Argumentative Essay On Surrogacy

It is quite astonishing to realize the great extents that people would go to fulfil their instinctive desires to achieve parenthood. One of the most famous methods to achieve this desire is surrogacy which is, in layman language, the act of couples turning to a ‘surrogate mother’ to carry and deliver their child. Surrogacy is medically defined as the practice by which a woman (called a surrogate mother) becomes pregnant and gives the new born to someone who cannot have children. This process is a medically complicated process that can be simplified by thinking of it in terms of the following: mature eggs are collected (retrieved) from a woman’s ovaries, fertilized by sperm in a lab, and then implanted into the surrogate mother’s uterus. For

Unfortunately, the start of the concept of surrogacy wasn’t well-documented back in the day when it started which leaves us at a dead end of how surrogacy actually started. The best document story about surrogacy dates back to mid-1970. It was the story of Baby M that had raised eyebrows across the globe and rapidly became a public case. Later that year, the lawyers defending Baby M found the Infertility Centre, an organization that arranges for hundreds of surrogate births annually which will later set the stage for many surrogacy organizations. The following excerpt is from Wikipedia explaining the very first court-documented case of surrogacy in the United States about the birth of Baby

According to the agreement, Mary Beth Whitehead would be inseminated with William Stern's sperm (making her a traditional, as opposed to gestational, surrogate), bring the pregnancy to term, and relinquish her parental rights in favour of William's wife, Elizabeth. After the birth, however, Mary Beth decided to keep the child. William and Elizabeth Stern then sued to be recognized as the child's legal parents. The New Jersey court ruled that the surrogacy contract was invalid according to public policy, recognized Mary Beth Whitehead as the child's legal mother, and ordered the Family Court to determine whether Whitehead, as mother, or Stern, as father, should have legal custody of the infant, using the conventional 'best interests of the child' analysis. Stern was awarded custody, with Whitehead having visitation rights. At birth, Mary Beth Whitehead named Baby M. Sara Elizabeth Whitehead. She was later renamed Melissa Elizabeth Stern, after William Stern was awarded legal custody.” The case of Baby M led to blossoming hope across the world. Couples who weren’t able to conceive yearned to be parents and latched on the idea of surrogacy, but with the concept of surrogacy, and the complications it led to in the case of Baby M, came a concern for the ethicality of surrogacy. It raised the awareness of many active groups about the huge ethical complications