Surrogacy is a noble invention of assisted reproductive technology (ART). Many involuntarily childless couples from all over the globe want to opt for surrogacy. In surrogacy, a gestational surrogate plays a major role in the whole treatment procedure.
A gestational surrogate is a woman who carries the embryo in her womb and delivers a baby after completing the whole gestational term.
Therefore, surrogacy is a type of third-party reproduction process. Surrogacy is also an effective measure for individual or transgender people who want to be single parents.
The emotional motivation differs for every individual surrogate mother, which drives them to become surrogates. The different motivational drives are financial gain, the pleasure of pregnancy and giving birth, sublime feelings, and the satisfaction of helping others.
Research studies reported one of the primary motivations for surrogate mothers is to help the couple who are unable to have offspring by any other method. In such cases, surrogate mothers feel to accomplish a great noble job, which helps to provide them an emotional strength to maintain the distance from the newborn baby to whom they gave birth.
Many general populations believe surrogacy involves sexual intercourse between the surrogate mother and intended father. This is one of the main reasons for disapproval. Whereas some people still believe in traditional conservative culture and are unable to accept that a child-bearing woman is not married to the biological father of the child.
To reduce the conflict, it is necessary to change the point of view of the general population about surrogacy. Proper education to the local people requires clarifying all the misconceptions related to surrogacy such as involvement of sexual intercourse or stigmatizing surrogate motherhood, etc. Giving an understanding of the process of surrogacy and IVF to the local people is necessary.
The future policy should be designed in such a way that it is approachable to the general population. However, educational promotion is not easy for a country like India. A huge population and diverse culture may become a barrier.
But this is the only way to provide the understanding of surrogacy is valuable and surrogate mothers are doing a price-worthy job. Social policymakers should promote the view that the surrogate mother is someone attempting a noble endeavor.
This notion of surrogacy should be considered as ‘care work’.
Consideration of surrogacy as ‘care work,’ could be incorporated as the rights of surrogate mothers into existing labor rights legislation. Such regulations may increase the possibility to avoid stigma and other social discrimination toward surrogate mothers by involving local norms.
Besides, the surrogate mother would ideally be someone who is valued and respected during the interaction between the surrogate mother and the intended parents, as well as financial compensation required to allow for her services.
These overall changes may also break down the divergent global opinion about surrogacy.
Overall, surrogate mothers receive surrogacy as a positive experience. Surrogate mothers typically have an embark assessment upon surrogacy and often they believe that without their help an incomplete family can never become complete.
They help infertile couples who are otherwise unable to become parents. Therefore, the whole society should be grateful to the surrogate mothers who do this novel job, even after some psychological problems that they experience the following childbirth.
References:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5496060/
http://www.bioline.org.br/pdf?rm10006
https://academic.oup.com/humrep/article/18/10/2196/622680
Ravi Sharma is a self-motivated, successful entrepreneur and has a solid experience in the fertility segment. and he is the director at ARTbaby Global (ARThealthcare). He is a pharmacy graduate with post-graduation in business administration and has 14 years of rich experience in the field of infertility segment. He loves to write about IVF, Surrogacy, and other ART (assisted reproductive technology) news, issues, and updates. He is a Pharmacy graduate (B. Pharm) and M.B.A (marketing).
His most recent success includes the successful launch of the medical tourism company, ARTbaby, which offers treatment options for infertility, egg donation, and surrogacy. He likes spending time with his family and writing about various aspects of IVF surrogacy and donating eggs.