Trying to find a carrier
Man has deep thoughts on ethics – deep Catholic thoughts on ethics.
My husband and I are in the process of surrogacy. Friends know we're trying to find a carrier. Thread.
— Brandon Ambrosino (@BrandonAmbro) July 12, 2019
A carrier. A carrier. As if that’s all it is, like carrying a bag of groceries.
I am getting my PhD from a Catholic theology program in ethics. I understand that there are many, many factors to consider from an ethical perspective. Andy and I talk and think about them all the time.
— Brandon Ambrosino (@BrandonAmbro) July 12, 2019
And yet all this constant thinking somehow doesn’t deliver up the thought that he shouldn’t refer to the prospective baby’s mother as a “carrier.”
"Why would you USE women to carry your child?" Every woman who carries a child for any couple is a blessing and should be celebrated. But the word "use" isn't correct when we consider how highly compensated most carriers are, and the fact that many claim to ENJOY being pregnant.
— Brandon Ambrosino (@BrandonAmbro) July 12, 2019
But it’s not just carrying that gestating women do. It’s far from just that. First of all she contributes the egg. The baby is hers as well as the father’s. I know it must be painful for same-sex couples that they can’t conceive together, but that’s just how it is, and calling the mother “the carrier” doesn’t change that.
And it doesn’t end with the egg, obviously. That “carrying” includes nourishing the baby for nine months, sharing her entire body with the baby, living with the baby at all times. That’s a big deal.
Then there’s the giving birth part. I understand it’s not entirely painless.
Calling a woman who does that for someone else a “carrier” is dumbfoundingly insulting.
“Ethcis” my ass.
Am I missing something? The first thing that Catholic ethics says about being a same-sex couple is “don’t”. He has already rejected that advice. Why is he still attending a course on Catholic ethics?
No one has any problem understanding why selling human organs is illegal. Yet somehow surrogacy goes unquestioned. I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that there’s a certain class of people who would never be asked to be surrogates.
At a play festival I went to a couple of years ago, there was a play about a same-sex couple using a surrogate mother. The name of the play said it all: Breeders. And the same-sex couple was paired with a “cute” story line about hamsters who were also breeding. The female hamster was played by the same woman as the surrogate. The male hamster was not played by a member of the same sex couple.
This is not okay.
1.”I am getting my PhD from a Catholic theology program in ethics.” OK. Cover story established with that.
2. ” I understand that there are many, many factors to consider from an ethical perspective.” Maintaining that cover story can be a bit tricky, but we have over 2,000 years’ worth of Jesuit and other casuistries to get us where we want to go; in our heads.
3. “Andy and I talk and think about them all the time.” This needs round-the-clock reinforcement and repetition (a bit like a Gregorian chant) to get us where we want to go; in our heads. And to keep us there; in our heads.
There is a term psychologists use for this: not ‘bullshit’, though they use that often enough. But for the life of me I cannot remember what it is.
Radiation? No…. Ratio and proportion? No…. Radiolation? No……
Might just have to settle for bullshit.
He only ever hears the ‘why not adopt an existing baby’ argument when it’s lobbied against gay couples? He must have very selective hearing, because I’ve heard that argument used for years, long before gay couples latched onto it. It’s a damned good argument, too.
What else does this remind us of?
“Prostitutes exchange a service for money so they are not being “used”, and besides, a lot of them really enjoy it.”
I find it amusing that he justifies the use of “carrier” because “that’s what everyone calls them”, basically. He sees nothing wrong with dehumanization if “everyone” does it.
This everyone, I presume, is the other couples that are using surrogates? Because I have never heard that term in that use. I have heard it biologically, as a carrier for infectious diseases. A post man may be called a carrier. A ship that delivers aircraft to a foreign port may be called a carrier (my father was stationed on several of these in his Navy years). But a pregnant woman? Never before today.
This is on a par with those who refer to women as “uterus havers” and “menstruators”. It is dehumanizing, as you noted, and also dismissive of women as people. When people hear “carrier”, it doesn’t make them think of pregnant women, or people, at all. It makes them think of tools, objects, things that are used for one single purpose and often discarded after use.
