posted
Th lack of DNA does slightly change things, but reading the article, they were upfront about the woman's past, she has been mentally stable for 9 months and has a psychiatrist certifying that she is fit to be a mother and has never missed an appt. And the woman did not return the money or repay medical costs. If she returns all the money for costs and any gifts they may have given, then I will stop thinking of her as a thief, but I still don't think what she did was morally correct. If her cocaine use in the distant past was not an issue when she signed the contract and cashed the check, it shouldn't be an issue once she has the babies.
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posted
Things change once babies are carried and born. That's why birth parents have a window to change their minds, no matter what contracts they signed before the babies were born.
I think it is crappy and hard, but I don't think money makes one person more a parent than another. That implies that it is okay for people to buy children - it isn't.
When a birth mother keeps the baby instead of handing it over to the adoptive parents, she doesn't have to pay back any expenses paid during her pregnancy.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
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quote: And children are indeed entitled to parents that can give them a stable, healthy, to parents that are ready and capable and willing to take on all the responsibilities.
If they are, then we as a society are doing a extraordinarily poor job of protecting children's rights. If children really are "entitled" to parents that can provide them a stable healthy home and who are capable and willing to take on all the responsibilities, we should be taking children away from all single parents, all people living below poverty level, all teenage parents, and anyone else who isn't providing a stable healthy lifestyle for their children.
I confident that isn't what you intend, but I'm at a complete loss to understand what you do mean.
This is a rather unusual case since no one involved is genetically related to the babies. The surrogate mother is the only one involved who has a biological claim to the children. Legally, the Kehoe's are no different than any other adoptive parents even though their involvement in the child's conception is unusual.
Since surrogacy contracts aren't legal in Michigan, the surrogate mother is legally considered the biological mother and must agree to the adoption. I understand its traumatic when I biological mother changes her mind about giving a child up for adoption, but what is the alternative? Forcing biological mothers to give up a child based on a verbal agreement?
Given the ambiguity of parenthood in this case, I agree with kat that the primary concern should be the well being of the children and not the prospective parents. But as best I can tell, the courts didn't even try to assess that question. Legal, this was simply a case of a biological parent deciding not to go through with an adoption and that is legally the biological parents right. Its pretty clear that Michigan law is inadequate when dealing with this unusual adoption situation, but the courts can't decide to make up laws because the existing ones don't seem to quite apply.
I'm very uncomfortable with the surrogate mother assessing whether or not the Kehoe's were fit parents, but I can see that a surrogate mother should have the right to decide for whom she will and will not make babies. Considering that she and her husband already have four children, they certainly understood the enormity of the commitment they were making when they chose to take this twins into their family. Right or wrong, it can't be a decision they made lightly.
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I don't know... it still strikes me as a bit wrong what they did and there's my this person is making me irritated senses to consider too.
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posted
I mean that children are entitled to all of that. That does NOT imply, in any way, that children should be taken away from the parents they already have, nor does it imply that there should be
Entitled by moral law is not the same as being entitled by civil law. Lots of things that are morally wrong are supported by civil law, because civil law is inadequete fundamentally for many reasons.
In other words, I meant exactly what I said, and nothing more. Since keeping one's own biolgical children trumps almost all other considerations, immediate danger to children aside, often life is unfair and kids get worse parents than they should. Removing them, short of established, imminent dangers, is almost always worse.
The only case where this really comes up is when it involves non-biological children, and decisions must be made as to who will be the parents. In that case, the children are entitled to the home and family that is mostly likely to give them a stable, healthy upbringing.
In this case, it looks like there are conflicting stories. The prospective parents say that they were upfront from the beginning, and the surrogate mother (parents)say that they didn't know about the psychosis diagnosis and wouldn't have agreed if they did.
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quote: If her cocaine use in the distant past was not an issue when she signed the contract and cashed the check, it shouldn't be an issue once she has the babies.
The surrogate mother claims that she did not know about either the mental illness or the cocaine use until the adoption hearing. The adoptive parents claim they told her. I don't know who's lying, I suspect the truth is somewhere in the middle. The adoptive parents mentioned it but did include the details. When the surrogate heard the details presented in court, she was sincerely surprised.
