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Reflections on the Beasley Case

© Heather Weller

Yet again, surrogacy is making headlines in the U.S. because of one situation gone bad, and the American public is once again seeing surrogacy as an aberration of nature versus another option for people who can't have children. It's disheartening for those of us involved in surrogacy to sit by and watch it ripped to shreds because it's not always perfect; to watch a media that will report the few cases gone bad until they're blue in the face yet ignore the hundreds of good arrangements that go on all the time; and to watch the public - and more frighteningly, the legislators - base their views of surrogacy on these few cases gone bad. I mean, imagine if public opinion and policy about air travel was based solely on the flights that made the news.

I am talking, of course, about the case of Helen Beasley. In a nutshell, this is the opposite of most people's fears about surrogacy - it's not the surrogate wanting to keep a baby, but the Intended Parents deciding they don't want the child either. This case involved a couple who doesn't want twins, a surrogate who became pregnant with twins, and the resulting dispute over who should decide who will be the babies' adoptive parents. This article is available from CNN, giving a general overview (there have been many articles available recently, but I'm not sure how many of them will be archived for the long-term).

I am not naive enough to think surrogacy policy as it exists in the U.S. is perfect (nor in other countries - but the focus of this article is based on U.S. law, as that's where the Beasley case is being played out). The first glaring problem is the lack of national policy to begin with - we range from states where surrogacy is well-grounded legally with several precedents giving Intended Parents legal rights to their children, to those with no laws at all, to those that completely outlaw surrogacy if any compensation is offered. So far it's been a combination of the luck of the draw - where the cases that go wrong enough to end up in court have been located to establish those precedents - and the collective action, or lack of action, of state legislatures on events unfolding in other states that has established the legality of surrogacy in each state.

Nor do I think that encouraging the national government to enact surrogacy legislation across the board is a good answer, especially if done now in the wake of the Beasley case. There are so many areas of reproductive technology that have popped up while law in the area lags behind, the thought of one knee-jerk piece of legislation in response to a surrogacy arrangement gone awry does not bode well for other areas. As a society, we're still grappling with the moral issues over some of these procedures - egg donation, sperm donation, cloning as a form of infertility treatment, for example - while the law is still based for the most part on the premise that children only come when a man and woman have intercourse. I don't believe these are issues that can easily be put into law - or put out of the law - on the whim of Congress.

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