Surrogate offered $10,000 to abort baby

[myswtghst]

I'm not sure about trigger warnings, but the article discusses abortion (with a dash of anti-choice rhetoric), reproductive coercion, disability & aborting due to birth defects, custody laws / adoption, and surrogacy / pregnancy. Please let me know if there is anything else I should include here (and Mods - let me know if you'd like this edited

Comments

[lorrybank]

She forced decisions on the bio parents by refusing to accept their claims to the baby. She put herself on the birth certificate, not the father (or mother). I'm not talking about her not getting an abortion, I'm talking about how her relationship with the fetus/baby was very inappropriate for a surrogate. She did not act "entirely responsibl[y]" like myswtghst claimed.

Read the article. The bio parents filed for their parental rights a month before the baby was born. They wanted their name on the birth certificates and wanted the child. But because the surrogate felt as though she had 'become the mother', she refused and thus made decisions she had no right to.

It doesn't matter that she felt attached to the baby as it was growing inside her. She'd been a surrogate before, and a surrogate's ENTIRE JOB is to have the baby as a part of her for nine months, and then give the baby to the rightful parents. It sounds like the surrogacy agency might be at some fault here, to have allowed her through all the checks they are supposed to do to make sure this type of thing doesn't happen.

It's her body and, just to reiterate, I'm in no way arguing that her bodily autonomy wasn't number one here. But it also wasn't her baby.

[wuvvumsoc]

Did you miss the part where they were trying to assert their rights on the baby so they could then surrender it to the state and make the baby an orphan/ward?

[lorrybank]

I literally went back and tried to edit this before I read your comment, but you had already replied.

I wanted to say that the bio parents wanted the child or at least a say as to what happened to the child. Which is their right, for their child.

The surrogate gave the baby up for adoption, how is that much different than what the bio parents said they would do? To be blunt but realistic: a newborn white baby is prime for adoption. Turning the child over to the state means it was likely the child would have been adopted (after all the necessary background checks, etc) ASAP. The main difference between what the surrogate did and want the bio parents said they wanted to do is the difference between an open adoption and a closed one.

How is one choice, made by the surrogate when she didn't have the right, admirable, and the other bad?

[mythrai]

do you know what Holoprosencephaly is? because it's unlikely a baby - even a white one - with it would prime for adoption

[lorrybank]

Sorry, you're right, that would make it more difficult. The baby's full list of disabilities actually slipped my mind (which is kind of embarrassing, since that's basically what the entire article/situation is about), but that would make it more difficult for the child to be adopted.

Nonetheless, the surrogate stepped way, way out of bounds by acting as if this child were her own and she was her mother.

[wuvvumsoc]

She kind of HAD to step out of bounds to begin with by refusing the abortion. From them on she realized that most of what the parents were trying to do was to get her to abort. I honestly can't say I'm concerned about the bio parent's rights because they wanted to give them up anyways (but make sure to do it in a way that would leave the baby with less help).

[lorrybank]

Well, that's stupid, to be blunt. Ignoring people's rights just because you don't agree with them is... not how rights work. And exactly what people are (rightfully) criticizing the birth parents of doing to the surrogate.

Keep in mind you're only getting Kelly's side of the story here. It's hard to know what the intentions of the bio parents were, and even if you disagree with them from this one-sided account, that doesn't terminate their rights to their child.

[wuvvumsoc]

Because the surrogate was making sure she would get adopted to parents who had the baby's best interest in mind, in a place where she could get the best medical care. The parents were looking to make the baby a ward to the state without any particular plan other than to intimidate the surrogate. It was a move to scare her into having an abortion.

[lorrybank]

I agree it was a move to scare her into abortion, which is shitty, but it was still the parent's decision to make. It was not the surrogate's, even if you personally think she made a better one.

I think you are giving the surrogate a lot of credit - it's not as though she moved to Michigan primarily so that she would be closer to a good hospital. She moved there, first and foremost, because the laws suited her wants and needs there. If we are going to give people the benefit of the doubt and look at the best side of their actions, I think there is an argument to be made that the bio parents suing for their parental rights does not necessarily mean they were actually planning on turning the child over to the state - as you pointed out, that was most likely just to try and intimidate her into having the abortion. We don't know what they were going to do with their child because the surrogate took away their right to have a say.

[wuvvumsoc]

I kind of doubt they had good things planned for the child with their attitude before it was born. They might have done something different once the baby was born because they didn't anticipate the move but that's honestly a gamble for the baby's well being.

I don't really think I can trust the parents at this point though. They chose to bribe and intimidate and didn't make a plan for the scenario should the baby be born because they likely anticipated that they could make her cave into an abortion. :/

[lorrybank]

They didn't make a plan for the when the baby was born at first because they had an agreement with the surrogate that an unhealthy fetus would not be taken to full term. I don't think you can blame them for not having anything in place.

They obviously thought that terminating the pregnancy was best for the baby. (Which is fine.) They tried to force this onto the surrogate when she disagreed and went against the contract. (Which is not fine, since I think most people here are in agreement that bodily autonomy doesn't work that way.) It sounds to me as if when they finally realized that the baby WOULD be born, they weren't sure what to do (which is understandable, I think), and I'm hesitant to take what the surrogate says as 100% truth of their intentions.

As I said before, both sides of this don't look great. The bio parents should never have tried to force or manipulate the surrogate into getting an abortion, but that doesn't mean their parental rights disappear just because they did shitty things. And, to be entirely honest, I don't think it necessarily means they would have been bad parents to the baby, since that's the conclusion you seem to be jumping to.

[spyral_path]

She hadn't been a surrogate before. She had been pregnant four times and had two children and two miscarrages, and had been rejected as a surrogate by a single man just before she was set up with this couole because medical tests found an issue with her uterus. None of this is clear from the article, but it's all in her blog.