Biological Colonialism Continues to Increase

Saturday, June 13, 2009
Wesley J. Smith

An increasing number of well off Western couples are renting wombs of poor women in India to gestate their children. From the story:

One leading obstetrician at a Mumbai hospital says she delivers on average one baby to a British couple every 48 hours. One London couple who have taken advantage of India’s “baby factories” told the Standard of their joy at having twins. Louis and Freya are the genetic offspring of Chris and Susan Morrison but were carried in the womb of a Gujarati woman who was paid £8,000.

It is very disturbing to see well off Westerners with such a sense of entitlement that they think it is perfectly fine to use poor women as so many brood mares. And what about the well being of the birth mothers? What psychic cost do they pay to gestate children and then have them taken away, never to be seen again–perhaps never to be ever known about by the children they bore? And what if something went wrong and the surrogate lost her health, her fecundity, or her life? Or what if the baby was born with a disability and the parents “change their minds?” There is a lot more involved here than the joy of the parents. the rest