Several laws are being considered in Minnesota that would allow people to enter into paid surrogacy agreements, which one politician is criticizing as the commodification of both women and babies.
HF 3567 and SF 3504 would allow people to enter official surrogacy agreements, including commercial surrogacy. Minnesota Representative Walter Hudson told WDAY that while he doesn’t oppose altruistic surrogacy — in which the woman who carries the child is not paid — he cannot support commercial surrogacy, and he compared it to slavery.
“There is a number of families who have taken advantage of [surrogacy] to have and raise children, and there is nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is paying people to do it,” he said, adding, “A vote for the bill, which would enable exactly that; commercial, for profit surrogacy, the renting out of wombs for the creation of people to be treated like commodities, to be bought and sold. You are on the same side of history as some of the worst villains we point to when it comes to the original sin of the country.”
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Surrogacy is big business today — according to Fortune, “[T]he cost to the prospective parents can reach over $300,000 – and surrogates themselves may be paid anywhere from about $35,000 to $100,000 for a pregnancy.” And surrogate mothers are typically lower-income women, for whom that money can provide a huge windfall.
As Taslima Nasreen, a feminist and humanist activist, said in 2022, “Surrogacy is possible because there are poor women. Rich people always want the existence of poverty in the society for their own interests. If you badly need to raise a child, adopt a homeless one. I won’t accept surrogacy until rich women become surrogate mom [sic].”
Research has likewise found that surrogates are at higher risk of gestational diabetes, hypertensive disorders of pregnancy, and bleeding complications after birth, while babies born via IVF are at a higher risk for numerous complications. Other studies have found that taking babies from their birth mothers, even if they aren’t biologically related, causes serious trauma. While adoption exists to heal the wound created when a biological parent cannot care for a child, with surrogacy, the child is created with the intent of removing her from her birth mother. Both women and children deserve better than to be treated like products to be bought and used by the wealthy.
