As a reproductive
alternative, surrogate motherhood enables one woman to bear
a child for another. It involves a process through which a
married couple in which the husband is fertile but the wife
is unable to carry a pregnancy, seeks out the means of
fulfilling the strong and understandable desire to become
parents through a privately arranged contract with a fertile
woman (the surrogate mother).
In the most common
arrangement, the surrogate (stand-in) mother agrees to be
artificially inseminated with the sperm of the fertile
husband. Alternatively, the surrogate mother may be
impregnated with an embryo (fertilized egg) produced by the
wife’s or another woman’s egg. In either case, what happens
is that the surrogate mother carries the pregnancy until
delivery, and then, as stated in the contract, relinquishes
the infant to the couple initiating the contract along with
all her parental rights and responsibilities.
Vanguard
recognizes that in a society like ours in which procreation
is a culturally and socially treasured quality, every effort
towards enabling or assisting infertile couples to become
parents, deserves to be encouraged if only to remove the
stigma cast over the plight of innumerable couples battling
with one problem of infertility or the other.
However, we wish to note
that even though the decision to participate in a surrogate
motherhood arrangement or other assisted reproductive
techniques like IVF or ICSI, ultimately lies with the
concerned individual, it is expedient to call on government
and related constituted authorities to begin to put in place
appropriate regulation procedures through which the moral,
ethical and religious views arising from available
infertility management methods can be tackled.
Adoption of a regulation
policy for assisted conception in Nigeria now and in the
foreseeable future, would not only bring about a
standardization of the procedures, it would also help
maintain the credibility of the medical practitioners and
guarantee improvement of services offered while protecting
the interest of all participating parties. It would also put
the nation at par with countries like the United Kingdom,
Australia, France, Germany, the Scandinavian countries and
the United States of America, amongst others, where the
quality management and assurance systems put in place for
assisted reproductive techniques, are as defined by
individual statutes or in compliance to international
standards organizations.
Currently, no such
guidelines exist in Nigeria, either in form of principles to
help in educating the public about the causes, detection,
treatment, and prevention of infertility, or as
recommendations to ensure that interests of parties involved
in such procedures are adequately protected.
