Childfree Abby - What do you think of surrogate motherhood?

27 March 2004

Message ID: c448a9$2deag3$1@ID-202214.news.uni-berlin.de

ASKER'S PROFILE:

The Jock
Intellectual Guy
The Rebel

City: New York
Age Range: 29-35
Occupation: Technical
I am: Single

Question

What do you think of surrogate motherhood? Lets say I want to have a child, but women don't find me very appealing (and aren't interested in dating me, let alone marrying me and breeding). I can hire a woman to bring the baby to term, and I can even hand pick the egg from a donor of my specification (the sort of woman I would always have wanted, but wouldn't have been interested in me). This can be fairly expensive (60- 100k, depending on how many times you have to try before the preganancy "takes"), but I do have the financial resources to pull it off. I could hire a nanny to do most of the raising work. This isn't an optimal situation for the kid, but it could be workable, and at least it preserves my genetic information for another generation ( which, let's face it, is the reason people have sex and procreate at all). Or would you consider this to be a strange family situation? And would I be cheating nature somehow?

Originally posted on answerology.com

Hmmmm. Surrogate motherhood. An interesting question to pose to someone who really just could not see the point of reproducing in the first place. One can look at it from the point of supply and demand - namely if there is someone who wants to buy a particular commodity there will be someone to provide it - just like lap dances, fast food, home stereo systems and miatas. As long as both parties are happy with the exchange, I really don't see the problem with it.

As for having a nanny raise the kid, well, a lot of people do that too, with varying degrees of success. It depends on your ability to hire the best person for the job.

The part though that does give me reason to pause is the fact that nowhere in your query do you ever actually say you want to be a parent or for that matter, to parent any offspring that may result from this transaction. What you seem to want to do is have someone spit out the kid, then slough off the responsibility of raising this offspring onto someome else.

So why do you want to reproduce anyway?

You don't want a child, but you do have the arrogance to suggest that for some great cosmic reason your particular DNA is somehow worth preserving. You present no reasons for this save your own hubris. Believe me, you are not that remarkable. Take a look around - there are 5 billion people on the planet - and revel in the fact that you are, in fact, incredibly ordinary. Why not just give a sperm sample to a storage facility where it can be used in the highly unlikely event that your particular combination of chromosomes might be of use? Takes up less space, uses less resources, and is about the same amount of emotional commitment that you seem to want to give to childrearing. As I see it, that is the perfect solution for you.

Childfree Abby
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