And yes, some women do enjoy being pregnant. I’ve only met one in my life, and I know a lot of women. And she only enjoyed it because she was getting attention she usually didn’t get. It wasn’t the pregnancy itself, it was the fact that society was perfectly willing to ignore her as a human until she was pregnant.
I’m not sure if this means he passes or fails his Catholic ethics course.
I’ve known two women that enjoyed being pregnant. One really enjoyed it and kept getting pregnant after delivering a child as soon as it was physically possible for her first several pregnancies until her doctor told her it was imperative she give her body a break for a few years, which she did but was very unhappy about. She said she felt supercharged while pregnant. The other woman also felt extra healthy while pregnant but not to the same extent.
So, I don’t know, maybe a compensatory response to what their body’s going through that for some women is turned up super high?
Pretty much all other women I’ve known had the much more typical reaction that they wanted to have a child and being pregnant was the burden they were willing to bear. From the outside it certainly didn’t look like anything enjoyable to me, especially toward the end.
I did a search to see if the “carrier” term has used by other people. Some results indicated a surrogate uses her own egg but a “gestational carrier” does not:
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/whats-the-difference-between-a-gestational-carrier-and-a-surrogate-150487325.html
Other sources, like wikipedia, seem to use the terms interchangeably.
So, not defending calling someone a “carrier”, but maybe the term was used to describe that they intended to use a donor egg not provide by the woman carrying the baby? It does sound rather flippant though.
iknklast@8:
If you read through his twitter feed, he claims that the doctors & nurses & other health care providers use the same term. He’s probably just lying, but that’s what he claims.
I realized later that I’d forgotten to account for the possibility that a different woman provided the egg. That probably is how “carrier” is used…but as you indicate, that doesn’t make it any less insulting.
If he is not lying, those health care professionals need to go into a new field.
They don’t want to use the word “mother” for obvious reasons, but that is the word they should be using.
I wonder how anyone explains this to the resulting child. People who were adopted usually wonder why their mother gave them up, and even the most well-adjusted ones can’t seem to shake off the question “did my mother not love me?” so what do you tell a child who know that there must have been a woman involved in the process? “She didn’t love you, she just had you because we paid her – wait no, I’m sure she loved you, but you are ours now and that’s why she’s not a part of your life- wait that sounds bad… umm, sweetie, go ask other daddy”
Doesn’t surrogacy also involve in vitro fertilization, during the course of which there are almost always “extra” embryos created that aren’t used?
The Catholic Church opposes both IVR and surrogacy.
I’m sure that Ambrosino would insist that he isn’t actually Catholic, he’s just taking a PhD in ethics from them. Which just boggles the mind. I will begrudgingly admit that the Catholic Church has some things going for it — nice buildings, and the music isn’t bad if you’re into that kind of thing. Deciding to just cherry-pick their ethical values is like going to a buffet and picking the nastiest, worst-tasting item on display.
Carrier of typhoid. Carrier of tuberculosis. Carrier of rubella. Carrier of a fetus. Really, what’s the difference?
/s
Catwhisperer @ 16 that’s a very good point. And a rather heartbreaking one.
Catwhisperer @16,
That hasn’t been true of the adopted people I know. Some are curious about their birth parents and some aren’t, but none of them “couldn’t shake” worries that a biological parent didn’t love them.
And I’ve never been a fan of the “how will I explain this to a child” argument. Bigots used to use it as an argument against gay marriage, and it turns out that kids can understand just fine that Heather has two mommies. And evidence presented in the gay marriage court cases showed that there is no reason to believe that children raised by same-sex couples do any worse than others, so if children are being traumatized by the thought that their mother or sperm donor father didn’t love them, it’s not showing up in any data.
Catwhisperer, I had eight nieces and nephews that were adopted and only one of them ever worried about their birth mother. She was the only one adopted old enough to sort of have memories of her birth mother (she was 3), and she had been abused by the mother, including having cigarette burn scars that will never go away. I think it sort of depends on how the parents handle it. My nieces and nephews knew they were adopted, but all of them were told that my sister and brother-in-law were their real parents. They never cared to know otherwise.
So I guess it depends a lot on circumstances.
