IT series: Ethics of paying for surrogacy & related issues.

The Irish Times has a series about surrogacy going on. I must say I find the whole thing very disturbing.

There is a lot of debate about the ethics of paying for surrogacy. However, not much about the ethics of bringing a baby into the world who, in this country is legally just not there and has no parents!

The parents cannot sign legal documents as her parents. That just seems outrageous to me.

They criticize the state for not being up to date with surrogacy laws, however don't criticize themselves at all for just going ahead with it anyway.

I havent read the series, is the baby biologically related to either parent to be?
If not, do the parents not adopt the child as a private adoption?

How is the baby 'just not there'?

As someone who cannot have children I completely understand the terrible sadness that people who want a baby but are denied one experience.

At the same time, however, a child is not an entitlement or a commodity and people do need to think of the consequences of certain courses of action before having a baby, however much they long for one.
The whole surrogacy business can become really really messy, with legal complications, people changing their minds, custody battles, and barriers that nature has put there for good reasons being bypassed - not always in the interests of the child.

Sometimes you just have to accept things in life, unfortunately.

What I found particularly unsettling about one of the surrogacy stories reported on in the Irish Times was the incident where a couple (two men, as I recall) had chosen an egg donor from Canada, but the surrogate mother in whom the fertilised egg was implanted was in India. The agency in India handling the arrangements was getting €20k; the Indian woman was getting €4k. I found it deeply shocking that a woman in a third-world country would be paid so little for such an invasive and arduous job.

Ceepee said:

What I found particularly unsettling about one of the surrogacy stories reported on in the Irish Times was the incident where a couple (two men, as I recall) had chosen an egg donor from Canada, but the surrogate mother in whom the fertilised egg was implanted was in India. The agency in India handling the arrangements was getting €20k; the Indian woman was getting €4k. I found it deeply shocking that a woman in a third-world country would be paid so little for such an invasive and arduous job.

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Who are the legal parents in this case? I can't imagine this set up will be easy for a child to grow up knowing about