ore than 200 miles away from New York, on a leafy cul-de-sac in Columbia, Maryland, Lisa Schuster is curled up in an armchair with her elderly terrier who is deaf and blind and bewildered by the smell of my presence. The hum of family life surrounds her. Her 15-year-old son is on the computer upstairs, her 13-year-old is on his way home from camp, and her daughter, 11, is clattering around in the kitchen.
So far, all of this sounds like it’s for the benefit of the intended parents, not her. She says she also met with a mental health provider, both with her husband and in a group session with the intended parents, before they went ahead. “There were so many things I hadn’t thought about. She asked how I would feel if I had to terminate the pregnancy or if the baby had any health issues when they were delivered. She asked what my family thought about it and how it would impact friendships.
I don’t want the surrogate daughter I carried to question if she’s here because someone was taken advantage of. It added to my life in so many positive ways The critics who argue that surrogacy fragments the reproductive role of women and reduces them to body parts are the same people who refer to what Schuster has done as “womb rental”, she says. “All of those other things that I was doing have no value in today’s society: the time that I missed caring for my children or taking care of my household, that mental load I carried. If you don’t value all the work that’s going into it, you’re going to assign that value to the womb.
Heather Breault with her family in Connecticut. She has carried two children for a gay man in the Cayman Islands: ‘It was none of my DNA – I’m more like a babysitter.’Unlike Schuster, Breault had complicated deliveries. She had pre-eclampsia for the first birth, which meant the baby had to be delivered a week early, while she was heavily medicated. “I didn’t do the research I feel like I should have done. But I still wouldn’t take it back for anything – the delivery was the best feeling ever.
What about adoption? “We consider adoption [to be] a form of volunteering. It is not a way to become parents,” he says. “As a society, we should use whatever power we have to ensure there are no children that require adoption. Telling us that we should depend on the failing of society, and that’s a solution for us – it’s unacceptable.
Why can’t they just go and get pregnant? Apparently men can do that now