Surrogate Mothers vs. Artificial Wombs

Yonatan Gher and his partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their child about being made in India, in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from an Internet lineup.__NYT__via_Impactlab

Outsourcing child-bearing and child-birth to India? Yes, of course. In India a surrogacy will cost roughtly US $25,000, while in the US it would cost over $75,000. The Indian surrogate mothers will likely practise healthier lifestyles--better food, less likelihood of alcohol, tobacco, and drugs in the system etc.--than their American counterparts.

Under guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research, surrogate mothers sign away their rights to any children. A surrogate’s name is not even on the birth certificate.

This eases the process of taking the baby out of the country. But for many, like Lisa Switzer, 40, a medical technician from San Antonio whose twins are being carried by a surrogate mother from the Rotunda clinic, the overwhelming attraction is the price. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries — we can’t,” she said. “Unless we go to India.” __NYT

Until we actually have a viable artificial womb option, we will not be able to compare the advantages and disadvantages of surrogacy vs. artificial wombs. Artificial wombs within the western country would free the parents from the need to travel to India to collect the child, and would simplify the legality of the parental situation. The cost of providing artificial gestation and monitoring may easily make up for those savings, however.

Certainly the demographic shrinking of Europe, Japan, and other western nations points to the need for some form of child-bearing that relieves educated and liberated career women from the chore. A chore that more women are clearly choosing to do without.