In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, actress Kristen Wiig recalled how she used in-vitro fertilization (IVF) and a surrogate to have twins with her husband Avi Rothman. She called the experience a “struggle” and her path to having babies “bittersweet.”
“It was such a struggle,” she explained. “When you go through it, you meet other people who are going through it, and it’s almost like this secret little — the whispering conversation at a party. It feels like not a lot of people talk about it.”
She and her husband tried IVF for three years without success. Now 50, it appears Wiig was already in her forties when she began IVF. Research shows that for women older than age 42, the IVF success rate is only 4.1% for a singleton birth using a woman’s own eggs. “I remember when our doctor mentioned going other routes and I was just like, ‘Nope. Don’t ever bring that up again. I’m getting pregnant. I’m doing this,'” the actress said.
But Wiig didn’t have success with IVF originally. This was difficult for her to accept, so she tried another route: she hired a surrogate, who carried and gave birth to Wiig’s twins. And yet, despite her inability to become pregnant naturally, despite failed IVF cycles, and despite a decision to purchase another woman’s body to carry her children, Wiig said, “I’ve always believed that things happen the way they’re supposed to happen, and this is how [our babies] were supposed to get here.”
This seems like problematic thinking at best, though the problem is not that Wiig’s twins (who are valuable human beings in every way) exist; if Wiig truly believed that things happen the way they’re “supposed” to, then how is it reasonable to think that precious children are “supposed” to be created in a lab, with many destroyed intentionally or accidentally during the process (IVF destroys embryos at a higher rate than abortion)? How is it reasonable to think that children are “supposed” to be carried by and bonded with someone who is not their biological mother for the duration of pregnancy?
READ: New York moves to discourage adoption while incentivizing surrogacy and abortion
Just because we can create children in such a manner doesn’t mean we are supposed to. How many of Wiig’s other children may have lost their lives along the way?
IVF isn’t the only problem; renting wombs through surrogacy has created a class of “breeders” for the elite. The bodies of less privileged women are increasingly being used to create offspring for the wealthy, and the surrogates are often treated as disposable. The women who are choosing to become surrogates are not typically wealthy, but are often poor and looking to better their situations, explained Cassy Fiano-Chesser for Live Action News. The wealthy who rent the bodies of less privileged women even buy insurance in case the woman’s body doesn’t perform as wanted, and may attempt to force a surrogate into an abortion if the preborn child she’s carrying has a disability, if she becomes pregnant with multiples, or even if the baby is the “wrong” gender.
People born from surrogacy have also expressed that they don’t approve of the process. Olivia Auriol, was conceived via surrogacy 30 years ago and has spoken out about the trauma she experienced as a result. “People just think that it’s a beautiful little butterfly world where everything goes right and that love is sufficient and that the child will grow up and everything will be fine, but, no, no,” she said. “Not everything will be fine. We’re using wombs, we’re paying for women’s uteruses, we’re buying children. There’s nothing right with surrogacy.”
Katy Faust of Them Before Us notes, “Surrogacy always insists that children lose their relationship with the only person they know on the day they are born not due to tragedy, but because an adult wants it that way. Whether or not surrogacy is paid or altruistic, whether the child goes home with his genetic parents or genetic strangers, the loss of one’s birth mother inflicts a ‘primal wound.'” Faust also notes that while surrogacy is sometimes compared to adoption, the two are not the same. “In both scenarios, the child has experienced parental loss. In adoption, the parents seek to mend that wound. With third-party reproduction, the adults inflict the wound.” And in adoption, she says, “the child is the client. The goal is to find a family for every child without one. In #BigFertility, the adult is the client. The goal is to get a child for every adult regardless of the cost to that, or any other, child.”
Reproductive technologies and surrogacy are primarily focused on the wishes and desires of adults who want children. The rights and possible wishes of those children are not a consideration.