I can't see what motivation the surrogate mother has to lie. She has 4 children of her own. She has been a surrogate mother and given up the children previously. It was a decision she deliberated over for some time. I can easily believe she was honestly and sincerely concerned for the children.
The only thing that bother's me about the cases is what appears to be unwarranted prejudice against people with a history of mental illness. I don't know any details of this woman's medical history. There are certain types of mental illness that would be legitimate cause for concern and others that would not. In the absence of any other data, I think the woman's psychiatrist should be trusted to assess the situation. It seems like the surrogate mother was acting out of an unjust fear of all mental illness but perhaps she had observed things in this woman's behavior that we don't know about.
I find it a bit disturbing that this couple didn't use either the mother's egg or the father's sperm even though (based on previous miscarriages) they were not sterile. It seems like they were trying to create a designer baby. To me that was a bit of a flag that made me wonder whether the surrogate mother had other reasons to think the adoptive mother was unstable.
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quote:I mean that children are entitled to all of that. That does NOT imply, in any way, that children should be taken away from the parents they already have, nor does it imply that there should be
Entitled by moral law is not the same as being entitled by civil law. Lots of things that are morally wrong are supported by civil law, because civil law is inadequete fundamentally for many reasons.
I still don't know what you mean by "entitled". If a person is morally "entitled" to something, doesn't that necessarily imply we have a moral obligation to give it to them? I know there is a difference between legal rights and moral rights, but shouldn't we be striving to legally protect peoples moral rights?
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posted
Sometimes life isn't fair. And the right to keep one's own biological children trumps the children's entitlement to fabulous parents.
No adult is entitled to become a parent. However, parents have lots of rights concerning their children.
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posted
Morally entitled. If children get parents that don't provide that stable, healthy home for them, they are getting a raw deal from the universe.
I think what you are tripping is assuming that civil should always follow morality. It doesn't and it shouldn't.
Lots of things are legal that are immoral, some of them shockingly so. They are legal because there are practical reasons (civil law and courts incapable of regulating), or maybe because there are competing moral claims, or maybe because we have collectively decided that some matters aren't the business of the state, or because it would be unenforcable.
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quote:Originally posted by katharina: Sometimes life isn't fair. And the right to keep one's own biological children trumps the children's entitlement to fabulous parents.
posted
You still have explained what morally entitled means and why we don't have a moral obligation to give people what they are morally entitled to have.
I'm not tripping up over confusing what is civil and what is moral.
When the claim is made that an individual has a right or entitlement, it necessarily implies that someone else has an obligation. The two are inseparably linked. If you claim it's a moral entitlement, you imply a moral obligation. If you claim its a legal entitlement, you imply a legal obligation.
So when you claim that children are morally entitled to certain things, you necessarily imply that someone else has a moral obligation to provide those things.
If you were to say, children are morally entitled to receive certain things from their parents, it would be really clear what you are talking about. It would be equivalent to saying, parents have a moral obligation to provide their children with certain thing. I think we can agree that this is true.
What is very unclear from the way you have used entitled bears the reciprocal obligation. All of us, society as a whole, the legal system, God. Who is failing in their obligation if a child does not get that to which they are entitled? If parents fail to fill their obligation, does anyone else have any obligation to the children. If so, who?
In this situation where what we are trying to determine is who the "real parents' are, who has the moral obligation to provide these children with the stable healthy home you claim they are entitled to have?
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posted
The moral obligation means that parents have the obligation to create that environment for their children. It also means that when there is a child and there are not yet parents, the people with the power to decide are obligated to give the children the parents most likely to create that environment.
It means parents need to do the best they can, and to put the needs of their children to have that environment above their own desires, to every extent possible.
It also means that no adults who is not yet a parent has the right to a non-biological child.
It does NOT create an obligation for third parties to take away children from the parents they already have, nor does it trump people's parental rights over their own biological children.
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I'm sorry you can't understand. I've extended enough effort explaining. If you continue to be confused, you are welcome to read it again.
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posted
Uh, it's just that society with its laws has a right to take away a parent's rights if they are abusing a child and put that child in a safe environment. This is because biology isn't everything and the safety of that child is more important. So I'd say there IS an obligation to remove a child who is being abused, neglected or molested. Because it's worse on society not to do that! The safety of child to me is more important than a parent's rights.
