What do Cinderella, Pinocchio, Madame Bovary, and the Frankenstein monster share? They are among the many motherless characters that populate Western literature, and they all highlight the difficulty and suffering inherent in motherlessness.

Recently, these stories have become relevant in an entirely new way. On May 16th, a Maryland State Court of Appeals decision determined that children born to surrogate mothers—with whom they have no genetic connection—can be legally motherless.

In August 2001, a surrogate mother—or “gestational carrier”—gave birth to the biological twin daughters of a man identified as Roberto d.B. When the hospital put the surrogate’s name on the children’s birth certificates as the legal mother, Mr. d.B. sued to have the certificates reissued without a mother, on the grounds that the surrogate is not genetically related to the children. The Court of Appeals granted his wish, basing its decision on Maryland’s Equal Rights Amendment, which guarantees men and women equal rights under the law. According to the opinion, “[T]he paternity statute, as written, provides an opportunity for genetically unlinked males to avoid parentage, while genetically unlinked females do not have the same option.”

The implications inspire a sense of foreboding. As Judge Dale Cathell noted in his dissent, the decision means that “an entrepreneur could contract with a sperm donor, contract with an egg donor, contract with an assembler, contract with a woman to carry the child through the gestation period, and a child could be manufactured with neither a mother nor a father…. The child could then be put up for adoption at a price—and a new business, in the spirit of American ingenuity, is created.”

Not only “the spirit of American ingenuity” but the spirit of post-modern selfishness seems to be in play.

With this month marking the 29th birthday of Louise Brown, the world’s first test-tube baby, in vitro fertilization (IVF) is nothing new, and neither is the controversy surrounding it. In his 2002 book Life, Liberty and the Defense of Dignity, Leon Kass referred to “egg-selling and womb-renting entrepreneurs,” and warned that, “Through the rental of surrogate-womb services, and through the buying and selling of tissues and embryos priced according to the donor’s merits, the commodification of nascent human life will be unstoppable.”

Indeed, even though IVF is shrouded in the language of altruism, in practice it underpins a profitable market in eggs and sperm. A popular radio station in Washington, D.C., runs advertisements from a local fertility clinic soliciting egg “donations,” imploring young women to “give life, anonymously, and enhance” their own lives—for up to $6000 at a time. For Valentine’s Day, The New York Times printed a breezy article about a sperm donor in Los Angeles who decided to reveal his identity to at least seven of his biological children. The piece notes that he earned $400 a month for the “donations” he made in the 1980s.

So not only “the spirit of American ingenuity” but the spirit of post-modern selfishness seems to be in play. The Maryland ruling and the gamete market are designed to satisfy the rights, whims, and wishes of adults. They are utterly unconcerned about the best interests of children, who have the most to lose from careless IVF transactions. 

As Kay Hymowitz noted in her article “The Incredible Shrinking Father” in the Spring 2007 issue of City Journal, artificial insemination has been dramatically changing the underpinnings of American families. In what she calls the “unmarriage revolution,” sperm donation has built “a wall between children and their fathers”—and the same can now be said of children and their mothers. Yet quietly and without much debate, in laboratories and clinics and courtrooms, the process of producing fatherless and motherless children has been set in motion.

Camille Paglia warns in Sexual Personae, “In a totalitarian future that has removed procreation from woman’s hands, there will be no affect and no art. Men will be machines, without pain but also without pleasure. Imagination has a price, which we are paying every day. There is no escape from the biologic chains that bind us.” One needn’t look farther than Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex to see the damage that can be caused by discovering the identity of one’s mother too late.

Elise Passamani is an Associate Editor of The American. 

Image credit: 'dad and son' by Flickr user meemal.