Creating Motherless Children: Wombs for Rent

How can a human being be created without a mother? Take reproductive technologists and mix them generously with lawyers and judges in a totally out-of-control way and voila, it goes like this:

A woman agrees to be a paid surrogate, or "gestational carrier"- renting her body to be used as a hatchery for anonymous egg and the sperm of a paying customer. Then, the human hatchery who is not "genetically connected" to the twins she incubated and expelled from her uterus....wants no trail connecting her to this arrangement.

She and the sperm donating customer who paid to rent and use her as a human incubator, "Roberto d.B", were not satisfied to follow procedures already in place-such as have her terminate her rights and allow the babies to be adopted, or simply release custody to the sperm donor...they want no the tawdry events that brought these babies into t he world. They want the "creations" that she germinated to be absolutely and totally motherless children. The egg donor was not "involved" in the case, just another anonymous cowardly profiteering contributor to this "experiment"... persona non grata.

And, the Maryland Court of Appeals agreed with them 4-3. The goose that laid the golden egg is off the hook of any and all further responsibility to the two infants she brought into the world. The babies are not required to have a mother listed on their birth certificates.

Judge Dickens argued that Judges routinely allow blank spaces for mothers on birth certificates in surrogacy cases. However, this case marks the first time the Equal Rights Amendment was used by a state to make the decision. In a 56-page decision, the majority argued that a man who can prove he has no genetic relationship to a child can be ruled not to be its father, so a woman should have the same ability.

And thus we can now proudly have both fatherless and motherless children! What great feats we can accomplish when we put our collective minds to it. Wouldn't Orwell be proud?

Chief Justice Robert Bell found that: "She [the incubator] had a reasonable expectation that her role in the lives of these children would terminate upon delivery of the children, and that the faithful performance of her duties under the agreement would not permanently impact her life, nor the lives of her family." The majority of appeal judges agreed that "if you do not intend to be the mother, you should not be responsible as a mother."

In a marriage or even a brief relationship, if the mother of the child decides she wants not further responsibility she abandons the child and/or releases custody to the father, or another. However, she does not then go back and have her name erased from the child's birth certificate.

In adoption, adoptive parents are named as the parents "of birth" but not until the rights of the genetic mother have been terminated. Adoptees then have two birth certificates. Although those adopted have no legal access to their original birth certificate without court order, and in a limited number of states upon reaching majority...the information is there.

With this decision, Maryland enters into a new realm of non-reality. These children have a birth certificate with no mother's name on it!

Who was there to advocate for the rights of these children-victims of the most heinous form of identity theft? Did any one take into consideration what it would be like to grow up with such a void where one's mother's name should appear-a bizarre contracted "manufactured" science fiction project? What about the right to an identity? This is the ultimate identity theft. Nomen nescio.

And who is "Roberto d.B" and what is his fitness to parent these creatures he bought and paid for-no strings attached? The only two other publicly known cases of men doing likewise are Michael Jackson and Stephen F. Melinger.

Mellinger adopted the twins he paid to have created using a so-called "surrogate." The adoptions drew the state's attention after hospital employees raised concerns about Melinger's ability to care for the girls before they were discharged from a neonatal intensive-care unit. He showed up in Methodist's neonatal unit to visit the girls with a live bird in the left sleeve of his suit jacket and, later, bird feces on his clothing and is being challenged on the grounds that adoptions out of Indiana to another state are reserved only for "hard to place" children. The state contends in their suit that this case violated interstate laws.

Paid surrogacy is immoral and is outlawed in most of the world and in some states-such as Mellinger's home state of New Jersey.

Where is the outrage of the defenders of the unborn? Where are those who bemoan the fatherlessness of America and single parenthood being the scourge of society as we allow the creation of motherless children?

While some are up are arms about same sex couples adopting children through legal channels with oversight, anyone-including pedophiles-are allowed to purchase the services of women willing to provide them, with their own or another's eggs, to create children to ride with them on their merry-go-rounds in never-never land where children have no mothers and daddy's have no one watching....