BUT, there is the possibility of jumping the gun and discriminating based on mental illness.
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posted
Just as we have not yet worked out all the bugs from the transition of women from property to human beings with rights, we have not yet worked out the transition of children as property to human beings with some rights.
It is still delicate territory.
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posted
I don't understand why the couple decided to do surrogacy in Michigan in the first place. Most reputable surrogacy agency will only work with birth mothers in states that have surrogacy friendly laws. It seemed to me like the Kehoe's could have done a much better job of researching the legalities of the arrangement and saved themselves a lot of heartache.
It actually isn't that unusual to have surrogates carry a child that is not biologically related to the parents. There are a lot of additional cost to have eggs extracted and ferilized and a lot of instances where the quality of the egg is the problem in the first place.
My heart really goes out to both sides in this case. I think the surrogate really did change her mind last minute based upon incomplete informaiton provided to her. Legally she seems to be in the right and I understand how now 6 months later she is unwilling to consider giving the babies up. I know how attached I was after 6 months. I think the Kehoes need to recognize at this point that these babies are bonded to a mother and regardless of who was right initially its to late to change things. I hope if she is really stable, she can find another way to have a child.
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quote:This is a woman who took at least 10k from these parents, promising them a child.
This is misleading. It isn't legal in the US to pay someone to have your child. The surrogate mother was compensated for the medical expenses, that's it.
Acutally, I'm fairly certain that this varies from state to state, as surrogacy is a state issue and not a federal one. In thesetwo articles discuss the legalities of surrogacy in both a current case, a famous early surrogacy case. This article, discusses the legality and illegality of surrogacy in various states including that several states do have legal surrogacy contracts.
quote:The Baby M. decision inspired state legislatures around the United States to pass laws regarding surrogate motherhood. Most of those laws prohibit or strictly limit surrogacy arrangements. Michigan responded first, making it a felony to arrange surrogate mother contracts for money and imposing a $50,000 fine and five years' imprisonment as punishment for the offense (37 Mich. Comp. Laws § 722.859). Florida, Louisiana, Nebraska, and Kentucky enacted similar legislation, and Arkansas and Nevada passed laws permitting surrogacy contracts under judicial regulation.
and
quote:In 1993 the California Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling declaring surrogacy contracts legal in California. The case, Johnson v. Calvert, 5 Cal. 4th 84, 19 Cal. Rptr. 2d 494, 851 P.2d 776, involved a surrogacy contract between a married couple, Mark Calvert and Crispina Calvert, and Anna L. Johnson. Crispina Calvert was unable to bear children. In 1990 the Calverts and Johnson signed a surrogacy contract in which the Calverts agreed to pay Johnson $10,000 to carry an embryo created from the Calverts' ovum and sperm. Disagreements ensued, and later that year, Johnson became the first surrogate mother to seek custody of a child to whom she was not genetically related.
It therefore varies depending on your state as to whether surrogacy, paid or otherwise, is illegal and most states still have no actual laws one way or the other.
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quote: The child may potentially be isolated from their own race, uprooted from their own community, and be split from any relatives.
Well, that depends. I tend to think that "my own" community is the one I'm raised in, and my real parents are the ones who raised me, and so on. IMO, the community and the people that you have known your entire life, who have raised you and loved you, are the ones that you develop emotional ties with, and emotional ties are far more important than biological ones.
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quote: The child may potentially be isolated from their own race, uprooted from their own community, and be split from any relatives.
Well, that depends. I tend to think that "my own" community is the one I'm raised in, and my real parents are the ones who raised me, and so on. IMO, the community and the people that you have known your entire life, who have raised you and loved you, are the ones that you develop emotional ties with, and emotional ties are far more important than biological ones.
quote:Originally posted by sinflower: I tend to think that "my own" community is the one I'm raised in, and my real parents are the ones who raised me, and so on ...
No. Remember the context is one of children that have yet to grow up, that have a choice as to which community and which ties to develop.
Now there was a time when international intercultural adoption *was* relatively colourblind. But in the light of how disastrous these kinds of policies were, priority is given to actual relatives, local adoptive parents, and adoptive parents from the same culture/region in this order.
