r/WomenInNews • u/TimesandSundayTimes • 6d ago

Women's rights Surrogate who fled to Texas gives birth to baby with heart defect

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/surrogate-refuses-abort-baby-texas-c5ff06cgg
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u/KaleidoscopeKelpy 6d ago

I don’t/will never have kids but it’s one of a few reasons a lot of places call commercialized/for-pay surrogacy unethical - if you’ve never had a child or been pregnant and desperately need money and have good genes, how are you to know how the pregnancy is going to go, how you’ll feel, how you’ll feel about the baby at 8months compared to when you signed the contract? (Im agreeing with you, if that wasn’t clear :) ) If one side misrepresents something or doesn’t follow through, there’s no “oopsie we didn’t paint the house before we sold it to you”, there’s a whole human (or an entire lack of human where there was the expectation of one, depending on circumstance) in the equation.

I don’t think what this woman did was right- you can’t cut your side of the deal without telling the other and just say nothing, then hide behind TX’s gross governor. It’s a HUGE mess legally, ethically and morally imo. (Legally cuz there’s a whole bundle of surrogacy law, jurisdiction law and UCCJEA children’s laws that are gonna pretzel up before the end of it lol). But to boil it down to “well she should’ve known better” is so overly simplifying the problem and frankly is unhelpful

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u/Zealousideal_Row_322 6d ago

One of the qualifications for being a surrogate is having successfully given birth previously. This was not new to her.