Author: Surrogacy360

Article: Should Young Women Sell Their Eggs?

Should Young Women Sell Their Eggs?
By Donna De La Cruz | The New York Times | Oct. 20, 2016

screen-shot-2016-10-26-at-10-04-30-amPart of a series to help readers “navigate life’s opportunities and challenges,” this article starts with a reference to Justin Griffin and her experience as an egg provider. It provides information on the health risks and links to a number of other useful resources – including the New York State Department of Health website, which covers the egg retrieval process and outcomes in detail, and community based group We Are Egg Donors, which provides spaces for egg providers to connect and act around their experiences.

Read the full article >

An additional resource is the Dartmouth, N.H.-based Infertility Family Research Registry. This is a voluntary registry set up to understand the health and well being of individuals and families created by ARTs – and all egg providers are invited to participate.

Book: Being and Being Bought

Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self
by Kajsa Ekis Ekman | Spinifex Press, 2014
Buy at Amazon >

From the publisher:

Grounded in the reality of the violence and abuse inherent in prostitution—and reeling from the death of a friend to prostitution in Spain—Kajsa Ekis Ekman exposes the many lies in the ‘sex work’ scenario. Trade unions aren’t trade unions. Groups for prostituted women are simultaneously groups for brothel owners. And prostitution is always presented from a woman’s point of view. The men who buy sex are left out.

Drawing on Marxist and feminist analyses, Ekis Ekman argues that the Self must be split from the body to make it possible to sell your body without selling yourself. The body becomes sex. Sex becomes a service. The story of the sex worker says: the Split Self is not only possible, it is the ideal.

Turning to the practice of surrogate motherhood, Kajsa Ekis Ekman identifies the same components: that the woman is neither connected to her own body nor to the child she grows in her body and gives birth to. Surrogacy becomes an extended form of prostitution. In this capitalist creation story, the parent is the one who pays. The product sold is not sex but a baby. Ekis Ekman asks: why should this not be called child trafficking?

This brilliant exposé is written with a razor-sharp intellect and disarming wit and will make us look at prostitution and surrogacy and the parallels between them in a new way.

Talk: The Contemporary Genetic Landscape

The Contemporary Genetic Landscape
Marsha Darling | Tarrytown Meetings | 2010

In a very concrete way, women’s bodies are the gateway to the manipulation of human genes.

In this talk, Marsha Darling, director of the Center for African, Black, and Caribbean Studies at Adelphi University, summarizes some of the core issues and challenges raised by new genetic and reproductive biotechnologies, including their use in surrogacy and paid egg donation.

The Tarrytown Meetings were convened in 2010, 2011, and 2012 to “address challenges raised by profoundly consequential human biotechnologies and related emerging technologies.” Discussion topics at the meetings included sex selection, trait selection, commercial surrogacy, use of women’s eggs for fertility and research, and gamete donor anonymity. The meetings were organized by the Center for Genetics and Society, and held at the Tarrytown House Estate and Conference Center in Tarrytown, N.Y.

Report: Birthing a Market: Commercial Surrogacy in India

Birthing a Market: Commercial Surrogacy in India
By Sama – Resource Group for Women and Health | India | 2012

Excerpt from the Introduction:

sama - birthing a marketThere is an urgent need to initiate processes for a critical understanding of commercial surrogacy, that has assumed the proportion of a transnational industry towards building a collective, feminist response to it. This requires a strengthening of linkages between academia and activism that builds a perspective on the interaction of market, technology, patriarchy, and hetero-normativity as seen in this practice.

Further, the Draft ART Bill – 2010, prepared by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), necessitates a parallel process of mobilizing a wider response, particularly because this proposed legislation will be the first of its kind in South Asia, and is a step forward in checking the untrammeled commercialization of ARTs. In its current form, the Bill is hugely lacking in addressing this as well as the disadvantaged position of the surrogate.

Being a part of debates on the regulation of ARTs, which currently flourish in India in the absence of any state regulation, Sama has often been confronted with issues concerning citizenship, surrogates’ payments, and the contract between the surrogate and the commissioning parents.

Given this, Sama initiated the present research to gain insights into the lives of those at the heart of these issues—the surrogates—in order to make visible, and to better understand their perspectives, subjective experiences, and lives. The study scrutinizes the existing practices in the selected sites of research. Foregrounding the surrogate’s position in the arrangement and in the industry, the study examines several complexities regarding the terms of the contract, the multiple institutions and actors involved, their expectations and conditionalities regarding the surrogate pregnancy, medical practices and technological interventions.

Read the full report >

News Program: Outsourcing Embryos

Outsourcing Embryos
VICE on HBO: Season 3, Episode 4 | 2016

Synopsis:

Vice looks at the boom in one of the world’s newest billion-dollar industries: gestational surrogacy. The cost of surrogacy in the US can be over $100,000, leading many prospective parents to look for affordable options in other countries. Gianna Toboni heads to India, where commercial surrogacy is legal, to investigate this growing industry. By exploring some of the country’s 3,000 surrogacy clinics, watching doctors deliver surrogate babies, and following recruiters who find prospective surrogates in the slums, we see the true cost of outsourcing reproduction.

