The Consequences of Desperation

This really pisses me off.

Those who know me personally know that I have a personal problem with artifical fertility treatments. I know that my view is extreme, but I feel very strongly that given the number of children who need loving homes, no one should be spending tens of thousands of dollars to create "their own" child. And I also have a VERY big problem with the attitude that a child can only be "your own" if the DNA comes from you. Aaaaand then there's the issue of the leftover eggs/ embryos. What do you do with them? Should they be disposed of after you give birth to a child? (And incidentally, this is one of the most annoying hypocricies about the religious right: they tell you that it's murder to destroy these leftover embryos or to donate them for medical research, but they don't come out and tell you that these treatments are immoral for creating these wasted "lives"-- while at the same time claiming that birth control pills are the same as abortion. How do they keep from exploding from the volume of hypocritical thought???)

Anyway, despite all this, I don't put too much blame on the surrogate mother. And if it's true that the biological parents did not ask or pressure the doctor to implant numerous embryos, then I lay equally little blame on them. The doctor, however, should be strongly censured. If the AMA -- or whichever board governs in vitro procedures-- does not already have rules against this practice, it should. And doctors who insist on implanting more than two embryos against recommended practice should be liable for malpractice and subject to fines or possibly even temporary suspension of license. It's bad for the babies (and again, where's the religious right on this one?), who suffer from far higher rates of premature birth and birth defects. It's bad for the mothers, who suffer far higher rates of complications and whose bodies are not meant to take the rigors of five developing babies. And it's bad for society, which has to bear the extra costs associated with medical problems (either directly because the parents can't afford the medical care and the hospitals have to absorb the cost-- which gets passed on to everyone else-- or indirectly because the insurance companies pass the higher risk on the the rest of the insured pool. Who wins in this scenario? No one that I can see, not even the doctor. It's not like his success rates will be any higher than those doctors who follow the rules.