Her Body, My Baby

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/magazine/30Surrogate-t.html?_r=1

This is a very long article that is worth registering on the NY Times website for free if you need to do that to access the piece. While the article did have some negative points (mainly, the pictures, and the author being shocked that a surrogate mother could actually work a computer!) it is a good read.

I will caution anyone who decides to read the 400+ comments that they are horrible. I really never thought so much of the public was actually against surrogacy until I read those comments!

Her Body, My Baby

By ALEX KUCZYNSKI
Published: November 28, 2008

At 31 weeks, my baby was kicking and stretching. On the sonogram screen, I could see that he was doing his customary sit-ups. The monitor broadcast the slushy sound of his heartbeat.

The technician varied from visit to visit. The previous time, we were lucky: it was the gregarious young woman named Gisele who wrote things like “Hi Mom and Dad!” over the cloudy portraits of the baby or, on one image of the baby’s genitals, “I’m still a boy!” On this day, we got the terse woman who grudgingly wrote “foot” and “face,” if she wrote anything at all.

Then she tore off the sonogram images and handed them to me with one hand; with the other, she reached down to wipe the gel off the stomach of the woman who was bearing my child.

I did not give birth to my son. He is the product of my egg and my husband’s sperm. After half a decade of trying to become pregnant, sometimes succeeding but always failing to carry a baby successfully to term, I came to the conclusion that if we wanted to have a child who was genetically related to us, we would have to find a woman with a more reliable uterus to gestate and deliver our baby. That was in April 2007. I was 39 years old. Exhausted by years of infertility, wrung emotionally dry by miscarriage, my husband and I decided we would give gestational surrogacy — hiring a woman to bear our child — one try. It was a desperate measure, to be sure, and one complicated by questions from all the big sectors: financial, religious, social, moral, legal, political.


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