Graziella Beatriz A.

Cabuyadao BSN 2-B

Woman Gives Birth to Own Grandson

In June 2009, Bill and Sara Connell were five and a half years into an arduous fertility
journey that had involved 5 rounds of IVF and a subsequent miscarriage. Seven hundred
miles away, her 59-year-old mother experienced a flash of an idea. Her mother offered to be
the surrogate for Sarah and Bill’s biological child. On February 9, 2011, their son Finnean
Lee, came into the world and her mother became the oldest woman in Illinois to give birth.
Surrogate motherhood represents an objective failure to meet the obligations of
maternal love, of conjugal fidelity and of responsible motherhood. It offends the dignity and
the right of the child to be conceived, carried in the womb, brought into the world and
brought up by his own parents. It sets up, to the detriment of families, a division between
the physical, psychological and moral elements which constitute those families. The
Catechism of the Catholic Church reiterates that “Techniques that entail the dissociation of
husband and wife, by the intrusion of a person other than the couple (donation of sperm or
ovum, surrogate uterus), are gravely immoral”.
Surrogacy has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the
years. It is a class-and-gender minefield. When money is exchanged for pregnancy, some
believe, surrogacy comes close to organ-selling, or even baby-selling. It threatens to
commodify not only babies, but women as well, putting their biological functions up for sale.
If surrogacy ever becomes a widely practiced market transaction, it will probably make
pregnancy into just another dirty task for the working class, with wages driven down and
wealthy couples hiring the work out because it’s such a hassle to be pregnant.
Whatever form it takes, surrogate motherhood is a form of “reproductive
prostitution.” In street prostitution, the woman sells or rents her body or body parts, the
relationship to the “customer” is entirely impersonal, she must do what she is told, her
value or usefulness comes solely from her function, and she is to leave when she is told. The
surrogate is picked on the basis of desirable qualities — appearance, health, and fertility —
is paid to provide her body for a period of time, and then she is to disappear.
To put it briefly, surrogacy may appear to be a good idea at the time, but it does not
serve the best interests of the intended mother or the child who is born of a surrogate
mother. And, of course, to ask a woman to give up a child she has carried for nine months,
regardless of how much she is compensated financially, will usually leave psychological and
emotional scars.

REFERENCE:
Connell, S. (2012). Grandmother, Surrogate Mother. Woman Gives Birth to Own
Grandson. Retrieved from https://parenting.nytimes.com