What to Know
The relationship between parents and their gestational carrier is probably at least a little complicated even under the best of circumstances, but in this case, it sounds like the situation has gone completely off the rails.
A Canadian couple is suing their surrogate after she refused to abort their baby after finding out that they would be born with a cleft lip and potentially other abnormalities, claiming that she didn’t adequately keep them updated with their baby’s health.
Their relationship with their surrogate really went downhill after the genetic diagnosis.
According to the National Post, the surrogate was 22 weeks pregnant with the couple’s son two years ago when they discovered that the baby would be born with a cleft lip and may have other genetic abnormalities going on. The couple opted for an abortion at that point, but the surrogate asked for more genetic testing before terminating the pregnancy.
After the parents traveled to Toronto to meet with doctors, they decided they’d go ahead with the pregnancy since tests revealed the baby was healthy, minus the cleft lip, which was cosmetic.
“You know I’m a single mom, you know I have a daughter, and you’re basically suing me for my house. It seems very s—–. It’s just awful,” the surrogate, who remained anonymous, told the outlet. “I just feel used … They didn’t get the perfect child they wanted and they threw me away.”
They also disapproved of how the surrogate wanted to give birth.
Following the cleft lip diagnosis, the couple wanted the surrogate to give birth in a hospital, but she didn’t follow their request and gave birth at home, as she had originally planned. The baby did have breathing problems when he was born, but oxygen was administered and he was taken to the hospital after birth.
The surrogate told the National Post that once the baby was born, the parents took their son home and then ghosted her, ignoring her request for $10,000 in pregnancy and birth related expenses that they still had not reimbursed her for.
The couple is seeking about $600,000 in damages.
In the lawsuit, the couple claimed that the surrogate was “failing to follow the (parents’) direction regarding decisions affecting the fetus’s medical care,” while also putting their baby’s health at risk and causing emotional distress that caused one of the parents to be out of work for more than a year.
The couple is asking for about $600,000 from the surrogate, as she told the outlet.
Surrogates in Canada do not get paid for carrying babies for others, so that $600,000 would have to come straight out of the surrogate’s pocket — and it certainly doesn’t sound like she has that kind of money to burn.
But after this legal fiasco, one expert, bioethics professor Juliet Guichon seems to believe the parents should be a bit nervous about what could be coming next for them.
“The question arises as to whether it is in the best interests of the child to be raised by these people,” she said.
READ NEXT: We Caught Our Surrogate Taking a Tequila Shot So We Chose to Terminate the Pregnancy
