Last week, Britain's most famous surrogate mother gave up her involvement in surrogacy surrogacy arrangements. Kim Cotton, who shot to fame in 1985 for being the first British woman to publicly act as a surrogate mother for money, has given up the fight to make surrogacy an acceptable practice by resigning from COTS (Childlessness overcome through surrogacy), the charity she helped to set up.
And who can blame her? Over the past 15 years, surrogacy has barely been out of the newspaper headlines. But unlike other forms of assisted reproduction, public attitudes towards surrogacy have changed little. Whilst treatments like IVF and donor insemination have become more widely accepted as legitimate medical procedures, surrogacy - despite its move into the IVF clinic - still has a tarnished reputation.
Surrogacy arrangements are often viewed as sordid affairs, intertwining the lives of desperate commissioning couples with hard-nosed, money grabbing surrogates. The latest controversy is of a couple offering women £10,000 to be surrogate mothers and £2000 to anyone who introduces them to potential surrogates.
Whether or not this story is true is, in many respects, neither here nor there. The point is that we are predisposed to believe it because surrogacy has such a grubby reputation. With newspapers so inclined to report the failures rather than the success stories, the public has a skewed vision of surrogacy. In such an atmosphere, the fact that COTS has had only seven failed surrogacy arrangements in 300 falls on deaf ears.
But is surrogacy really so bad? The team which recently reviewed current surrogacy regulations in the United Kingdom thinks that the financial aspects of surrogacy arrangements are problematic. There should be no financial inducement to become a surrogate, the review team says. Expenses for maternity clothes and hospital trips are acceptable, as is remuneration for loss of earnings. But surrogates should not, according to the team, receive compensation for actually being pregnant.
The surrogacy review team's view rests uneasily with a subsequent ruling on egg donation. In the UK, women are allowed to receive free IVF treatment in return for donating some of their eggs. This arrangement, called egg sharing, means that women who partake are effectively being paid £2000 (the rough cost of an IVF cycle) for donating their eggs to another woman. The woman is being financially induced to take part in the scheme, because this is the only way she will have a treatment she cannot otherwise afford.
Egg sharing seems an acceptable practice. So why is surrogacy not viewed in the same way? Both schemes mean that someone who would not otherwise become a mother has a chance to do so. Money is involved in both practices, just as it is in all private fertility treatment. But since when does the exchange of money make something necessarily bad? Perhaps it is time for at least some consistency in the regulation of assisted reproduction.
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