David Quinn
The excesses of the fertility industry will come back to bite us, writes David Quinn
We are rightly disgusted at some of the adoption scandals of the past, especially those that involve a mother being effectively forced to give up her child. Another source of scandals were those instances where a birth certificate was illegally altered so that it became almost impossible for mother and child to ever find each other again.
What disgusts us about this? A big element is that the natural tie between mother and child has been deliberately sundered. It is one thing when the mother gives up her child voluntarily because she believes she is not in a position to raise a child. It is quite another when she feels under pressure to do so and the decision is effectively involuntary.
Adoption now is extremely rare. In many instances, abortion has taken its place. When a woman feels she cannot raise her child, she will often opt to end the pregnancy rather than place the child up for adoption. Sometimes she will come under pressure to abort, either from family, friends or the child’s father.
Except in those very rare cases where a baby survives an abortion, the mother and her aborted baby will never seek one another out, will never be reunited and no story will be told of a mother and a child separated at birth. Who would you interview? If the woman regrets her abortion, most of the media aren’t interested, and if she doesn’t, then there appears to be no unhappy story to tell. The child can obviously tell no tale.
But what will happen in the future as more and more children created by fertility clinics come of age? Will we hear their tales? Will they be given a platform? Will we heed what they say?
I am referring here to the children brought into being by IVF and other such procedures using the eggs, sperm and wombs of other people, that is, people different from the adults who will actually raise the children.
Not regulated
The fertility industry in Ireland is still not regulated. Plans have been afoot to do so for a long time now. Currently before Leinster House is something called the General Scheme of the Assisted Human Reproduction Bill.
The Oireachtas Health Committee examined the scheme. The scheme is bad enough, but the report of the Health Committee is even worse. Together, the two of them take a giant step towards the total commodification of children and the trivialising of the natural ties.
The great majority of people who use IVF, etc. by use their own eggs, their own sperm and their own wombs in order to have a child. But when they cannot do this, they will sometimes obtain the eggs and/or sperm of someone else, and sometimes they will use someone else’s womb as well, that is, they will use a surrogate mother.
When you use someone else’s sperm or egg to have a baby, that baby is the biological offspring of the sperm or egg donor. You have deliberately cut the natural tie to either the mother or the father. How will the resultant children feel about that in later life? It turns out that they feel a lot like adopted children who go looking for their mothers, (and it is usually the mothers they seek out).
But there is a sharp difference with adoption. In the case of adoption, no-one plans to cut the natural ties on purpose. Instead it is done by life’s circumstances and the adoptive parents step in when the mother cannot raise her child for whatever reason.
But when another person’s egg and/or sperm is used to have a child, the natural tie is cut deliberately and many of the children who are conceived in this way do not like it one bit. They demand to know why anyone thought it was permissible to deliberately cut the natural tie to a biological parent and that they plan to do so even before the child is conceived.
This is what makes a lot of our anger about past adoption scandals so hypocritical. The outrage shows we care about the natural ties, that we want children to find their natural parents. But why don’t we want the same thing for the children of egg and sperm donors?
If a fee is paid to the woman, this amounts to baby-buying. What else can we call it?”
The Health Committee wants to go even further than the General Scheme. It wants to permit something called ‘traditional’ surrogacy. Typically, when a woman agrees to have a baby on behalf of someone else – sometimes for a fee – she will be impregnated with the fertilised egg of another woman. This is called ‘gestational’ surrogacy.
But with ‘traditional’ surrogacy the woman uses her own egg, that is to say, the baby she gives to the couple or person who hired her is fully hers, biologically speaking. If a fee is paid to the woman, this amounts to baby-buying. What else can we call it? Even when a fee is not paid, the woman agrees to become pregnant with her own child and then hands it over to someone else.
This practice makes a total mockery of the natural ties. It pretends they do not matter. It treats babies, and sperm and eggs and wombs as commodities that can be traded in the marketplace.
The very occasional article or interview aside, this is happening with almost no debate. These highly dubious practices will eventually come back to bite us, like the bad adoption practices of the past.
