Rent-a-Womb Is Where Market Logic Leads
At long last, our national love affair with the rich is coming to a close. The moguls whose exploits we used to follow with such fascination, it now seems, plowed the country into the ground precisely because of the fabulous rewards that were showered on them.
Massive inequality, we have learned, isn't the best way to run an economy after all. And when you think about it, it's also profoundly ugly.
Some people haven't received the memo, though. Take Alex Kuczynski, author of the New York Times Magazine cover story for Nov. 30, which tells how she went about hiring another woman to bear her child.
For years Ms. Kuczynski worked the plutocracy beat for the New York Times, and in her whimsical way she described the travails of the world's supermodels, the scene-making that went on at this or that high-end restaurant, and the feeling on the hard streets of Greenwich and the Hamptons.
Somewhere along the way, Ms. Kuczynski went from observer to observed. She married a hedge-fund billionaire and in 2005 was the subject of a memorable bit of plute-worship in W magazine. Here we learned about her four homes (including one on Park Avenue and one in Southampton) but mainly about her really inaccessible spread in Idaho, where everything has to be flown in: the masseuses, the meat, the guests, the yoga instructor, the chefs, and the logs that were required to restore the property's log cabins to her husband's exacting standards.
Now Ms. Kuczynski's trademark concern for the moneyed becomes memoir as she relates to us, in last week's Times Magazine, her "adventures with a surrogate mom." The story starts with Ms. Kuczynski's infertility, which is genuinely piteous, but quickly goes wrong, as she and her husband decide to hire a woman to carry their child and review applications from women with available wombs.
Surrogate motherhood has been the subject of much philosophical and political dispute over the years. To summarize briefly, it is a class-and-gender minefield. When money is exchanged for pregnancy, some believe, surrogacy comes close to organ-selling, or even baby-selling. It threatens to commodify not only babies, but women as well, putting their biological functions up for sale like so many Jimmy Choos. If surrogacy ever becomes a widely practiced market transaction, it will probably make pregnancy into just another dirty task for the working class, with wages driven down and wealthy couples hiring the work out because it's such a hassle to be pregnant.
Ms. Kuczynski is not entirely oblivious to these issues; indeed, she considers them for several poignant paragraphs before inevitably brushing them off.
It's "organ rental," Ms. Kuczynski decides; nothing worse. She is taken with the surrogate's reference to herself as an "Easy-Bake oven" -- a toy appliance -- and further describes her as "a vessel, the carrier, the biological baby sitter, for my baby." And, yes, the surrogate applicants could all use the money, if not desperately; the one who gets the job plans to use it to help pay her kids' way through college. Additionally, one of the surrogate's children, Ms. Kuczynski notes, "had been an egg donor to help pay her college tuition."
Maybe if this young woman had been donating her eggs to buy groceries Ms. Kuczynski would have understood that all this reproduction-for-hire was a product of her billionaire-centric world as surely as the Blahniks and Versace she used to trill about -- that college and surrogacy are available to people like Ms. Kuczynski and not to others because that's how our system works.
Instead she tells us, very sincerely, how much she enjoyed spending the last few months before the child arrived "by white-water rafting down Level 10 rapids on the Colorado River" -- presumably Level 10 rapids are really quality rapids -- "racing down a mountain at 60 miles per hour at ski-racing camp, drinking bourbon and going to the Super Bowl." She also does a lot of "Bikram yoga," which is presumably a really quality form of yoga.
What she doesn't tell us is even more revealing. Of the story's nearly 8,000 words, there are only three quotations from the surrogate mother. Ms. Kuczynski does not describe this remarkable woman's clothes or, really, tell us her thoughts about much of anything. About Ms. Kuczynski's own feelings and fears and cravings we get paragraph after maudlin paragraph. The one who does the labor is almost completely silent.
