A modest proposal on surrogate motherhood

I’m starting to feel alienated from my peeps over at Mothertalkers. In a recent post, Elisa, one of the editors, responding to a recent Newsweek cover story, put in a plug for surrogate motherhood.

“Despite some people denouncing it as exploitive, it made me think the opposite: I would consider becoming a surrogate for my closest family or friends. Also, if I needed the additional income, I could think of many worse ways to make money than give this wonderful gift to another couple.”

A number of readers chimed in to say they’d do it too.

Let’s just look at the economics first. Did anyone notice how little surrogate mothers get paid? According to the Newsweek article, about $20,000—for working 9 months, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That’s way less than minimum wage. Considering the major wear and tear on your body a pregnancy and delivery entail—never mind emotional toll and other sentimental nonsense—that is a raw deal. I have a modest proposal: Let’s open up the market in women’s bodies for surrogacy. But women should be paid a fair rate for their 9-months-long, 24-7 labor. Seems to me star athletes’ pay makes a pretty fair guideline, as both are highly physical endeavors that require utter commitment of mind and body, quickly take a lot out of you, and leave you unable to practice the trade for more than a few years. So let’s set a floor of, oh, say, $1 million per pregnancy.

How crass, many will protest. Most of those who commented at Mothertalkers and said they’d be surrogates seemed to be saying they’d do it for something other than the money. Fine. That’s a different matter. Let people make heroic gifts (and I too just might consider being a surrogate for a sister or intimate friend). But then crass contract law should have no part in the matter. A gift is something freely given, and one can change one’s mind about making a gift at any moment. So no court should then turn around and treat such a surrogacy arrangement as binding. Anything different is rank dishonesty, using the traditional glorification of self-sacrifice in women to reinforce the power imbalance created by economic inequality—all in order to enforce contracts for the buying and selling of women’s bodies.

There are lots of creepy oddities of the practice exposed in the Newsweek article. For one, a huge number of surrogates are military wives, and while the article suggests this belies the stereotype of surrogates as ignorant and impoverished, I don't see it that way. The modest $20,000 pay of a surrogate is more than the entire yearly base pay of many of the wives' military husbands; don't tell me these people aren't poor and vulnerable. Another reason military wives make up such a large chunk of surrogates suggests that vulnerability and lack of earning power play a big role:

"Military wives can't sink their teeth into a career because they have to move around so much," says Melissa Brisman of New Jersey, a lawyer who specializes in reproductive and family issues, and heads the largest surrogacy firm on the East Coast. "But they still want to contribute, do something positive. And being a carrier only takes a year—that gives them enough time between postings."

And finally, there's health care. Military wives have generous government-provided health coverage. While they're supposed to tell the insurance companies about their surrogacy arrangements, so their payments can be deducted from coverage, there's no penalty for not telling and no incentive for telling. Efforts to cut off coverage for medical procedures related to surrogacy failed last year, and there are no data on how much the public is paying for this coverage. However much it is, we—you, me, and the rest of America's taxpayers—are subsidizing surrogacy for a well-off few. Next time someone extols surrogacy as a case of free enterprise that shouldn't be repressed, tell them it sounds about as free-market as the Bear Stearns bailout.

I think I might be for a free market if I ever saw one.