Ha, well now that I think about it, I suppose my impression of adopted people wondering about their birth parents probably comes from the fact that they are the ones who have stories to tell. “I was adopted – so what?” is the title of no documentary ever.
I was thinking specifically about the scenario in Ophelia’s post – gay men who barely seem to register the humanity of the woman carrying their baby. I was thinking about their attitude to it, and how that would then be passed on to their child. Pregnancy? Pfft, no big deal, just what women do, no problem at all to expect them to do it to order. It seems very different than adopting a child that has already been born into difficult circumstances. It’s this guy’s indifference to women that had me reaching for the “what are you going to tell the kid” argument only because it seems so unlikely that he will ever be able to present the child with a compassionate explanation of what happened. Ultimately I think I’m not very comfortable with the idea of surrogacy – until we live in a world where the people who can become pregnant and have children are completely free to make their own decisions about whether to do so, and are not in any way disadvantaged by belonging to that group, it’s just another way of exploiting women’s reproductive abilities.
Catwhisperer, as an adoptee, I can’t thank you enough for your comments.
I hear “The adoptees I know are happy and don’t ask questions” as an adult about as often as I heard “So your mother didn’t want you?” as a kid. But being adopted does haunt many of us all our lives. We often can’t say so because saying so hurts the feelings of the people who love us and care for us. For whatever reason (and I could speculate all day), adopted men tend not to search and to be much more adamant about not wanting to know. Does that really mean none of them want to know? I doubt it. Similarly, unhappy/bewildered children of gamete donation may not blip the data, but they exist, they’re human, and they’re suffering.
Being adopted matters. I had what most people would consider a model adoption: I went from one caring family into another when I was too young to know the difference, and I was given a family as like my original one as could be found. My adoptive parents encouraged me to be myself, not some version of their never-born imaginary child. Being adopted has still been complicated and at times very painful.
Learning my mother gave me up because she was not married and “had to” made me sad and angry on her account. I imagine I would feel similar to have learned she gave birth because she was poor and desperate (i.e., “had to”). It’s my empathy for women, not just my empathy for babies, that makes me anti-surrogacy. Pregnancy should be an uncoerced choice because women and children are people, period.
Again, I think you did a wonderful job of wondering what it might be like to be adopted without speaking for the adopted, and I appreciate it very much.
And in turn, thank you for that, Laurel.
It seems to me this whole issue hasn’t been explored enough.
One of my cousins was adopted. He was also mixed race. His adopted parents loved him, as did his sister (also adopted) and the rest of the family. He had a good group of friends. Yet he always felt unsettled. It was clear that their was a gap in his life that gnawed at him, yet he couldn’t talk about. One night after an argument with friends he threw himself off a cliff. The idea that all adoptees are happy and content with their lives and don’t feel a need to understand where, why, who… is a myth.
Ophelia @ 24, thank you so much. I don’t say much, but I’m a long-time B&W reader. I appreciate being able to post about this here.
Adoption’s effect on adoptees is not an issue many non-adoptees seem to want to explore. There are some good adoptive parent bloggers out there, but anyone wanting to know how adoptees feel about adoption should check out blogs and books by adoptees. There are a lot of really good ones, and although we certainly have things in common, the variety is amazing.
Rob, I’m so sorry about your cousin. A study concluded several years back that adoptees are up to four times more likely to commit suicide. (How good a study it was I do not know, but it certainly got my attention.) Children need love, but love is never all they need. Adoptive parents are sometimes encouraged to believe that it is. Unfortunately, that just isn’t true.
There was also a recent tv documentary on identical triplet adoptees and the lies they’d been told all their lives. They were “research subjects” for a study on (of course) nature v nurture. They learned the truth around age 18 I think…and they were furious. One of them committed suicide decades later.
Three Identical Strangers, it was called.
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/28/three-identical-strangers-review-triplets-research-tim-wardle
I’ve been meaning to watch that one for a long time now. I often have to psych myself up before watching an adoption documentary. I think Mercy Mercy–A Portrait of a True Adoption and Wo Ai Ni, Mommy are both very good, but they are shattering to watch (and not easy to find). I also like Adopted, which is on YouTube, very much. All three are about international/interracial adoptions.
It is pretty shattering, there’s no getting around it.