Then there are the photographs, already infamous: Ms. Kuczynski in a black sleeveless sheath and stiletto-heel pumps, posing next to the pregnant surrogate in khakis and a tousled pink flannel shirt. Ms. Kuczynski holding the baby on the lawn of her Southampton estate, with columns, topiary and servant. The surrogate sitting, barefoot and alone, on a beat-up porch of her house in Pennsylvania.
According to the Times's "Public Editor" column, Ms. Kuczynski objected to the pictures before the article was published. And who knows? Maybe the photographers and art directors were out to subvert her story all along. If so, they understood market relations far better than the author herself.
Thomas Frank's column, The Tilting Yard, appears every Wednesday at OpinionJournal.com
Also in Opinion Journal:
Peggy Noonan: Rectitude Chic
Carly Fiorina: Corporate Leadership and the Crisis
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This was disturbing not because of surrogacy (I think adoption is better...m
this child..may grow up...reall
The surrogate.
I hope she enjoys her hedge-fund cake......
Poor people do the work and suffering. Rich people enjoy the fruits of the work and suffering of the poor. Some have a problem with this arrangement. Like it doesn't seem fair or something. Others have no problem. Like this is how its always been so it must be OK. What do you think?
Maybe I'm being obtuse...b
I am NOT being sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek. I am pro-choice
I think they just find the attitude of the rich womb-renter to be a bit distasteful. While I do agree with you in principle, I also find myself sharing some of the author's queasiness over Ms. Kuczynski's somewhat cavalier attitude towards the surrogate.
This post is intellectually bankrupt.
Whilst Mr Frank has every right to pillory Ms Kucynski for her foibles, be they real or perceived, he does not make the case to sully the entire process of surrogacy. To make the quantum leap that surrogacy arrangements are indicative of societies "love affair with the rich " is downright dishonest and factually unprovable. Do some research.
Anyone who has walked down the path of infertility and craves a family , knows of what I speak. Surrogate mothers provide an invaluable service and to hear them referred to as "easy bake ovens" is crass , unnecessary and not the caliber of discussion we should be having.
I'm so glad to hear you mention this letter, Ioana. I was as disgusted by Warner's use of the word "bovine" as I was of the original article. The odd thing was, it seems her letter was meant to be somewhat sympathetic to the unfair portayal of "Cathy," the surrogate mother. How the word "bovine" founds itself next to "lovely" in this letter is mystifying. Warner is a writer- she could have found dozens of less insulting - and more descriptive ways - to describe the surragote mother.
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dear Thomas
i certainly agree with the spirit and the tone and the content of your article. But if you (and I) think these things that seem commonsensical are equally understandable to, surely, any other reasonable person once you take the time to explain it to her - we are mistaken. A person named Judith Newman who apparently could also afford to "throw" (her word) a comparable amount of money to a surrogate mother for her baby managed to get her letter published as a response by NYT Magazine. Here's an excerpt:
"what was shocking, and inexcusable to me, was The Times’s complicity in creating the Park Avenue Princess narrative: I mean, of all the photos taken, were the ones of the perfectly groomed Kuczynski next to the lovely but bovine surrogate really the most representative of the text? The surrogate couldn’t have been dressed elegantly, too?"
As unbelievable as this may sound - no, it's not a joke or an irony. This woman really means it. Sarah Palin, meet your Fifth Avenue counterpart.
wow.
i thought the pictures were a brilliant indictment of the article.
"Let them eat labor pains," says the Southampton & other enclaves hedge fund plutocracy. You can take that several ways. They're all anti-democratic, some are immoral, and most are decadent and corrupt.
Hey, whatever it takes to HATCH MORE BABY "anti-democratic, immoral, decadent and corrupt"
filthy rich children of the filthy rich!
lol
I read the article in the Times which was accompanied by two very telling photos: the one of Alex on the huge, manicured lawn of one of her homes, trim and slim, cool as a cucumber and holding the baby. A few feet behind and to the side of her standing at attention is the nanny--a young Black woman apparently in uniform. The other picture is of the surrogate--large bellied and casual, sprawled out on the front porch of her home which obviously needs paint.
