Basically, people are bastards

Last week I read a story that has been doing the rounds on Down syndrome blogs and boards across the global media. An Australian couple who hired a surrogate in Thailand to carry their twins (apparently at a clinic that's not even licensed) discovered through prenatal screening that one of the babies had Down syndrome. They requested that the woman (who they never met through the entire process) terminate the pregnancy but she refused on the grounds that it was against her culture's beliefs.

When she finally gave birth, they came to Thailand and took home the little girl with a typical number of chromosomes, abandoning the little boy with Down syndrome. The woman who had carried he and his sister (and bears no biological connection to them) has since been caring for the boy as his mother. She comes from a rural part of the country and her poverty is what compelled her to enter into the surrogacy arrangement in the first place. Now the baby boy, called Gammy and loved by his adoptive family, needs cardiac surgery to survive (as about 50% of all babies with Down syndrome do), and the family cannot afford to get him the care he needs. Meanwhile, his biological parents, who went to great lengths to conceive him via IVF, are back in Australia with his sister.

This story enrages and saddens me on so many levels I don't even know what to say. The Australia media, as they are right to do, has emphasised the ethics involved in using the bodies of impoverished women in the developing world, women who very often have few choices in life, as essentially objects to sustain a reproductive industry available to a wealthy few.  

As one half of a couple who struggled with infertility for years and came very close to needing IVF to build our family, I am angered at stories like this. Stories that give a bad name to assisted reproductive technologies which, on the whole, help to bring babies into the world for parents who just long to love and care for a living child. Angered that these stories give any credence to the widely held but mistaken societal belief that IVF exists primarily to furnish rich, self-indulgent couples with designer babies. Angered on behalf of the many wonderful and loving parents I know who had no choice but to rely on such technologies to welcome their precious babies, and who may face stigma as a result of such negative coverage.

And as the mother of a child with Down syndrome? I. can't. even. I should clarify: I pass no judgement against people who consider termination or adoption when they get a diagnosis. While I think it's sad for everyone involved, I understand that sometimes it may be better for people who feel from the outset that they lack the capacity to parent a child with complicated needs.  

But that's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about self-absorption on an epic scale. We're talking about abandonment. We're talking about treating both the surrogate and the babies she carried - to borrow a term used by one of the experts interviewed in the press - as commodities that you can return if you don't like the fit or the colour.

I don't even know what to say about people such as these. I can't help but think that the real loser in this whole story is the baby girl; she has a twin brother growing up in another country who she may or may not learn about when she's older, and is stuck with those people for parents.