For example:
quote:As the CEO of one of the nation's most experienced international adoption agencies, I am committed to doing what's best for orphaned children. When children lose their parents, it's always better for them to remain in their country of birth, provided that someone — a relative or adoptive parent — is able to care for them. It's only when kids have no options or opportunities for a family in their native countries that international adoption should be considered. ... It may sound counterintuitive, but I do hope for the day when all nations are able to adequately care for all of their children — even if that puts agencies like ours out of business.
Lillian Thogersen has adopted eight children internationally, and is the CEO of WACAP (World Association for Children and Parents), a nonprofit adoption agency based in Renton.
This issue comes up every once in a while after disasters too since demand is so high, for example in Haiti:
quote:There is also a risk that children could be caught in irregular adoption processes - a risk increased by the interest of families abroad who would like to adopt Haitian children orphaned by the earthquake. Haitian institutions also have a lack of capacity to determine the status of children and ensure their rights are protected Separated and unaccompanied children might wrongly be considered orphans.
International adoption should be a last resort, used only after domestic alternatives have been exhausted. The Haitian authorities must ensure children are not taken out of the country without the completion of formal legal proceedings for international adoption.
Family tracing should be a priority for the international community, the Haitian authorities and international aid agencies.
posted
There are places were domestic adoption is looked down upon. Plus, many of those kids need homes right away. It's not really good for their psychological well being to be stuck in limbo for years due to folks on their high horses. Though, it is important to make sure a child that has living relatives that want them and will truly give them care they need are not deprived of that, it's hard to have much of a culture languishing in an orphanage.
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quote:Originally posted by scholarette: Th lack of DNA does slightly change things, but reading the article, they were upfront about the woman's past, she has been mentally stable for 9 months and has a psychiatrist certifying that she is fit to be a mother and has never missed an appt. And the woman did not return the money or repay medical costs. If she returns all the money for costs and any gifts they may have given, then I will stop thinking of her as a thief, but I still don't think what she did was morally correct. If her cocaine use in the distant past was not an issue when she signed the contract and cashed the check, it shouldn't be an issue once she has the babies.
posted
sinflower: *shrug* It is pretty textbook stuff. As in here is a textbook link
Particularly the section starting with:
quote:Adoption professionals and parents gradually realized that recognition and celebration of the child's cultural heritage was healthier and more psychologically appropriate than the pretence that the child was "just like the parents" and that "adoption didn't matter." That these attitudes seem so odd today is a tribute to the shift in perspective over the past few decades.
posted
Does anyone else have a hard time understanding WHY someone would choose to hire a surrogate with donated eggs AND donated sperm to have a child, rather than adopting a child? I just don't get it. I can understand why parents would prefer to have their own genetic child as opposed to adopting one (even if I don't always agree), but I simply cannot understand why someone would want to grow a whole new unrelated child when so many other unrelated children already need parents. This, by itself, already makes these parents questionable in my opinion.
But back to the initial question of the legality and morality of surrogacy. I think alot of it depends on whether the surrogate is the genetic mother of the child or if she is using a donated embryo (which, hopefully, has at least some of the genetic material of the perspective parents). If the surrogate is the biological mother of the child, then I think paying her for the child is most definitely exploitation. Even if the only reason she conceived was to give the baby up, it's still buying her own child from her. On the other hand, if she is merely renting out her womb for a time, then I think doing think there's anything all that wrong with it, especially if she's had children before and knows what she's in for. In many ways this is no different from women being "wet nurses" in the past.
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posted
DDDaysh- I would assume, and perhaps unfairly, that the parents screened potential egg and sperm donors. I once read an article that mentioned that an egg donor could make between $10,000-$20,000. This assumed proper hair color, high IQ, good BMI, etc. And then the sperm would come from one of those "genius" sperm banks. Though it is possible that she used a blood relatives so there was some genetic link.
Or she might have not wanted to go through all the hoops of adoption. My brother is trying to adopt right now and it is a lot of work. I also had a friend who was trying to adopt and had several parents back out on them, which was pretty hard on them. These parents might have heard horror stories about adopted babies being taken back by birth parents three or four years later and feared that as well.
