Why aren't there more single fathers?. Adults have a tough time getting along with each other, especially when they are of opposite sexes and sharing a domicile. Most adults, however, are very happy to live with their children. High-income women in their 30s often put these two facts together and come up with intentional single motherhood. They find a sperm donor, spend nine months producing the baby "in-house", then hire a nanny or two once the baby arrives.
Why can't a man be more like a woman? What stops a high-income older man from hiring surrogate mothers to produce kids and an au pair or two to take care of them when he is at work or otherwise unavailable?
In the old days, of course, a mature man was not necessarily precluded from the standard marriage route. Ferdinand de Lesseps, the man behind the Suez Canal, got married at the age of 64. To a woman of 20. They had 12 children. Today, however, except in some Third World countries, a woman of 20 is likely to prefer a young good-looking mate.
One potential obstacle to this approach to single fatherhood is that apparently American courts are not anxious to enforce surrogate motherhood contracts. For example, a woman could decide that she has grown attached to the baby that she has carried to term and elect to keep the baby. That isn't so bad necessarily. A man could hire 3 surrogate mothers, expecting a yield of 2.2 delivered children. What if one surrogate repudiates the contract to hand over the baby. Can she then sue the father for paternity? Could that mournful situation be prevented if the man purchased donated eggs from one woman and hired an unrelated woman to handle the pregnancy?
And in an age of outsourcing Java coding, something for which many months of training are required, to the Third World, why not outsource surrogate motherhood? Suppose that a man has a budget of $50,000 per child. A smart healthy college-bound woman in the U.S. would probably reject that amount, only slightly more than the cost of one year at a top university. Consider, however, a woman with a good genetic patrimony in a country where the average income was $5,000 per year. Ten years of salary for 9 months of work!
A pregnancy is not work, it's a labour of love.
A bit of labor (literally) today and enough capital to buy a house and perhaps start a business. Perhaps that $50,000 is beginning to sound attractive. Not to mention all the other advantages of production in a foreign country. Obstetrical care and hospital fees are vastly cheaper in any country other than in the U.S. [Philip Greenspun Weblog]
I find this absolutely disgusting!! Kids come from the love of their parents (either naturally or through adoption), not from a bought out surrogate mother. This is really the summum of egoism. With such a system, you reduce babies to a commodity: You have the money, you order, you pay, you get it. Amazon for designer babies anyone? And then how do you explain this to a child? "One day, I really wanted a baby: I found a genetically-suitable woman, I paid her money and then you came. Who's your mother? Don't know and don't care..."
Disgusting!!!
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