It was with profound gratitude that I happened upon a seething
Salon Broadsheet essay about a New York Times article called “Her Body, My
Baby.” What a relief to know that another woman found this essay on gestational
surrogacy as callously classist as I had!
One need only look at the photograph on the right to get a
sense of how Alex Kuczynski’s privilege colors her concept of motherhood. Here
she is standing in front of her Southhampton home (one of several) as her baby’s
nurse waits obsequiously in the background. By contrast, Cathy Hilling, the
substitute teacher who carried Kucynski’s biological baby to term, is shown
relaxing on her porch barefoot, one hand on her swollen belly. It is as if the Times wanted to highlight exactly what Salon writer Amy Benfer (and myself) found so offensive about the article.
Benfer is appropriately deferent to “the tragedy of infertility,” and certainly does not argue that there is anything inherently wrong with the fact that some
infertile women can afford to pay upwards of $30,000 for gestational surrogacy to fertile women who need the money. Her qualm is not with surrogate motherhood per se; it’s with the way Alex Kucynski
treats the woman who carried and gave birth to her child.
Hilling refers to herself as a “foster mother” for Kucynski's baby (quite appropriately, since she and husband were longtime foster parents), while Kucynski refers to
Hilling as “a vessel,” a person “renting” out her “organs.” She asserts, with catty sarcasm, “Surrogates
would never say they were motivated to carry a child for another couple just
for money; they were all motivated by altruism.”
When Kucynski comes across Cathy Hilling’s application in her search
for the appropriate surrogate, she is condescendingly relieved to find that it
is typed: “she must live in a house with a computer and know how to use it.” What
a shock! Who would have thought that the middle classes were computer-literate?
As Salon points out, Kucynski is a style writer who has
written a book on plastic surgery, being herself intimately familiar with "beauty maintenance." During her grueling
rounds of IVF treatments, Kucynski found hope in photos of Nicole Kidman “wearing
skinny white jeans” just two weeks after giving birth. Physical vanity is certainly no crime, but it does make a lot of sense given the arrogant vanity with which Kucynski treats the women who have done so much to help her have a child.
Photo: New York Times
