SURROGACY MOTHERHOOD

We live in a time when it is difficult to express one’s opinions without being pigeonholed into a fanbase where the norm is to insult those who do not think like you. It is enough to say that the Americans fueled the war in Ukraine to be called a Putinist or if you try to say that Netanyahu is slaughtering Palestinians in Gaza, then you are a Nazi who wants to exterminate Jews. If you ask a few questions about sexual identity, open heavens, you immediately become a reactionary homophobic fascist. Instead, I think it’s precisely at a time like this that we need to try to go to the content so that people who want to get some insight can have some food for thought.

Regarding surrogacy, there is not the usual sharp line dividing left and right, conservatives and progressives. Mind you, I am not referring here to the absurd and violent law that makes it a universal crime, but only to gestation for others, the so-called “womb for rent.”

Of course there are the hyper-ideological, religious, right-wing groups and pro-life committees who are compactly against it. Although then a contradiction leaps to the eye: how come the very ones who continually tell us that women’s fulfillment comes through being mothers are then against letting other women become mothers? But the contradiction is only apparent because evidently for them being a mother means doing 9 months of pregnancy, the biological reproductive fact. Granted that of course — but in these times it bears repeating — a woman’s first aspiration should not be to be a mother, I find it frankly humiliating and mortifying to reduce being a mother to something mechanical and repetitive, even cows do 9 months of pregnancy, but being a mother is something else in my opinion.

Perhaps I am wrong but I believe that precisely in this passage lurks a problem that also concerns many unaligned people who with respect to surrogacy are perplexed, have an instinctive reaction of rejection, as if centuries of Christianity had left a trace even in those who do not realize it.
If we try to get out of this unfortunate country and alas also out of Europe (with small exceptions) with its Judeo-Christian roots, we find that there are many countries (65) where surrogacy is legal, in others (35) so-called supportive motherhood, that without payment, is legal. Without going into detail, we can say that in these countries the prevailing concern of the legislators has been – rightly – to prevent any social consequences such as abuse and exploitation, but it has not concerned the fact itself, gestation for others.

This leads us to say that there are many countries in the world that consider, correctly in my opinion, pregnancy to be a purely biological fact and that therefore motherhood is realized after birth, in the relationship with the born child. That is, in all these countries there is the thought that the human being realizes its mind at birth and consequently the fetus does not make any psychic or mental or emotional relationship with the mother. Therefore, there is no wrongness or even abandonment if biological reproduction is entrusted to a woman who generously lends herself or rather lends her womb to do a beneficial deed to another woman.

Incidentally, I point out that there are advanced studies on the realization of the artificial womb for preterm infants, and it cannot be ruled out that in the future we may achieve complete ectogenesis, that is, to carry out gestation from beginning to end inside the artificial womb.
It is important to clarify our minds about these things because if human identity-and I am therefore not referring to somatic aspects but to the mind-were determined biologically, we would go straight to racism. And this is perhaps what leads some people to have so much fear and hostility toward migrants, as if they are inherently, genetically, psychically different from us. So, just to say, white people would be born smart, green people stupid, purple people bad, and so on….

Instead, we need to know and think that all children are born the same, no matter where in the world they are, no matter what color they are, and they may even have had a psychologically sick mother, a severely mentally ill one, but they will be born like everyone else: human, profoundly human…then if anything, adults will take care of them and make them inhuman!

Marco Michelini