Surrogate Attorney Reports American Surrogate Death

Surrogate Attorney Reports American Surrogate Death: Not the First

As a surrogate attorney, it is disturbing that it has been reported and repeated that Brooke was the first American surrogate to die of pregnancy complications though there have been such fatalities in India and elsewhere. Sharon LaMothe, a surrogacy consultant in Florida, assures me this is not so, however. LaMothe, who I spoke with via telephone and who has twice been a surrogate herself, was insistent that Brooke was not the first American surrogate to die of pregnancy related complications. She “guaranteed” me that Brooke was not the first. There have been a “few” in the past fifteen years that she knows of that likely went unreported because they all occurred earlier in the pregnancy and because they occurred prior to the proliferation of social media.

“Give me children, or else I die. Am I in God’s stead, who hath withheld from thee the fruit of the womb? Behold my maid Bilhah. She shall bear fruit upon my knees, that I may also have children by her.” Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood

In Atwood’s novel, which takes place “after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and blamed it on the Islamic fanatics,” becoming pregnant is the one thing the Handmaids can do to rescue themselves from death. Not so for today’s surrogates.

“Brooke Lee Brown, 34, of Burley, [Idaho] passed away Thursday, Oct. 8, 2015, at St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center in Boise, due to complications during pregnancy.”

On Oct 8, just days before her 35th birthday, Brooke reportedly died either of placental abruption – the result of the placenta separating from the inner wall of the uterus before delivery – or amniotic fluid embolisms. Both are rare pregnancy complications that can occur suddenly in the last trimester and, left untreated, put both mother and baby in jeopardy. The twins she was about to deliver any day via a scheduled cesarean section reportedly lived for a short time on life support before losing their lives as well.

The twins’ demise is not mentioned in her obituary, however, nor is there any mention that Brooke died while serving as a paid surrogate for by a couple from Spain, one of many countries in which surrogacy is illegal. Tess Shawler, of Rocky Hill Mountain Surrogacy in Idaho, who may have arranged Brooke’s surrogacies, has found American surrogates for people from Australia, Canada, Spain, England, and Germany.

Brooke’s funeral is taking place as I write this. A GoFundMe page, set up to raise funds for Brooke’s memorial service, says that she was a surrogate for five babies though it is unclear if that includes the two who reportedly died along with her and how may were multiple births.

Click here to read the entire article.

 

 

Huffingtonpost.com, October 19, 2015 – by Mirah Roben

in Ethics / In the News / IVF / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Commercial Surrogacy Legal Cases Strand Families

Commercial Surrogacy Legal Cases; Surrogacy ban strands families in Nepal

Australian parents have been left stranded overseas with their newborn babies, unable to bring them home, after a court issued a ban on commercial surrogacy in Nepal, having decided one of the many pending commercial surrogacy legal cases globally. Distressed parents said the health of their babies was at serious risk and that the children were “basically being held hostage” because local authorities refused to issue them exit visas.

“The longer this goes on, the bigger the risk becomes,” said one man whose twins, born six weeks prematurely, have fallen ill after their supply of formula ran out.

“It’s a matter of time until something drastic happens. I would hate for someone to die.”

Commercial surrogacy is banned in Australia and under NSW law prospective parents cannot pay a surrogate, even for arrangements in another country.

Australian babies and parents stranded in Nepal after commercial surrogacy ban

Nepal previously allowed the practice as long as the surrogate was not Nepalese, but its Supreme Court suspended commercial surrogacy services on August 25.

Parents said Nepali immigration officials have since refused to issue exit visas for babies born through surrogacy, even when the process was started long before the ban.

Lisa McDonald* was recently forced to return to Sydney, leaving her newborn son, Sam*, in Kathmandu with her husband, after she ran out of vital medicine.

She has a disease of the immune system and the couple’s biological child was carried by a surrogate.

“It was so hard to leave him and come back, it was torturous,” she said. “All I know is I want him home.”

Sam had to be rushed to hospital last week but transport is difficult because a dispute with neighbouring India has led to petrol rationing.

The Nepali government is also in upheaval after the adoption of a new constitution, a process that sparked deadly and ongoing protests.

“It’s really dangerous,” Ms McDonald said. “This is wrong, to be holding babies hostage like this. These are tiny babies. They just need to get them out.”

Nick Martin* and his partner have been in Kathmandu for six weeks with their twins. The Sydney father said resolving the babies’ status did not seem to be a government priority.

“We are distraught, absolutely distraught,” he said. “We’re effectively being kept captive in a country we don’t know, where we don’t speak the language. We just have no idea when we’re going to be going home.”
Click here to read the entire article.

by Kim Arlington, The Sydney Morning Herald – October 6, 2015

in Ethics / In the News / International / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Gay Rights: Couple’s Legal Battle in Thailand

Gay Rights: Couple’s Legal Battle in Thailand Highlights Commercial Surrogacy Issues

Gay rights amid Thailand’s commercial surrogacy industry has been complicated and controversial this past year. It’s been half a year since Baby Carmen was born in Thailand, but aside from the pictures, everything else remains fuzzy. For biological father Gordon Lake and his partner, Manuel Santos, what started as a legal agreement to have a surrogate baby has evolved into a custody battle.

