The practice of surrogacy made the news recently when podcaster Dave Rubin announced that he and his male partner had rented the wombs of two women who were carrying children created with their respective sperm and eggs purchased from a donor. This commodification of both human life and the female body is dystopian enough, but most missed a particularly horrifying aspect of what Rubin clearly believed to be a feel-good story: The fact that he noted in his recent book “Don’t Burn This Country” that he and his partner had decided that if they discovered that any of the children being carried by the surrogates were disabled, they’d have the child aborted.
Rubin doesn’t mention how the surrogate might feel to have his disabled child suctioned out of her womb, or that she might be horrified to find that her offer to carry a child mutate into a demand to abort a child. But that’s how it works with surrogacy: the mother is erased entirely.
Surrogacy has become increasingly popular since Western nations began to legalize same-sex “marriage” and homosexual couples seek to procure children they cannot conceive naturally; other couples choose surrogacy to avoid the pains of pregnancy and childbirth or because they cannot carry children themselves. If you have enough money, nearly anything is possible these days. But that has spawned a new genre of horror stories. Melissa Cook, a woman who decided to become a surrogate mother because bringing life into the world “is the greatest gift you [can] give anyone,” found herself at the center of one.
She now tells the Daily Mail that her perspective has changed. Six years ago, she became pregnant with triplets and was thrilled. On May 31, 2015, the mother of four had signed a surrogacy agreement with Surrogacy International in California. She thought surrogacy was a beautiful thing, but did it largely for the money (she would earn $33,000). A Brit, Cook didn’t make much money at her job as a “mobile notary” and thought that surrogacy was a good example to do a good deed and make money in the process.
