Is Surrogacy For The Elite Becoming A Modern ‘Handmaid’s Tale’?

You’re not alone if you’ve started noticing similarities of real-life surrogacy to the forecasted arrangement played out in The Handmaid’s Tale. As the real world has grown to mirror a fictional Gilead, where the infertile can become parents with enough status and income while the poor and underprivileged are used as fetus incubators, I can’t help but relate this to the commonness of those that have started using surrogacy to bypass pregnancy altogether. With enough money, you can remove any and all risk that comes with childbirth, paying someone else to take that on. To this extent, separate from someone dealing with infertility, there is an overflow of funds and no concept of an expense too big. It appears that using surrogacy is either a luxury for the elite or an unmanageable cost for anyone else.

So, if we’re paying women rent money for their uteruses today, who’s to say that we won’t remove the middleman known as in-vitro fertilization and start raping women as fictional Gilead has predicted? Same outcome different method.

After adding compensation and science to conception, what comes next? What will be the bigger and better advancement to follow?

We’re already living during a time where not all women have control over their bodies as some states still have not legalized abortion. Although conception has traditionally involved both man and woman, we’ve historically placed the entirety of the outcome onto the female. So who’s to say that these states, who already don’t believe a woman should have a say in the matter of her own body, won’t take the science we’ve created today to further monetize surrogacy while simultaneously forcing it onto the lower class?

It all sounds crazy, I know, but I’m sure you never thought that a sexual predator would become the president of the united states either, yet here we are. We’re living during a time of immense progression intertwined with relentless resistance.

Perhaps surrogacy has provided some good, but has it provided more evil or better yet, potential solutions for future harm?

Not all surrogates are created equal, so don’t group every situation together. Surrogates that work as incubators for the rich and entitled have no correlation to the infertile family that used surrogacy to create a family by any means necessary.

Don’t rush to judgment but also, don’t fall ignorant to these changes that impact people today, and inevitably even more people in the future.