I'll Bear Your Baby, Says Tracey
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday April 2, 1987
Tracey Kingsley has already worked out how she will spend the $10,000 or more she expects to receive.
"I'll buy furniture for this place," she says without hesitation.
But money is not the main reason she wants to be a surrogate mother; her motives are more compassionate, she says.
"I think it is such a shame when a man and woman love each other so much and they can't have kids. Being a surrogate mum would be just like baby-sitting for nine months."
Tracey rang the Herald yesterday asking how she could go about becoming a surrogate mother, after hearing the outcome of the historic and protracted Baby M trial in the US. (The judge decided that a surrogacy contract between Mary Beth Whitehead and Elizabeth and William Stern was valid and binding, thus legitimising such surrogate baby deals.)
At 22, Tracey says surrogate motherhood has been on her mind for six years, since reading her first magazine article about the sadness of infertile couples. She liked the idea of doing something to help these people, and at the same time experiencing pregnancy without the responsibility of a child.
"At the moment I can't take care of a child because I have got two jobs, so I wouldn't have time. I also wouldn't like the responsibility of it yet, because I'm young and I've got my whole life in front of me," she said.
"I'm just looking at going through the pregnancy as an experience of giving life to a child - going through the kicks and punches and morning sickness. I have been clucky since I was 18."
Feeling as she does, how does Tracey think she will be able to part with the child after giving birth?
She has thought about that, she said, and it doesn't worry her because she hopes that a few years on, she will be married with children of her own. And that is why she believes she won't be plagued with a desire later in life to find her lost child.
But, just to make sure, she would stipulate as part of the agreement, that she wasn't to set eyes on the baby.
"Once I'm in labour, I wouldn't even see the child. A lot of mothers like to hold the child, but if you do that, you get attached to it. If I held her, she would have to be mine."
Tracey feels surrogacy is a much better option than adoption: "That way at least you know the child is half yours."
PAGE 9: Bonn to outlaw surrogacy.
PAGE 15: For love or money?
© 1987 Sydney Morning Herald