Plus: Read an interview with Vice correspondent Gianna Toboni at New York Magazine > 

Article: Mexico Resists Becoming Next Reproductive Tourism “Paradise”

Mexico Resists Becoming Next Reproductive Tourism “Paradise”
by Isabel Reviejo | Latin American Herald Tribune | April 14, 2016

Excerpt:

This piece explores the role of Mexico as “the next niche” for international commercial surrogacy. It describes the scope of current law and legal loopholes, as well as attempts by the state to regulate the practice.

Read the full article >

Article: Gay Couple Win Custody Battle Over Thai Surrogate Mother

Gay Couple Win Custody Battle Over Thai Surrogate Mother
By Oliver Holmes | The Guardian | April 26, 2016

the guardianThis article follows up on a case in Thailand involving a same-sex couple that won a legal battle against the gestational mother who gave birth to their daughter, but refused to sign the paperwork to allow the baby to leave the country when she found out they were gay. It also provides links to articles covering the case of Baby Gammy and a 24-year old Japanese businessman who fathered 16 children with Thai gestational mothers – both of which led to the country’s current ban on the practice.

Read the full article >

For additional background on the case, read more by Oliver Holmes at The Guardian.

Article: Thailand Bans Commercial Surrogacy

Thailand Bans Commercial Surrogacy
By The Guardian | Feb. 20, 2015

the guardianThe Baby Gammy case made headlines in August 2014, when a Thai gestational mother claimed that Australian intended parents abandoned Gammy because of a diagnosis of Downs Syndrome.

This article provides an overview of the case and key elements of the law that came into effect soon after.

According to Thailand’s new law:

  • Foreign and same-sex couples are banned from seeking surrogacy services in the country.
  • Only married heterosexuals, with at least one Thai partner are allowed surrogacy.
  • No fees are allowed for the service.
  • Gestational mothers must be Thai, over 25 years old, and related to the intended parents.

Read the full article >

For more background on the Baby Gammy case and international commercial surrogacy in Thailand, read:

Article: Baby Markets and the New Motherhood

Baby Markets and the New Motherhood: Reproducing Hierarchy in Commercial Intimacy
By Michele Goodwin | Huffington Post | May 13, 2015

Excerpt:

huffington post logoIn recent weeks, the private reproductive decisions of Elton John and Sofia Vergara have spilled over into prime time news cycles — albeit by the celebrities themselves. Elton John called for a boycott of all Dolce and Gabbana merchandise after the designers regrettably referred to babies born through in vitro fertilization as “synthetic” children. The swift backlash caused the designers to issue statements of clarification and apology. Elton John’s twitter followers accused D&G of being woefully out of touch — not only with contemporary fashion, but also baby-making. In part, they are right.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), tens of thousands of children are born each year in the United States through assisted reproductive technologies (ART). These technologies provide a stunning candy store of options: a spectrum so vast in array, scope, and breadth as to make heads spin: in vitro fertilization, ova selling, cryopreservation of ova, womb renting, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, embryo transfer, assisted hatching, intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI) of ova, embryo grading, and more. However, these technologies are not just for celebrities.

Read the full article >

Michele Goodwin is a law professor at the UC Irvine School of Law. She is also the director of the Center for Biotechnology and Global Health Policy and author of “Baby Markets: Money and The New Politics of Creating Families.”

Study: Risk Disclosure and the Recruitment of Oocyte Donors: Are Advertisers Telling the Full Story?

Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics

Risk Disclosure and the Recruitment of Oocyte Donors: Are Advertisers Telling the Full Story?
By Hillary B. Alberta, Roberta M. Berry, and Aaron D. Levine | Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics (Neurosciences Summer 2014, pp. 232 – 243)

From the study’s abstract:

This study analyzes 435 oocyte donor recruitment advertisements to assess whether entities recruiting donors of oocytes to be used for in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures include a disclosure of risks associated with the donation process in their advertisements. Such disclosure is required by the self-regulatory guidelines of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) and by law in California for advertisements placed in the state. We find very low rates of risk disclosure across entity types and regulatory regimes, although risk disclosure is more common in advertisements placed by entities subject to ASRM’s self-regulatory guidelines. Advertisements placed in California are more likely to include risk disclosure, but disclosure rates are still quite low. California-based entities advertising outside the state are more likely to include risk disclosure than non-California entities, suggesting that California’s law may have a modest “halo effect.” Our results suggest that there is a significant ethical and policy problem with the status quo in light of the known and unknown risks of oocyte donation and the importance of risk disclosure to informed consent in the context of oocyte donation.

Please contact us or the journal directly for a copy of the full study.