The fact that a wealthy, white mother-of-two in California with access to excellent prenatal and birth care, acting as a surrogate for another family in the safest, cleanest, least coercive of all possible surrogacy arrangements, died this week while giving birth really underscores the surrogacy thoughts I've been having recently. Should you be ethically willing or legally able to compel another woman to risk death at worst and major lifetime health consequences at best just so you can have a child that is biologically related to you?
Hereâs an article about it.
She died of an amniotic fluid embolism, which is rare but very deadly.
This post gives another example of a surrogate dying and includes this disturbing information:
An article online incorrectly states âthe risks of being a surrogate mother are the same as for every pregnancy.â This is not true. Recent studies have shown that surrogate pregnancies are different and are high-risk. Studies show that women pregnant with donor eggs (as in gestational surrogacy) have a more than three-fold risk of developing pregnancy induced hypertension and pre-eclampsia. Â
W/ the greater risk of hypertension/pre-eclampsia, why? Or rather, is it known why?
Because in a normal pregnancy the baby is >50% related to the mother. In surrogacy, an unrelated egg is used, which means entirely foreign biological material in the woman's body.
Pregnancy is basically a 9 month-long battle between the woman and the embryo; a "healthy" full-term pregnancy can only happen if, essentially, the women's body doesn't realize that the embryo is there, because if it does it will attack it with the woman's immune system as a "foreign body." This is the main reason the placenta exists, to shield the embryo from the woman's immune system (along with nutrient absorption obviously).
The closer the embryo is to the woman, the less likely an immune response will be triggered; this applies to gestational surrogacy, but also relates to things like the sex of the embryo and the embryo's blood type. So, the more genetically different an embryo is from its mother, the higher the overall risk of triggering an immune response, which then increases the likelihood of a smorgasbord of complications given the strain that an immune response causes both the mother and the embryo.
this is just personal observation, but all the people I know who had surrogates (which is only 3 so who really knows), their babies are so so sick all the time. Like months premature, weeks in NICU, multiple hospital stays in infancy, now constantly sick as toddlers, canât keep weight on, lowest percentiles of height / weight, etc etc. Literally every one of them.
and maybe itâs just a coincidence but maybe you arenât supposed to implant your eggs in another woman and assume her body will grow a healthy baby for you? not to even talk about what it does to an infant to be forcibly removed from their mother at birthâŚ.
This should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about pregnancy/women's healthcare. But because even doctors seem to think that pregnancy is when a woman just incubates a man's offspring for a few months, providing nothing but a chamber in which the baby can grow, they treat it as if it makes no difference where the embryo came from.
Surrogacy is this horrible intersection between modern medicine + capitalism and an almost medieval understanding of pregnancy. Worst of both worlds.
it's not only surrogacy. i meet a lot of kids who are the products of IVF, and the allergies, the immune issues, the eye issues, they are many. I wonder about embryos who have been frozen and thawed. surely that affects the human being? who went through that?





