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quote:Working mostly over the Internet, Ms. Kehoe handpicked the egg donor, a pre-med student at the University of Michigan. From the Web site of California Cryobank, she chose the anonymous sperm donor, an athletic man with a 4.0 high school grade-point average.
On another Web site, surromomsonline.com, Ms. Kehoe found a gestational carrier who would deliver her baby.
Finally, she hired the fertility clinic, IVF Michigan, which put together her creation last December.
Personally, I lost quite a lot of sympathy for the couple once I found out they weren't biologically related. Now it is just a fight between a surrogate mother and prospective adoptive parents. *shrug*
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quote:Working mostly over the Internet, Ms. Kehoe handpicked the egg donor, a pre-med student at the University of Michigan. From the Web site of California Cryobank, she chose the anonymous sperm donor, an athletic man with a 4.0 high school grade-point average.
This is the thing that really raises questions. Why didn't they simply want to adopt? They had to go through the adoption process any way and I can't imagine that find egg and sperm donors and a surrogate mother made that less complicated rather than more.
Why didn't they want to use their own eggs and sperm. Chances that they were both sterile seem unlikely at the outset and since they had 2 previous miscarriage I think we can reject that possibility.
It really seems like they weren't just seeking a child, they were trying to engineer a superior child and that bugs me a lot.
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quote:There is no fool like the one who wants to be fooled.
Professor David Smolin wrote those words in 2005 referring to adoptive parents in the Western world. Eager to believe they are saving orphaned children from poverty, he wrote, they are easily fooled into accepting laundered children from the developing world.
He knows first-hand how such a thing could happen.
quote:Originally posted by The Rabbit:It really seems like they weren't just seeking a child, they were trying to engineer a superior child and that bugs me a lot. [/QB]
Why? Clearly that lady was interested in having an intelligent child -- and intelligence is a heritable trait. Why should her hope to have a child endowed with above average qualities bother you?
It's generally agreed upon by psychologists that intelligence is a heritable trait. Today, the cognitive elite overwhelmingly marries within itself, thereby producing more intelligent children that carry on the legacy. Women of all social strata have the option of increasing the chance of having an intelligent child by inseminating themselves with the sperm of an Ivy League grad or successful scientist. And unlike the previous centuries where a person of moderate intelligence could secure a decent life with a job in manufacturing, today our society is getting increasingly complex and a decent enough IQ is crucial to securing middle class status. Therefore, women trying to become pregnant by artificial insemination would indeed be well advised to prefer the sperm of an Ivy League grad to that of Tony the bricklayer.
The only problem is that there's no way such a woman could tell how attractive the father of her child is, because all they give her is a baby photo of him. Can the future handsomeness of a man be determined merely from a baby photo?
Posts: 532 | Registered: Feb 2009
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quote:Originally posted by DDDaysh: [QB] Does anyone else have a hard time understanding WHY someone would choose to hire a surrogate with donated eggs AND donated sperm to have a child, rather than adopting a child?
To produce a child with superior qualities.
Also, to pretend to go through the process of pregnancy and waiting. It's fun to wait.
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posted
I would guess given the Kehoe's background they might not be eligible to adopt. I would think the prior drunk driving arrest and the mental health history would lead a lot of adoption agencies to turn them down and a lot of perspective parents to chose someone else to take their baby. While there are a lot of kids who need to be adopted, there is a short supply of healthy caucasion babies waiting to be adopted which is presumably what they were after.
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quote:I would guess given the Kehoe's background they might not be eligible to adopt.
Nonsense. This was an adoption, it had to be approved by the courts as an adoption so they were obviously eligible. They may not have been eligible by certain adoption agency standards, but there are many options for adoption. If they couldn't work through an agency, private adoptions aren't that difficult. I have friends who adopted 3 children through private adoptions in 3 years with almost no waiting time. These were all domestic adoptions, all newborns and 2 of the three were Caucasian. Cost is the primary barrier to private adoptions, which are more expensive than going through an agency, but still far far less expensive than surrogacy.
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quote:At least 10 of the 33 Haitian children a group of American Baptists tried to take across the border into the Dominican Republic have parents, says the group taking care of them while the Haitian government investigates an alleged case of child trafficking. ... On Friday evening, a truck was stopped at the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. It was carrying 33 Haitian children, some as young as two months old.
