Mother surrogate for son’s baby
Britain’s first case of kind, in which man’s son is also legally his brother, raises profound ethical questions
A MOTHER has helped her 24-year-old son become a father by carrying his child as a surrogate. In the procedure, the first of its kind, Anne-Marie Casson, 46, became pregnant using a donor egg fertilised by her son Kyle’s sperm.
Kyle, gay and single, had wanted to be a father for some considerable time.
After surrogacy clinics across Britain turned him away, and a woman relative who had volunteered to be the carrier developed medical difficulties, Casson and her husband, Alan, decided she should step in and be the surrogate mother.
A family court judge ruled the situation was entirely lawful and Kyle has been allowed to adopt the baby – his son but also, legally, his brother.
Lawyers point out that family members are increasingly acting as surrogates in the UK, but the Cassons’ case is unique: Kyle is the first single man in the country to have a child through surrogacy and the first to use his mother as the carrier.
“I cried and cried,” Kyle said, describing his happiness at his son Miles’s birth. “I could not believe it.”
Kyle’s longing to be a father highlights issues affecting gay men and women – but also the one in six heterosexual couples in Britain who have problems conceiving.
They will know first-hand the plight of a young person desperate to be a parent.
Medical advances have delivered many of these would-be parents from their misery.
Andrew Solomon, award-winning author of Far From the Tree, a book about conventional and unconventional families, tells how, as a young gay man, he was “riven by my agony at having to choose between my integrity and the urgent wish for children”.
He and his partner, John Habich, had their son with donor eggs via a surrogate mother, Laura – a friend of Habich’s and one half of a lesbian couple whose own two-child family Habich enabled by donating sperm to them.
Solomon, meanwhile, had donated sperm to father a daughter, via in-vitro fertilisation, with a friend, Blaine, who is bringing the child up with her (male) partner in Texas.
Solomon sees surrogacy as proof of progress: Britain has developed into a more just and caring society that helps anyone who longs to be a parent become one.
And yet, the Cassons’ case has ignited huge controversy. The procedure may have taken place in the sterile surroundings of an IVF lab, but the participants’ consanguinity raises the spectre of one of the few remaining taboos – incest.
Twitter reaction to the story ranged from “nothing wrong with this” to “gross”, “disgusting” and “selfish”.
Social policy analyst Jill Kirby finds it “very disturbing that any mother would consider it healthy or appropriate to give birth to her son’s child”.
