medical history.’”
“We are born with all the eggs that we are ever going to have,” she continues, adding, “so there’s no studies on her fertility as she ages. There’s no studies on her risks of developing breast cancer or any other types of cancer for being put on hormones at such a young age.”
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