The photos themselves, provoked a lot of righteous wrath from NYTimes readers, I'm happy to say, who wasted no time deploring the situation. Yes, I suspect that the editors were undermining the message of the author with these photos---good for them!
I wonder what kind of informed consent gets passed on to these women. We don't even have the full story on fetal microchimerism and its effects, so I doubt it's fully informed.
Well, this article didn't hack away at the rich anywhere near the level that is necessary at this time in this country.
We need to get in their faces and say WTF?
The MSM needs to cover the homeless and the overloaded shelters and the real damn world of the poor and getting poorer. We need to see pictures of what is really happening in this country and we need them yesterday.
We need to take it to the rich!!!
Tax their asses and stop kissing them.
What I don't understand: is why the Rich, the millionaires and their families..
I know there must be and certainly are a FEW rich folks responding to the economic crisis this way... but I would think it would be a remarkable landslide of "patronage
It's inevitable. Whenever I'm so outraged by something that I can't even articulate it, Thomas Frank comes along to lay it out calmly and precisely. Thanks again. That's exactly what I would have liked to say if I could have found the right words.
Finally, someone has enough guts and horse sense to say no.!:)
How could anyone call themselves mother if they hadn't borne the child and especially in this way?
If it comes to being infertile, it's sad but you can always adopt right?
I think that these super rich folks are going to begin to have a hard time...jus
"How could anyone call themselves mother if they hadn't borne the child and especially in this way?"
That's an unfair pronouncement. Yes, the rich lady in the article is a bit clueless and self-preoccupied, but I don't see how that can be an indictment of the whole process itself.
Nope, sorry, not unfair in the least...
Maybe there are reasons we don't always get everything we want?
sadly there hundreds of thousands of women who have turned their wombs into rent-a-bake ovens
and most notably the republicans who have a lot to say about abortion ignore the issues of selective reduction and embryo abandonment by the wealthy
I'm a conservative who has said a lot about selective reduction and embryo abandonment by anyone. I am saddened that women's bodies have become sources for eggs for SCNT, that they've been given a load of spin on what happens to their eggs upon donation to infertile couples and clinics, and that fertility treatment that necessitates the freezing of embryos ought to be avoided at all costs.
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I came away from reading this just feeling like there isn't enough real confict for Alex K. to warrant an article. It's win-win for her. An article by the surrograte mother, that would be something but for her to play up any sort of heebie-jeebies about the process was ridiculous.
I have deep moral issues with the idea of 'renting' a womb. I also have similarly deep moral issues about the excessive consumption of the rich. Worse is how the media plays up being rich as so good. Maybe we do need to tax them more, mainly on their consumption rather than their incomes. Maybe a 'luxury tax' on expensive clothing, cars, homes and so on and redistribute the monies for affordable food, housing, transportation for the masses.
I certainly think there is value into considering the moral issues involved in surrogacy, but I get more than a little annoyed when others start making one-sided selfrighteous judgments about how others choose to exercise their reproductive rights.
Although surrogacy can be an expensive process, so can adoption for that matter. And most people who choose to adopt are not ultra-wealthy hedge-fund billionaires, and neither are most people who choose surrogacy. Also, surrogates are not all poor women "renting" out their wombs--aside from family members volunteering to be surrogates, not all the rest are helpless women acting out of economic desperation.
If Mr. Frank wants to make a comment about the glamorization of the rich in our society, fine. However, he really is making a bit of stretch to leap without any evidence of economic exploitation and just a whole lot of assumptions as to the nature of the circumstances of Ms. Kuczynski and the woman acting as her surrogate into accuations of "commodification" of babies and dire warnings of the creation of some oppressed handmaiden class (perhaps he recently read Ms. Atwood's classic).
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