The psychological trauma behind surrogate pregnancies

Life imitates fiction. What is more appropriate than Sarah Jessica Parker, star of Sex and the City, having twins via a surrogate mother with her actor husband, Matthew Broderick?

The women in Sex and the City want all the things that men want - and more. They want to be rich and powerful, free in their sexual relations, able to have babies and carry on as if nothing has happened, and believe that anything is possible if there is enough money to pay for it.

The reality is that it doesn't work like that. Even with surrogate motherhood, an increasingly popular solution to infertility or the incapacity to have a baby, there are psychological hazards beneath the surface.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

While Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, who already have a six-year-old son but have been unable to conceive since, are not imitations of the characters in Sex and the City, their announcement that they have employed a surrogate mother, due to give birth this summer, raises questions not only about morality but about the psychology of prospective parents who choose this option.

The baby, represents a magical phallus that can be created at will without effort

Surrogate motherhood appeals to many women - and men - for different reasons. In the case of Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick, they have made it clear that they were "desperate" for another child of their own.

This is perhaps the most frequently cited reason and, apart from the fact that the reality favours the rich over the poor, it signifies that there may be increasing difficulty in accepting our human limitations and consequent losses. Age and physical incapacity can be magicked away when someone else can have your baby for you.

A New York writer, Alex Kuczynski, who chose surrogate motherhood, sums up her experience. "As the months passed, something curious happened: The bigger Cathy was, the more I realised that I was glad - practically euphoric - I was not pregnant.

"I was in a daze of anticipation, but I was also secretly, curiously, perpetually relieved, unburdened from the sheer physicality of pregnancy... Cathy was getting bigger and the constraints on her grew. I, on the other hand, was happy to exploit my last few months of nonmotherhood by white water rafting down Level 10 rapids on the Colorado River, racing down a mountain at 60 miles per hour at ski-racing camp, drinking bourbon and going to the Super Bowl."

In short, surrogate motherhood is also a great solution if you are a woman and want to go on doing all the things that men do without the "physicality" of being a woman with a woman's body.

The most worrying aspect psychologically of surrogate motherhood is that it bypasses the actual creative process of bearing children. A baby becomes something that is manufactured elsewhere, vicariously, without the physical and emotional processes that naturally occur during pregnancy and childbirth.

The actual work of making a baby is farmed out to someone else and this necessarily turns the process into artifice. At its most extreme, the product, the baby, represents a magical phallus that can be created at will without effort or experience. In this respect, the baby becomes in fantasy a substitute for the real thing and confers omnipotence to the person possessing it.

The pressure to create a ‘fake’ baby indicates an early narcissistic wound

Surrogate motherhood opens the door for the possibility of anyone being able to produce a baby - as long as they can pay for it. The problem is that it is a fake - just like going to the bakery and buying a cake and passing it off as one's own.

This deception comes about when there is overwhelming internal pressure on the ego to conform to some ideal that is beyond its means. The pressure to create a 'fake' baby may also indicate that the mother and/or the father suffer from a deep sense of rejection - an early narcissistic wound - that makes any inadequacy or limitation unbearable to acknowledge.

The parents who produce a child through surrogacy can maintain an unconscious one-upmanship over parents who produce children normally. Through their special powers, they can fill in the gap in their lives that has made them feel inadequate and they can avoid having to acknowledge their envy of parents who can make their own babies. The tables are turned and they become the envied rather than the other way around.

We do not yet know the full impact on the baby of the loss of its mother at birth

Unfortunately, like in Sex and the City, this narcissistic attempt to make up for what is lost throws up serious difficulties in reality. The pressure to maintain this degree of omnipotence and to avoid pain and loss is likely to take its toll on the entire family.

In addition to this, there is substantial evidence that babies are highly attuned to their mothers' bodies (ie taste, smell, touch, sound) in utero. We do not yet know the full impact on the baby of the loss of its mother at birth except that it undoubtedly exacerbates an experience that is already traumatic.

The failure to recognise the importance of pre-natal attachment suggests a desire to minimise the importance of attachment, separation and loss for the baby. Surrogacy may be at the cost of these basic needs in the case of the baby as well as the parents, much less the surrogate mother.