Posts Tagged ‘surrogacy’
My dad died before I was conceived.
Normally when you’re dead, your reproductive potential drops to zero. Not so when your mom is Missy Evans and she’s determined to carry out the last wish you never actually made.
On April 6, a judge ruled Evans could harvest sperm from her dead son, Nikolas, who died the day before after falling and hitting his head during an altercation outside an Austin, Texas, bar March 27. Although the 21-year-old told his mother he wanted three kids and had even chosen names for them, he hadn’t been trying to father any children when he died.
Evans is taking it upon herself to help her son posthumously father a child. The requisite tissue was harvested by a urologist, and plans are being made to store the viable sperm.
The murmurs that Evans was looking for a replacement child began almost as soon as the judge issued the ruling. She nearly came out and said it herself. “I want him to live on. I want to keep a piece of him,” Evans told the Austin American-Statesman.
Losing a child – even an adult one – is painful, but is another one really the way to work through the grief? Not if it truly is one. The pathological condition triggered by a replacement child is harmful to the parents and much more so to the child.
If it’s worse for children when the deceased sibling was older, imagine how difficult it will be for any child produced from Nikolas’ sperm to forge an individual identity when it has 21 years of memories, hopes, expectations and dreams to overcome.
Even if it isn’t a replacement child, it won’t have true parents. Its father is dead, and its mother would only be a donor and/or surrogate. Obviously, children have been raised by nonparent guardians before, but how would this child be affected by learning his or her parents can’t be met? Most orphans knew their parents, if only briefly as infants.
In this age of increasing genetic awareness, that’s not even fair. Unless they manifested early, any diseases Nikolas had or carried wouldn’t be easily discovered. And forget about tracking down an anonymous egg donor.
If nothing else, the situation begs the question: who’s this really for? I don’t doubt Nikolas was the man Evans described: an old soul who wanted three kids and had picked their names. He didn’t seem to be in a rush to do it, though.
These stories haven’t mentioned a girlfriend or wife who was going to bear his children. It’s mentioned Evans has the family’s support, but none of them contribute to the reports. Evans seems to be the driving force behind creating a child for her dead son, and it doesn’t seem to be in anyone’s best interest for her to do so.
