By Mirah Riben “Give me children, or else I die. Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? Behold my maid Bilhah. She shall bear fruit upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.” Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood In Atwood’s novel, which takes place “after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and blamed it on…
NY’s Child-Parent Security Act #A04319 and S02765 has been introduced to legalize compensated surrogacy in New York, and provide “protections” that ensure surrogates are entering into legal agreements and there’s no question that the intended parents of the child have full rights that they paid for.
Of course, also included in the proposed legislation are the already archaic practice of sealing the ORIGINAL BIRTH CERTIFICATE.
As I have long said that there is a strong correlation between what happens in surrogacy and what happens in adoption, so a film like Breeders is very important. It is an honest look at the risks of surrogate mothers and the commoditization of fertility and pregnancy, egg donations, and assisted reproductive technology in regard to human rights violations and women’s empowerment. Surrogacy is making all the same mistakes that have been made in adoption and have not yet learned from the past decades of education and awareness because the two have been seen as separate, but it’s really not very different.
I have heard from more than a few good sources that many adoption attorneys are making most of their money through surrogacy agreements these days. In my opinion, the only difference between adoption relinquishment and surrogacy is that one pregnancy is usually unplanned and one pregnancy is planned. In either case, someone is getting paid for the separation of a mother and her genetic creation, her child.