Abandoned surrogate child is only one of many such tragedies

Abandoned surrogate child is only one of many such tragedies

WHAT have we become? Where even to begin?

An Australian couple travel to Thailand in the hope of finding a surrogate to carry their child.

They find a 21-year-old girl who is deeply in debt, and already has a five-year-old, and another child. They pay her about $11,000 to ­undergo IVF, and so she falls pregnant, and it’s twins.

The Australian couple is delighted. To be clear, these children are their children, meaning their own flesh and blood. Time passes, and a test is done. One of the ­babies has Down syndrome.

Now the mood turns dark. First, the Australian couple tries to order the surrogate to have an abortion. She refuses, so they try to bully her into having a “selective reduction’’ (this is term given to the culling of unwanted, usually disabled, foetuses in multiple pregnancies.)

She again refuses, and gives birth to both children. At which point, the Australian couple take the healthy baby from her arms, and spirit her away.

In the process, they leave her baby brother — her twin, Gammy — struggling with a lung infection and a hole in his tiny heart.

Most Australians have reacted with horror. How does anyone do that?

How do you get on the plane with your daughter, knowing that your baby son — her twin — is fighting for his life?

How do you show off a new baby, knowing that she has a twin that you have abandoned, on foreign shores?

What does this couple intend to tell their daughter, in years to come? You had a brother, but he was disabled, so we left him to his fate. The situation is grotesque, yet Australians should know this Gammy is not the first, and he will not be the last.

The Australian embassy in Bangkok deals daily with Australian couples who travel to Thailand to find a surrogate to carry their baby.

In recent years, the embassy has had to open a new room to cope with demands from new parents, including many same-sex couples, who have no idea how to care for the babies they’ve ordered. These parents go to the embassy for the documents they need to bring their children back to Australia, and stay to beg for help from staff on how to nurse, burp and change their infants.

This is not the first time one of those couples has tried to order a woman to have an abortion; very often, they succeed.

Nor is it the first time that embassy staff have had to deal with a couple refusing to take their own child home.

In one earlier, unreported case, a surrogate went to embassy complaining that an Australian couple was trying to back out of their contract because she was carrying twins, and they wanted only one child. The embassy stepped in, and the couple ended up taking both children.

Another couple tried to make a surrogate have an abortion because she was carrying a boy and they wanted a girl (according to embassy workers, when it comes to surrogacy, Australian couples overwhelmingly prefer girls). She refused, and the Australian couple reluctantly took their son.

In another case, almost as shocking as Gammy’s, the embassy has had to persuade an Australian couple to pay the medical bills of their own, sick child, after they initially refused to pay on the grounds that she was one of a set of twins, and they only wanted one child.

In this case, the couple told the embassy they had paid for one baby and only wanted one baby. The babies were born at 28 weeks and, when one of them needed both intensive care, and follow-up treatment, the Australian couple actually had the gall to ask the embassy for help in getting out of their contract, which stipulated that they would help with medical costs, on the grounds that the surrogate had refused to have an abortion and should therefore bear the cost of complications from a multiple birth.

Is this then, who we are now are? A nation so rich that we can easily hurdle the problem of infertility by travelling abroad to pay poorer women to have our children; and yet so poor in spirit that we would then abandon those ­infants for the crime of being born in the wrong number, or of the wrong gender, or somehow less than perfect?

The answer is no. Not all of us are like that. At time of writing, good people had opened their wallets and donated more than $190,000 to Gammy’s care. Others had offered to open their homes — but remember, he is not the only one, and by tomorrow, there will be more, and so the question remains: Have we gained the whole world, and lost our own soul?

Caroline Overington is a best-selling author and journalist who has won the Sir Keith Murdoch Award for Journalism and a Walkley Award for investigative journalism.

A good surrogate or not a good surrogate.

I have met a woman on the Surrogacy Australia forum who has offered to surrogate for us.  She lives in Albury which is a bit on the inconvenient side, but when you are planning on entering into something like this, do you really get to be choosy about where your wonderful helping angel comes from?  I think not.  Luckily, I am going to be down in Canberra in mid-August so I am hoping to take a day trip out to meet her.

She has five children and loves being pregnant and loves newborns, which is lovely because she understands how important babies and children are in people’s lives.  Unfortunately she has what sounds like a slightly deranged ex-husband who was ‘abusive to her and her kids’… which is a huge worry.  What if her being pregnant with our child sent him into a tail spin and put her and her children (and our potential child too!) at risk of his habitually violent ways?!  When I asked her about this, she quite dismissed it and said it was none of his business.

It is a bit of a conundrum from where we stand… obviously we desperately want a surrogate to help us in this enormous endeavour, but at the same time we really need that to be the right person – someone who will happily give the baby back to us, the biological parents and stick by the surrogacy agreement should we be fortunate enough to have a positive outcome at the end of the process.  We definitely do not need complications like an interfering or violent ex-partner.   What to do?  What to do?  I don’t want to look a gift horse in the mouth and say ‘no’, when there is no guarantee that any future offer may come our way.  🙁

Update 10th August:
Well, the more I got to know this lady, the more concerned I became.  Her husband had sexually abused her and her two eldest daughters before she finally managed to kick him out, and was known to local police for being of violent temperament.  Yet she had no restraining order in place to provide her and her family some protection.  This to me indicated that she was not someone who was unlikely to act with good judgement.  In itself, this is bad enough, but we got to talking and she told me she collected ‘baby dolls’, on enquiry, it turns out that after a miscarriage a number of years earlier, she had bought herself an expensive ‘Reborn Doll’, which, it turns out, is a freakishly realistic (but not really) newborn sized and weighted doll.  And now she has collected four in total. O.o

creepy baby doll

Sigh… I am sure she is trying her best to work through her own really crappy circumstances, but I am convinced she is not a good candidate for surrogacy.  The doll collecting thing is just a bit too creepy for my liking… and kinda suggests she would have real trouble handing over a baby that she had been nurturing for nine months.  🙁