SURROGATE MOTHERS

In 1994, St. Mary's University in San Antonio hosted a panel discussion for Women's History Month entitled "Reproductive Frontiers: Technology, the Law and Women's Bodies." One observation was that as the 1960s and 1970s are remembered as the decades of sex without procreation, that the 1980s and 1990s may well be recalled as the decades of procreation without sex. Professor Marsha Merrill observed how, with technological advances, one can have as many as five parents: "You can have the mother who gives birth, the donor of the egg implanted in her. Another mother may adopt the child. You have the sperm donor who fertilized the egg--the adoptive father." She asked, "How are we going to treat all these people?"

Matters are even more complex than what Professor Merrill observed. In late 1998, for instance, New York physicians transferred the genes from an infertile woman into the egg of another woman, fertilized it, and placed the scientifically altered embryo into the first woman's womb. Scottish scientist Roger Gosden suggested that the ovaries from aborted fetuses could be transplanted into infertile women, producing the possibility of individuals having a mother who was an aborted fetus and grandmothers who were never mothers. So what are to the be statuses and rights of genetic, gestational, birth, and social mothers? Consider the following news stories of the past few years:

• A host of moral and ethical issues surfaced in the 1980s in the so-called "Baby M Case," involving a surrogate mother, Mary Beth Whitehead, who was paid to be artificially inseminated and carry to term the child of an infertile couple. She reneged on her agreement to surrender the child, claiming that she was powerless to overcome her desire to keep it. She was denied all rights to the child in 1987 but the following year was awarded visitation rights by the New Jersey Supreme Court on appeal. Among the questions raised:
• Is a surrogate mother, who is paid to gestate the unborn child, selling her baby?
• If for some reason no one wants the child, such as if it is born with a severe handicap, then who is responsible?
• Is the gestational mother truly the legal mother, as is the legal presumption, even if she is not genetically related to it?
• Do women have the right to control their own bodies, even if it means choosing to be breeding machines or, as Professor Sidney Callan put it, "uterus rentals"? Or is this the ultimate form of female exploitation in a capitalist economy where nearly all traditional family activities have become fair-game commodities for sale?
• In 1990 in Santa Ana, California, Superior Court Judge Richard Parslow ended the rights of a surrogate mother to visit the child she bore for another couple. He said that she had been but a "home" for an embryo that was the product of an in vitro fertilization by its genetic parents.
• Family news was made in 1991, when a 42-year-old became pregnant with her own twin grandchildren. She had been implanted with the embryos produced from the eggs of her daughter (who was born without a uterus), which had been fertilized in a laboratory dish with her daughter's husband's sperm.

In the 1996 NORC General Social Survey, a random sample of American adults were posed the following question:

Recently, some married couples who are unable to have children have paid women, called "surrogate mothers," to bear a child for them. When the child is born, the couple becomes its adoptive parents and the surrogate mother receives a fee. Do you think that this practice should be permitted or forbidden under the law? (variable SELLBABY)

As can be seen in the marginals of their responses below, Americans were just about twice as likely to approve than disapprove of the practice.

Examining how this surprisingly high level of support differs across various social groups and categories we find that:

• men were slightly, albeit insignificantly, more likely to approve of surrogate mothering (63%) than women (59%);
• support consistently increases with education, from 47% of those with less than a high school diploma to 68% of those with four or more years of college;
• support consistently declines with age, from 70% of those 18-30 to 46% of those 65 and older;
• support declines with increasing religiosity, from 74% of those with no religious affiliation to 65% of those "not very" religious to 52% of those claiming to be "strongly" religious;
• there were a relatively small differences among members of various religious groups, with support weakest among fundamentalist Protestants (53%) and Catholics (59%) and greatest among moderate and liberal Protestants (64%).
  
  And what bearings do individuals' marital and parental status have toward this matter? In total, the percentage approving the legalization of surrogate mothering is highest among those separated (74%) and never married (69%) and is lowest among those widowed (48%), with married (59%) and divorced (57%) falling in-between.   Those without children were about twelve percentage points more likely than those with children to approve (69% vs. 57%). These figures, of course, are strongly influenced by respondents' ages, which we've seen is probably the strongest predictor of attitudes. Below we can see the interactions between age, marital and parental status:

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