Friday, April 26, 2024

The Dark Side of Commercial Surrogacy

pregnancyOn October 8 2015, a young mother died of complications from childbirth.

If we can believe the GoFundMe page put up under the name of Kathleen McRoberts, an Idaho and Utah fertility lawyer, this woman’s name was Brooke: “She was a mother, a friend, and a surrogate mother to 5 babies. She was an advocate and the face for everything good about surrogacy.”

In her death, Brooke is also the reminder of many things that are bad about surrogacy.

As the news of Brooke’s death circulated through the network, this week in Canada another woman, named Nancy, came forward to discuss her brush with death as a result of a pregnancy created with a surrogacy contract, according to the National Post: “Carrying triplets for complete strangers, the Ontario woman developed first high blood pressure, then congestive heart failure, before she was put into a medically induced coma last fall to save her life — and that of the infants.”

Nancy signed with an American agency, was paired with a Canadian couple, and ended up in a Mexican clinic with two embryos inserted in her womb. She said she heard nothing about the increased risk of pre-eclampsia in women carrying multiples — until after she was diagnosed with the condition while pregnant.

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Read the full article at National Review.

Maggie Gallagher is a senior fellow at American Principles in Action.

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