Surrogate motherhood

The agony a childless woman goes through is incalculable. She suffers from a feeling of insecurity in her marriage. She suffers from low self-esteem arising from self-doubt. As I was saying last week broaching the subject, it can be harrowing for a woman who longs for a baby to stay childless for a considerable length of time.

Except where the husband is mature, the relationship between the couple becomes easily strained. Many a man is wont to snap at his lady, “Look, what have I got from all my efforts?” The woman begins to lose confidence in herself .

There are gossips in the neighbourhood. Glances trained at her approach in gatherings are regarded as askance. Anyone can sense how she would wish there is an art to read the mind’s construction in the face, apologies to Shakespeare. There is backbiting among friends as soon as she turns her back.

Some who may have travelled and returned perhaps home on holidays ask with a tinge of mockery: “Are you still looking unto the Lord for the fruit of the womb? And what are you doing about it?”

The mother-in-law mounts pressure on her son to look for another girl as she is eager to see and carry her grandchildren before she passes away. From sisters-in-law comes no less a pressure.

The unkind ones go to the extent of taunting: “What has she done to herself that she cannot give our family children? Are we not women? I have two already, you have three!” All kinds of admonitions are thrown at her, solicited and unsolicited. Friends or relations drag her to prophets or prayer houses where prayer warriors are on standby. Gynecologists are besieged. There is going up and down for counselling.

In desperation, the lady in her closet, continually asks, “Lord, why me?” Some on their own go out to get a younger lady for the husband to pacify him and so that the family can have a child to call their own, and on whom to lavish love and care and who would keep the family name.

That is the picture of our environment and what we believe constitutes a complete family. Children are considered a cultural and economic imperative. Children are part of family accoutrements and pride to flaunt.

So is it that it is rare to find a lawyer or a judge whose son or daughter is not in law practice, a notable accountant, or company proprietor whose son or daughter is not prepared to succeed him. A woman who is unable to give her husband a child begins to indulge in self-recriminations. The attitude of family and the society at large, the air of lack of understanding and cruelty, becomes a burden weighing her down.

Again, the question rings out of her mouth: “Lord, why me?” In no time she begins to suffer from bouts of depression as her feeling of abandonment, ostracisation and shame deepens her sorrow. It is, therefore, no surprise couples are hailing the scientific wonder that is making surrogate motherhood possible and opening the window of opportunity to banish childlessness from their lives. The woman in particular can go to any length in search of her baby.

An American Television Reality Celebrity, Kim Kardashian, has brought the technological rescue into sharp focus with the addition she just had to her family through surrogacy last month. She is already a mother of two.

Last year after her son clocked one, she longed for more children but she had by her own revelation a medical condition of placenta accreta which surfaced while she carried her two children, North and Saint. Her doctors said it would be life-threatening for her to bear more children.

By April she secured a surrogate, a mother of two, as someone with the experience of motherhood is said to be preferred for the business. Surrogacy is an exercise done strictly under wraps understandably for the future health of the children produced through the system. The first of what is now referred to as gestational surrogacy was in 1985 and surrogate mother was Mary Bath Whitehead. The baby was born in 1986.

The lady bold to publicly admit she is a beneficiary of surrogacy remedy publicly is Neil Patrick Harris who lives with her partner called David Burtka. She said back in 2010 that she had her three children through surrogacy. Several celebrity couples are reported to be the principal adherents of surrogacy. Not surprisingly in the United States there are about 100 agencies that offer assistance to couples in need of surrogate mothers. There are clinics that attend to such beseeching women within the Nigerian frontiers as well, I am told.

It is now in vogue. And one may dare say that the world is rushing into embracing the enthralling scientific wonder of this Age, Assisted Reproduction Technology, without giving sufficient thought to the implications of populating societies with children whose eggs were hatched in the laboratory!

Since the first Test-Tube baby that took the world by storm in 1978, three million children have been born through the Assisted Reproduction Technology that is, conceived through In Vitro Fertilization generally referred to as Test-Tube. The first test-tube baby was born in England in July 1978. This was followed by one in India in October, 1978 as well, then in the United States in December, 1981. In the case of surrogate children, it is reckoned that there are approximately 5,000 of them, about nine each year in every state .

