Ethical Case for Abolishing All Forms of Surrogacy
By Catherine Lynch | Sunday Guardian | Oct. 28, 2017
This is the fifth installment of an ongoing series called “Global Child Rights, and Wrongs,” focussing on global child rights within the field of reproductive technologies.
While these are often discussed in terms of the rights of adults to have children, there is very little discussion from the perspective of the child born of such technologies.
Dr. Lynch, an Australian lawyer and adoptee rights activist, addresses this gap with an essay on the ethics of surrogacy and an argument to ban all forms of the practice.
Here is an excerpt:
As an adoptee, I was removed at birth from my gestational mother, her breasts bound for three days in another room while I screamed for her, and my hospital records record my growing distress. Adoptees around the world testify to their battles with depression and rage, difficulties in trusting and attachment, and a profound sense of loss and grief caused by the loss of their mothers at birth. Scientific studies prove that maternal-neonate separation in the crucial months after birth disturbs the baby’s heart rate and sleep and other biological systems, predisposing the child to difficulties later in life which can include relationship and emotional difficulties, mental disorders and illnesses. In taking a child-centered view of surrogacy, we must take into account what we know of the trauma and confusion of separation from the natural family, especially from the birth mother, experienced by adoptees.