But one thing remains clear to the American-born Lake. “Carmen is a U.S. citizen,” he said. “She’s biologically my daughter. That’s been proven with a DNA test. The embassy has issued a CRBA, a consular report birth abroad, which certifies her as a U.S. citizen.”

Thailand’s commercial surrogacy industry made headlines last year when a newborn with Down syndrome was left behind by an Australian couple, while they took his healthy twin sister.

Following the negative exposure, the government banned commercial surrogacy. The law came into effect in July.

But the surrogate mother said she wasn’t aware of one fact about the couple.

“If they were a mother and father like a normal parents under Thai culture, I would have no problem being a surrogate for them,” said the surrogate, Patida Kusongsang. “If I had known they were a gay couple, I would not have done this for them, because in Thai culture we don’t have this kind of status.”

Click here to read the entire article.

by Steve Sanford, August 14, 2015 – VOANews.com

BANGKOK—

in Ethics / In the News / International / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

Egg Donation or Sperm: kids have a right to know ?

Do children have the right to know if they’re the result of a stranger’s sperm or egg donation?

Although she has two half-sisters from her dad’s previous marriage, there was nothing in Jess Pearce’s childhood to make her doubt her biological origins. She tanned, her father tanned; he was tall, so was she. Yet when she was 28, her mother dropped a bombshell.

“She sat me down one Sunday afternoon and said she had something she wanted to tell me,” Jess recalls. “She looked quite upset, and I thought, ‘She’s going to die.’” Instead, her mother told her, “Your dad isn’t your real dad.”

Jess’s father had undergone a vasectomy after his first marriage. When he met her mother he tried to get it reversed, but the operation failed and they opted for sperm donation through the NHS. Jess was conceived on the third try at St George’s Hospital in Hyde Park Corner; all her parents knew about the donor was that he was from Middlesex. The clinic advised Jess’s parents to keep the insemination a secret. “No one knew,” says Jess. “It was literally just my mum and my dad and two of their best friends.” This was the norm back then, says Olivia Montuschi, co-founder of the Donor Conception Network. “The vast majority of [parents] were told not to tell their children… They just thought it was in everybody’s best interest that the secret was kept – go home, make love, and who knows?”

Olivia herself has had two children through donor insemination because her husband is infertile. They had resolved to be honest with their kids from the outset. “I remember telling this to a nurse when she was inseminating me, and getting a very odd look as if to say, ‘Why would you do that?’” she says.

Reactions range from shock and horror to “That’s interesting; I thought there was something odd going on,” says Montuschi. “More often than not, you will find that there have been odd discrepancies in things that parents have said,” she says. “Or [the child] will wonder about the complete lack of physical likeness or [shared] interests with the non-genetic parent.”

Though some parents feel under pressure to tell their kids about their genetic heritage, many decide to keep the details of their child’s conception under lock and key. A 2003 survey by the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge found that 47 per cent of parents of kids conceived after egg donation had no intention of telling. It’s not just the child’s feelings at stake. Even a genuine desire to tell can create tensions with grandparents or other family members who think it should remain a secret. Then there’s the wider taboo of where babies come from. “A lot of people find it really difficult to talk about, not necessarily because there is a genetic difference in the family, but because the discussion takes them into areas of parenthood where they wouldn’t normally have to go,” says Petra Nordqvist of the University of Manchester. “They’d have to say, ‘My sperm doesn’t work and we’ve had to undergo five years of IVF.’ Some people just hate having that kind of conversation with their families.”

Click here to read the entire article.

theindependent.co.uk by Linda Geddes, August 10, 2015

in Anonymous/Known Donation / Egg Donation / Ethics / Parenting / Science / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments

India must regulate its booming surrogacy business and stop women being exploited as just a ‘womb for hire’

South China Morning Post, July 13, 2015 by Amrit Dhillon

Surrogate mothers in India are a sad lot, their lives wrapped in layers of exploitation. At the bottom of the social heap, poor and uneducated, they spend their days in drudgery either in an urban slum or a rural shack.

Poverty has forced these women to “willingly” rent their wombs to rich Indian and foreign couples. In practice, this often means that when the surrogacy contracts are being signed, they give their uninformed consent to all manner of procedures without understanding a word of what is written.

If this wasn’t bad enough, the findings of a new study on Delhi’s fertility clinics – by researchers at two Indian universities, University of Delhi and Jawaharlal Nehru University, and Aarhus University in Denmark – show that their situation is even worse, with doctors doing their utmost to please the commissioning couples, often at the risk of harm to the mother.

The study found that some doctors implant several embryos in the womb – sometimes up to five or six – to ensure a higher success rate even though medical guidelines say that transferring more than three embryos can pose a serious health risk to the mother. “In a majority of clinics, doctors alone made the decisions about the number of embryos to transfer. Some of them involved the commissioning parents but few involved the mothers,” one of the researchers said.

What is unconscionable is how the Indian government has let this billion-dollar industry continue for so long with little or no regulation.

As cases of exploitation began being reported, the government came out with the draft Assisted Reproductive Technologies bill in 2010. It provides surrogates with a range of safeguards and also lays down regulations for the thousands of fertility clinics in the country.

But, for five years, the bill has been in limbo as lawmakers are apparently too busy to discuss it.

Click here to read the entire article.

in Ethics / International / IVF / Legal / Surrogacy  by Anthony Brown 0 comments