Predictably, surrogacy is enmeshed in controversies in America, Australia, but more spectacularly in France where it was prohibited in 1991 by the highest court, on the grounds that it was contrary to public policy and to protect the fundamental values of society. Bioethics Act three years later, that is in 1994, confirmed the court’s decision. The French court said surrogacy, while it recognised the altruistic motives behind it, threatens the symbolic image of women and the principle of human dignity. It argued that “children should not become commodities traded as merchandise between surrogate mothers and infertile couples.”

Although the legal concerns would appear settled in most states of the United States because the couple seeking help and the surrogate mother sign binding agreements, the psychological worries for the child remain. Scientists themselves are beginning to express misgivings in the light of studies carried out at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia by a geneticist, Carmen Sapienza. The studies show that as a group surrogate children are at a higher risk of obesity, hypertension and the dreaded Diabetes Type 2.

What then is surrogate motherhood? It is an arrangement whereby a woman is signed on to carry a pregnancy for a couple when their desire and efforts to have a child remain unavailing. It is medically certified impossible when there is damage to the uterus or as experts say, when a woman had what they call hysterectomy removed from her uterus. What is common is when the fallopian tube is blocked. There could be certain conditions that make pregnancy risky. Are these all to why a woman may be childless? Certainly not. But this is subject for another day.

In the process of In Vitro Fertilization, doctors, using fertility drugs, stimulate the ovaries of the woman in order for the ovaries to produce some eggs. The eggs are placed in an incubator. Her husband is then required to make his own contribution which is placed in the incubator as well with the eggs from his wife for fertilisation to occur. The embryo arising from the fertilisation is placed in a drop of fluid to provide cushion. This is then transferred using a syringe tube into the uterus of the surrogate mother. When it is attached firmly to the wall of the uterus, implantation has taken place. I have gone a little into the process to demonstrate how unnatural having babies through surrogate mothers is.

In the natural way where there is procreation is love making between a man and a woman and it is a petition to the Creator, that the couple desire to have a child as their permanent guest in their midst. The volition that is expressed in the act, even if unconsciously, is then taken up by the servants of the Creator, the forces of nature called nature beings who have taken on form. They work on the radiations contained in the petition.

The fertilisation itself contains its own heat that generates radiations. It can then be easily seen that ab initio, such a petition encoded in the volition is missing when the implantation is done artificially, through the syringe tube. Procreation as we know it is missing. The nature beings bring about embryonic development. They begin by first building the astral model body on the astral plane. It is after the model astral body that the physical body is then patterned.

The body is constructed using what the prospective mother eats, converted, as it were, into radiations. As the body develops the cells are also brought into being from out of which the organs, the heart, the liver, the brains and the lymphatic system, emerge and are appropriately placed, all regulated by the nature beings. In the cell is a nucleus in which exist chromosomes in which genetic information is stored. The nucleus is surrounded by protoplasm.

In all these formations, the radiation bridge which only the woman offers through her special spiritual make up, is crucial. She forms radiations to out of the physical world where several souls are eagerly waiting for another opportunity of the grace of incarnation.

The one or two or three who may be compatible with prospective mother’s radiations are astir, mediating their own radiations as well which nature beings use to form a bridge through which incarnation is to take place when pregnancy has gone half-way. That is when the soul saunters into the womb using the radiation bridge. At that time every expectant mother experiences the first kick.

From the foregoing logic it can be seen that it is the radiation of the surrogate mother that is used as a bridge in the case of surrogacy and she can only attract her own kind in terms of karmic property, in terms of burden or blessing. Information about the surrogate mother called the ‘Birth Mother’ in the U.S. is little known.

Apart from the defects in its formation arising from the unnaturalness of its starting point, incubated in a laboratory, the child will have very little in common with its real parents. It may well be that it will be a total alien to them.

Pray, therefore, that it does not turn out to be a black sheep in the family! As it is revealed in higher knowledge, adopting a child or two, as the case may be, will attract a great deal of blessings if it is done out of love to look after another human being, affording him the opportunity for atonement and for development to fulfill the purpose of his existence.

Indeed, it is said the blessing could sometimes be greater than even having one’s own children biologically. The technological wonder of surrogacy has its drawback and the attendant sorrow that may be lying in wait for its adherents against the future!