Surrogate Mom Defies Pressure to Abort One Triplet
Brittneyrose Torres, a surrogate mom who is 17-weeks pregnant with triplets, is being pressured to abort one of her fetuses by the biological parents. But Torres refuses.
She told the New York Post that the biological parents “knew from the beginning that we wouldn’t want to abort unless it was a life-and-death situation.” She added: “We would never want to abort a baby’s life.”
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Through in vitro fertilization, two fertilized eggs from the biological parents were implanted in 26-year-old Torres, with the hope that at least one would survive. But one of the fertilized eggs split, creating twins. She is now carrying twin boys and a girl. The biological parents have asked Torres to abort the female fetus. “We did not think we would be in this position,” said Torres, who lives in Thousand Oaks, Calif., with her husband and young child.
Torres decided to share her story after reading about another surrogate mom, Melissa Cook, who is in a similar situation. She also reached out the Center for Bioethics and Culture (CBC), a nonprofit anti-surrogacy organization, who helped her find legal counsel. “Here’s a low-income woman who agrees to help [by being a surrogate] because she needs payment,” Jennifer Lahl, president of the CBC, told Yahoo Parenting. “They don’t always have a lawyer who represents them. So we find pro-bono lawyers to advocate for these women.”
The contact between Torres and the biological parents stipulates that Torres will receive $25,000 for carrying one baby and an additional $5,000 for carrying two or more. “Surrogacy contracts almost always include an abortion clause,” explains Lahl. “[The biological parents] get to decide if and when there’s a termination. It’s the expectation that she works for them. It’s an ugly way to handle women’s bodies and pregnancy.”
Controversies over surrogacy agreements appear in the media with increasing regularity these days. That’s because these agreements, whether U.S.-based or foreign, are typically in murky, unregulated territory, in some ways. Since July, Gordon “Bud” Lake and his husband, Manuel Santos, who live in Spain, have been fighting to bring their baby girl Carmen home from Thailand after the surrogate, Patidta Kusolsang, who is not the biological mother, says she changed her mind. And in 2013, gestational surrogate Crystal Kelley found herself in a legal battle when the baby she was carrying for a Connecticut couple was diagnosed with severe fetal abnormalities, including heart defects, prompted the biological parents to request that she have an abortion.
When Torres told the biological parents that she is carrying three fetuses, they seemed excited at first. But when she reached week 12 of her pregnancy, Torres said the parents asked her to abort the female fetus because of the potential medical risks to the babies, including developmental disabilities. “I emailed my doctors,” Torres said. “There were no abnormalities.”
She added: “I told [the biological mother] I couldn’t abort one of the children. I could not emotionally and physically do that at nearly 13 weeks. I believe it will be killing this baby.”
Torres offered to adopt the female baby instead of aborting her, but the couple said no.
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“I think [Torres] has a right not to do the abortion,” says Lahl. “But I don’t know what will happen because right now [the biological parents] are withholding the payments to her. Does she have a right to still get paid?”
Adds Lahl: “This is a situation in which there are no winners. The best case scenario is that the intended parents back off of this, allow [Torres] to go forward, and they take all of the children. But they [would be] raising them in a home where the parents didn’t want one of them.”
(Photo: Getty Images)
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