The Baptist group said the children were going to a newly established orphanage – New Life Children's Refuge – in the Dominican Republic, where eventually 100 Haitian children were to be housed.
The Haitian government says the group had no approval and no documentation that would allow them to take the children out of the country.
quote:"They are very, very precious kids that have lost their homes and their families and are so deeply in need of, most of all, God's love and his compassion and just a very nurturing setting."
posted
westboro baptist is remarkably less equivalent to regular baptist than FLDS is equivalent to LDS
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quote:The Dominican consul general Wednesday rejected the claim from an American church leader that she thought her paperwork was in order when she attempted to take 33 Haitian children out of the country, saying he had told her it was not.
"I warned her, I said as soon as you get there without the proper documents, you are going to get into trouble, because they are going to accuse you, because you have the intent to pass the border without the proper papers and they are going to accuse you with kids trafficking," Carlos Castillo said he told the group's leader, Laura Silsby, during a meeting Friday.
Four hours later, Silsby and nine other Americans were turned back from the border. They were arrested and taken to a jail in Port-au-Prince.
"This woman knew what she was trying to do was not legal," Castillo said.
A CNN reporter attempted to get reaction to Castillo's comment from the jailed Americans, but they would not discuss the matter, responding to questions by singing "Amazing Grace" and praying.
quote:But even before Laura L. Silsby and seven other Idahoans ended up in a Haitian jail accused of trafficking in children, Silsby had a history of failing to pay debts, failing to pay her employees and failing even to follow Idaho laws.
Silsby has been the subject of eight civil lawsuits and 14 unpaid wage claims. The $358,000 Meridian house at which she founded her nonprofit New Life Children's Refuge in November was foreclosed upon in December. A check of Silsby's driving record revealed at least nine traffic citations since 1997, including four for failing to provide insurance or register annually.
Looks like the leader at least had strong motivation to make some money quickly. Maybe not so 'nutcase' after all.
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posted
It also shows she has a habit of ignoring pesky little details like proper paperwork. Which I find much more likely than the suggestion she was in this for money.
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Ok, forgetting your register your vehicle for maybe a year or two is forgetfulness. Maybe forgetting to pay your employees once or twice is forgetfulness.
But the sheer length of claims, suits, and infractions seems to be to be somewhat more intentional. Plus, her foreclosure was just in December, a jury trial on February, and what seem to be two separate civil suits next week and next month.
Plus she was warned only four hours before attempting to cross the border that what she was doing was illegal. It is not unreasonable to wonder if she felt she had to take risks and cut corners in order to get back her house and pay off the lawsuits, possibly in order to save her business.
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posted
There's no reason to exclude the likely possibility that she is both an attempted child trafficker and a nutcase.
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I just want to comment that I think people in this thread are being a bit harsh regarding Clive. It is not the case that he is being irrational, as he certainly seems to be consistent in his reasoning, and does provide some form of justification for everything he says. It is merely the case that he is bring rational within a different epistemic framework than that under which most of us normally operate. So this is not to say that he is "stupid" or even wrong. He is simply acting from different starting assumptions.
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quote:Originally posted by JonHecht: It is merely the case that he is bring rational within a different epistemic framework than that under which most of us normally operate. So this is not to say that he is "stupid" or even wrong. He is simply acting from different starting assumptions.
No, we had ample evidence that his starting assumptions were profoundly irrational, even in some parts completely delusional. And there's serious doubt he was even an honest personality (it's very likely more than one person posted under the name).
Then he got banned for trollin' so it's irrelevant anyway.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Stephan: Good friends of mine are doing it right now. And it does end up costing more than that. They have to fly to India to make the donation (they chose the father with the higher sperm count). They then have to fly back well before the due date, and stay for a couple of weeks after at a hotel.
The woman however is living very well. They Skype with her on a regular basis. She is married and has three children of her own. It sounds to me like my friends are being exploited more than she is. Adopting a baby in the States takes forever. Finding a woman to volunteer to take your baby privately here risks her coming back later and wanting the baby. Using a donated egg and a surrogate here costs so much more. India knows this and takes full advantage of the situation.
Interesting. Did your friends use an Indian egg donor?
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