Bobby Jindal: Surrogate motherhood lessens ‘the way we value human life’

LifeSiteNews.com ^ | Mon Jun 02, 2014 17:43 EST | Dustin Siggins

[topher]

BATON ROUGE, LA, June 2, 2014 (LifeSiteNews.com) -- For the second time in as many years, Governor Bobby Jindal has vetoed a bill that would have made it legal to enter into a contract with a surrogate mother in Louisiana. Both vetoes took place despite enormous support in the state legislature.

In his veto letter Jindal, who is Catholic and considered a likely GOP presidential candidate in 2016, said he had concerns about "how this legislation impacts the way we value human life."

[topher]

Further down in the article:

While Jindal's veto can be overridden, the author of the bill admitted that was unlikely to happen.

I guess there will not be much fanfare when HB388 is signed (requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges at local hospitals).

That type of legislation has closed abortion clinics in states life Texas and Ohio. It recently passed in Oklahoma, but I am unsure how many abortion clinics it will close.

[topher]

Louisiana bishops put pressure on Governor Jindal on this legislation.

Governor Jindal is Catholic and apparently listened to the bishops...

This bill would have legalized surrogate motherhood for same sex couples and single people...

[Girlene]

If you read the article, it says the bishops did NOT put pressure on Jindal this year. They did last year, but agreed to back off to “preserve relationships with state legislators”.

So Governor Jindal listened to his own conscience.

Good for him.

[McGarnickle]

Good to see a Catholic politician with a spine these days.

[stormer]

He’s a politician who happens to be Catholic, not the other way around. Will he apply Catholic doctrine to all his decisions, or just ones that he thinks support his political ambitions? Surrogate parents can provide a way for people to have children biologically related to them, when for whatever reason, it’s otherwise medically impossible. How can he possible think that lessens the value for human life?

[Wayne07]

I think his objection isn’t to surrogacy in theory, but that state-sanctioned surrogacy condones in vitro fertilization, which involves processes that some in the pro life community equate with abortion (e.g., selective reduction).

[stormer]

So in other words he’s pandering to the subset of pro-lifers who don’t understand reproduction.

[married21]

“How can he possible think that lessens the value for human life?”

---

Okay. I’m going to take a stab at answering that.

1. You are renting the woman’s womb. That cheapens the value of her life.

2. Also, consider the difference between would-be parents who will open their hearts to a needy child through adoption, and would-be parents who would not do that if they could custom-build their own by paying for the surrogate. One couple is open to risk and helping someone in need. The other is messing with nature to diminish risk and keep there own genes going. The two people I know who have done this have a degree of selfish, upper-middle class smugness— used to having a perfectly planned, stylish life. If you can’t have yours naturally, and you have a certain income and are used to buying what you want, you can buy a family in this way. Like getting custom remodeling on your home, or a little nip/tuck to keep your looks up. With those sorts of expenditures, who cares? But if a child is involved, starting out the process with a note of hubris doesn’t bode well for honoring that child as-is, faults and all, nor honoring the others that you may have been called to welcome into your life, but rejected.

[two134711]

For years pro-abortionists have derided pro-lifers for viewing women as nothing but wombs. But this is exactly what women are being used as in a surrogate pregnancy. It absolutely devalues human life, because it treats women as commodities; they are paid for use of their bodies, their wombs. This is a form of prostitution. There is no difference in a man paying a woman to sleep with him, bear his child and walk away, and a couple or individual paying a woman to be inseminated or go through IVF.

To desire a biological child is a natural urge, but there is nothing natural about modern surrogacy. And even though it occurred often in the Bible, when men took their barren wives' handmaidens to create children, this was wrong as well. Also missing from this dialogue is the fact that modern-day surrogate mothers share a biological and genetic bond with the babies they gestate, even if the baby came form a donor egg. While the nucleic DNA will match egg and sperm provider, mtDNA will match the mother who carried the child in utero.

[married21]

I like Jindal. I don’t know whether he has a future at the national level or not, but it is really nice to be able to point to him and say to my kids “see? There’s one of the small number of basically decent, pro-life, conservative Christian men in politics.” I know he’s not good enough for a lot of Freepers, but he’s so much better than what we have for a governor in our state (CA). Jerry Brown used to be a devout Catholic. He was even a seminarian, I believe. How different California might have been if he stayed that way.

[topher]

My reading of the article is that the Bishops agressively opposed it until it passed this year, and then backed off...

[Wayne07]

I disagree. Pro lifers in this case understand reproduction almost too well. IVF should be a great thing, but when you look at the details, while it doesn't inherently lead to involve abortion, in practice it does. I am not opposed to IVF, but it raises complicated issues that shouldn't be ignored.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_reduction

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/WomensHealth/reducing-twins-singles-womans-choice/story?id=14311243#.T2poumKok2Q

Increased use of in vitro fertilization techniques has made Ross's situation increasingly common. Given the high cost and failure rate of fertility treatments, some couples try to increase their chances of getting pregnant by using multiple embryos and end up facing an unexpected challenge of twins, triplets, or higher multiples -- a challenge some feel they cannot handle, emotionally or financially.

There is a way out of this challenge, but it is one that is seldom discussed among mommies-to-be: selective reduction.

In cases of high multiple pregnancies, doctors will often recommend selective reduction for purely medical reasons. Early in the pregnancy, one or more of the fetuses are aborted from within the womb to increase the likelihood that the remaining babies (and the mother) will survive and thrive. There are numerous health concerns to both mother and infants associated with carrying multiples. Thus for decades obstetricians have offered the option of reducing down to twins, which tend to have safer outcomes. This procedure can only be done with fraternal twins, as identical twins share a placenta and cannot easily be separated.

[Girlene]

okay.