According to a Newsweek article, Jennifer Cantor enjoys being pregnant. She says she likes the feeling of growing another life inside of her. However, she only has one child. All the others have been given away. In fact, none of them were even biologically related to her. Cantor is the vessel in which desperate couples plant their lab-fertilized eggs.
The concept of surrogate mothers challenges the very ideas of motherhood. What kind of traditional mother would bear a child for 9 months, and then simply give it away? These and other challenges were brought forward when the technology first became available. However, it has become more accepted as a last ditch measure for infertile couples to have a child. Nonetheless, there are still concerns about the practice.
Each surrogate is usually paid around $25000. This brings up issues we talked about in the beginning of the year: poorer women may be coerced by the high payments. In fact, Newsweek found that many surrogate mothers are the husbands of military men who are trying to supplement the family's income. However, unlike payments for clinical trials, there is much less of an ethical problem here. The technology for surrogate mothers is well-established and safe, so the risks are much less. I believe that surrogate motherhood is an ethically acceptable (although not exemplary) practice.
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I understand your point that the unknown risks which patients enrolled in clinical trials face are not issues in the case of surrogate mothers, but I don't think that reason makes the use of surrogate mothers ethical. There are risks associated with pregnancy. The mothers do not put themselves at the same unknown risk as clinical trial patients, but there are still risks involved, particularly when you look at the black market of surrogate mothers in countries such as India. I read an article last summer in "Vanity Fair" about the problem of surrogate mothers in India and other poorer countries. American women would travel to foreign lands and pay women to carry their child. The standards of care and quality of the pregnancy and life for the mother in these countries was terrible. The women who gave up 9 months of their lives at a time were in such desperate situations that they truly had no other option to make money to support their families. These women did face the risks of pregnancy in an under-developed region. They also had no power to fight for better conditions because they so desperately needed any amount of money they could receive.
Although I am sure there are some women who are surrogate mothers for completely altruistic reasons, and this does enable many men and women to have children, the payment and use of surrogate women has the potential to become a major problem in poor nations.
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