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Most surrogate mother arrangements work out exactly as intended by the participants. A couple or a single parent gets the biologically-linked baby they bargained for, and the mother gets what she wanted, cash. To many the contracts seem unethical because the idea, only recently beyond the realm of science fiction, of a woman bearing another couple’s child, or allowing a stranger’s seed to impregnate her,  appears strange, unnatural and  icky, which it is. No, it is not unethical, but it is what we call a pre-unethical condition, a situation that lays a foundation for unethical conduct and results if care isn’t taken and one or more participants lack functioning ethics alarms. Three recent episodes demonstrate how icky can turn to unethical, especially when the wrong kind of people are involved.

I. The Unwanted Triplet, continued.

Earlier this year, Ethics Alarms hosted a spirited debate regarding Melissa Cook, a surrogate who fought against the man who owned her three unborn triplets, having rented out her womb to gestate them. He wanted to have one of them aborted, because two babies were all he felt he could support. She refused, and challenged the surrogacy contract in court. I asked…

What is being argued about here? Is that newly spawned triplet a baby, as the gestating-by-contact mother claims? Is it just a potential, wart-like annoyance as the birth father says? Who should have the right to kill it? Cook’s not entirely a mother, is she? Could she choose to abort the triplet, or all of them? I’m guessing not, even though it is “her body.” Still, as long as the triplets are part of her body, they have only the status of leeches or tumors, right? That’s what I get from the rhetoric of the Planned Parenthood execs; I mean, I could be wrong. So if the fact that it’s her body having to nurture the trio of tiny parasites doesn’t give her the right to kill them, why would she have the right not to kill them, since her womb is now the equivalent of a rented, furnished apartment? Then again, surely we can’t have a man forcing a woman to have an abortion since…well, it isn’t her body, exactly is it? Not the baby-making part anyway–he contracted to have control of that part. She made a deal, fair and square, signed and sealed. Right?

The post and the situation sparked two thought-provoking Comments of the Day, this, from a father who used a surrogate, and here, a post that objects to those who employ surrogates being ask to defend their decision not to adopt.

Now Melissa Cook has given birth to healthy, though premature, triplets. During the pregnancy, the sperm donor ultimately demanded that she abort all three developing embryos, because, he wrote, the legal battles and paying for the surrogacy had ruined his finances.Immediately after the babies were born Monday evening of this week, the hospital refused to let Melissa see the children and removed them from Cook. Then a California judge granted the biological father/sperm donor/thwarted embryo killer full parental rights to all three children, and Cook is appealing the decision.

Says her lawyer: “We have a mother who loves them, who fought for them, who defended their life, who stands ready to take care of them. You can’t tell a mother who gives birth to children that what happens to the children is none of her business.”

Can’t you? Wasn’t her “business” just to gestate the children, give birth to them, and then cash her check?

Yet somehow I think King Solomon would have at least allowed her to keep the one the father wanted to kill.

I also wonder why the father is insisting on taking all three children that he apparently would have aborted without Cook’s intervention, especially when he has repeatedly said that he can’t afford them. The lesson here appears to be “Don’t get into a surrogacy contract involving someone who is unstable, vindictive, or a big  jerk.”

II. Jordan Schnitzer’s Heir

“Jerk” is also the operative word in this epic mess, as a tycoon with two daughters still would only be satisfied if a son would inherit his business. Someone who thinks like that is pretty much a jerk by the principle of res ipsa loquitur.

Jordan Schnitzer, the jerk in question, is a wealthy Oregon businessman. After two attempts to create a son using his sperm and  surrogates, he met and began dating Cory Sause, who had frozen some of her eggs before meeting Schnitzer. While they were dating, she offered her eggs to Schnitzer so he could finally have a male heir. (She did this, she said, in part because she had killed 21-year-old man and severely injured his 14-year-old brother in a drunk driving incident in 2004, so “I took a life and I want to help create a life.”)   Under the resulting contract between the two, the daughter-distrusting Schnitzer unequivocally disavowed rights and responsibilities to any embryos that were female, while Sause gave up rights to male embryos.

Schnitzer then had one of the male embryos that was created using  his sperm and one of Sause’s eggs transferred to the uterus of a surrogate, thus creating a pre-unethical condition using a pre-unethical condition.  Predictably, things went awry.

When his son was born last December, Schnitzer successfully petitioned an Oregon court for an order stating that only his name should go on the child’s birth certificate. Suase, the biological mother, has her lawyers opposing him, arguing that while she gave up rights to the male embryos, she did not give up the right to be acknowledged as the mother of the child on the child’s birth certificate, and rights to visit the child.

The surrogate, who actually gave birth to the child for these two wacky kids, has nothing to say in the matter.

III. The Sherri Shepherd Saga

The jerk in this strange case is former seven-year View co-host Sherri Shepherd. She “had a baby,” at least in the legal sense, using a surrogate, a donor’s egg and sperm from her then-husband Lamar Sally, whom she married in 2011. Under the baby-making agreement with a surrogacy-facilitating company called Reproductive Possibilities, they could terminate the contract at any time before the “gestational carrier” had  undergone the IVF/embryo transfer.

Shepherd paid $100,000 during the surrogacy process. She and Sally communicated often with the surrogate mother during the pregnancy. Then Sally and Shepherd separated and both filed for divorce in May 2014, before their baby was born.

Being no longer married, Shepherd no longer wanted the baby she conceived with its father. When her son was born on Aug. 5, 2014, Shepherd demanded that her name be left off the birth certificate, so the hospital listed the birth mother instead and billed her for hospital costs. Later, California began to seek child support from the surrogate mother, because Sally couldn’t afford to support the child by himself.

Lawsuits ensued.

Shepherd first claimed that Sally forced her to sign the surrogacy contract through fraud, then argued that since she didn’t give birth to the child, she could only become the baby’s mother through adoption, and she wasn’t about to adopt. In May 2015, a court in Pennsylvania found the surrogacy contract enforceable and decreed that Shepherd was the child’s mother. Shepherd has appealed, lost, asked for reconsideration, and been turned down. She must now pay Sally at least $4,000 a month in child support until the boy turns 18.

Shepherd has never seen the boy, and doesn’t plan to.

Nice.

Also, ick.

 

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Spark: Fred

Sources: Life News, Buzzfeed, Above the Law