GESTIÓN EN SALUD PÚBLICA: BioEdge: A dystopian novel about surrogacy in America

domingo, 12 de mayo de 2019

BioEdge: A dystopian novel about surrogacy in America

BioEdge: A dystopian novel about surrogacy in America

Bioedge

A dystopian novel about surrogacy in America

by Michael Cook | 12 May 2019 |

^{Joanne Ramos, author of ‘The Farm’}

Surrogacy exploitation has made it onto the best-seller list. The Farm, a debut novel by investment banker Joanne Ramos, paints a picture of surrogacy as the commodification of poor women’s bodies for the sake of the mega-rich.

“The work is easy and the money is big!” a Filipina broker for “The Farm”, a cosy estate in Massachusetts, tells the central character in the novel, Jane, a half-Filipina, half-American single mother with an infant daughter.

The story unfolds at The Farm where most of the “hosts” – the surrogate mothers – are Filipinas. “Premium hosts” are white. The manager is a Harvard MBA.

“What if we began sourcing more of our Hosts from lower-middle-class Caucasians?” says one of The Farm’s bean-counters. “They’ve been hammered for decades — no wage growth, unions emasculated. … I bet we don’t have to pay them much more than we pay our immigrant-sourced Hosts, but — and here’s the nub of it — we could charge a premium.”

The accommodation seems luxurious, but the women have to surrender their freedom. Every movement is tracked and contact with the outside world is monitored. They can’t take pain-killers. There’s no bonus if they have a Caesarean.

The plot and the setting might sound unrealistically dystopian, but all Ramos has done is to transfer the organisation of baby farms in India to the United States. According to reviews, the prose is wooden and the characters programmatic, but the novel is a real page-turner.

Michael Cook is editor of BioEdge

In our lead story today we focus on an apparent, and surprising, rift over euthanasia in Belgium. On the one hand the medical association recently issued guidelines which tell doctors to be more cautious about granting euthanasia for psychiatric reasons. On the other, the country’s leading right-to-die association is campaigning vigorously to grant euthanasia to patients with dementia. Apparently, even supporters of the country’s euthanasia law differ on the wisdom of making a liberal law even more liberal.

My feeling, however, for what it's worth, is that Belgium will keep relaxing its 2002 law until it becomes effectively euthanasia on demand. Doctors will become mere suicide enablers.

There may be one way to stop this process, or at least to slow it down. And that is to fire the chairman of the Federal Euthanasia Commission, Dr Wim Distelmans. This gentleman is not only the senior regulator of euthanasia in Belgium. He is also a media star as the chief spokesman for the right to die and one of the main practitioners of euthanasia. In other countries, this would be regarded as an egregious conflict of interest.

A new chairman who is not immersed in the world of Belgian euthanasia politics would be in a better position to identify abuses and refer doctors who fail to comply with the law to the public prosecutor.