Throughout this pregnancy, I've never felt like I was taking advantage of our surrogate, or exploiting her in any way. She signed up to do this brave thing that involves quite a bit of inconvenience for her, but that will allow her to dramatically improve her family's life. In just a year, she'll earn money that may be as much as her husband could earn in 4 or 5 years, and it will enable her to keep her children in school longer, buy a better house for them, or start a business. I hope I get a chance to ask her how she'll be spending the money.
But today I agreed to have her housed in the clinic for the remainder of the pregnancy, and I'm feeling guilty. She's actually been there before, resting for about 2 weeks after the implantation until we had a confirmed pregnancy. For some reason now, though, I feel like I'm imprisoning her. This is definitely the best place for her as far as we are concerned -- if there's any emergency, she can be taking to the very best hospital in Mumbai right away. In addition this hospital is "surrogate friendly"; not every hospital is so amenable to putting our names on the birth certificate. Maybe she'll even welcome the respite from her daily chores during these last two or three weeks before the baby arrives (since it will be a C-section, I hope she'll have lots of help at home after the delivery, too.) If only I could ask her some of these things, and not feel like I'm arranging her fate like some feudal lady of the manor....
Hey, Steph and Adam. I've figured out this blogsite and am enjoying the sense of immediacy of the coming of Baby M. Steph, I'm also enjoying learning about you; thank you for sharing.
ReplyDelete