And she and Charlie were delighted with their bundle of joy. Words will never express our endless gratitude for our incredible surrogate and everyone who helped us along the way. We love you to the moon and back again. The parents are over the moon; the surrogate is happy; a baby has loving parents; critics are haters.
Nothing, says The Economist , also in the past week. As usual, The Economist — like most supporters of legalising surrogacy — did not inquire into the rights of the child. In this case, the commissioning couple was gay, so the child will grow up without a mother. It will never know the history of its biological parents. It will not know nothing about its medical background. Nor did it inquire into the background of the surrogate mother. Why did she sell her body? Did she mind being excluded from the life of the child she bore for nine months?
If none of them had been aborted, perhaps all those parents would have been able to adopt a child. The surrogacy industry is growing at a fearsome rate. This suggests that the sum of surrogacy joy in the world has been eclipsed by the sum of surrogacy dollars. Already surrogacy has led to incredibly corrupt and perverse practices. Also this week, perhaps too late for The Economist to take into account, Thai police and Interpol uncovered a human-eggharvesting scheme which kept three young Thai women in virtual slavery.
The facts in stories spanning continents and languages are difficult to corroborate. But Pavena Hongsakula, founder of the Pavena Foundation for Children and Women, claimed in a press conference in Bangkok that the three women were trafficked to Georgia, where surrogacy is legal, by a Chinese gang. They were told that they would be surrogate mothers. Instead, their eggs were harvested for month after month. This sounds too awful to be true, but in Georgia, where surrogacy is legal, the practice has led to incredible situations.
Christina Ozturk and her 22 children, 21 of them from surrogate mothers, lives in the Black Sea resort city of Batumi. She posts regularly on Instagram in Russian about her family. She and her husband Galip originally planned to have children, but apparently this was derailed by his arrest for involvement in a murder back in his native Turkey.
