{"id":6280,"date":"2014-09-18T10:07:19","date_gmt":"2014-09-18T14:07:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/?p=6280"},"modified":"2014-09-18T10:07:19","modified_gmt":"2014-09-18T14:07:19","slug":"payment-for-surrogate-mothers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/philip.greenspun.com\/blog\/2014\/09\/18\/payment-for-surrogate-mothers\/","title":{"rendered":"Payment for surrogate mothers"},"content":{"rendered":"

The New York Times has been running a series of stories about surrogate mothers (latest<\/a>). In a July 6, 2014 article<\/a> the Times says that the expected compensation for the woman who carries the baby for 9 months is about $25,000 (range from $20-30,000). Meanwhile the agency that carries a filing cabinet and a Web site around gets $20,000 and the lawyers who carry a PDF or two get $10,000. So the surrogate mom\u00a0who does all the work\u00a0gets paid less than the bureaucracy of surrogacy.<\/p>\n

Per month of pregnancy the surrogate mother is receiving about $2800. Yet, according to attorneys interviewed recently for a book project the typical\u00a0price received from\u00a0a potential child support defendant in Massachusetts for an abortion is $250,000 after two or three months of pregnancy (the profitability of a pregnancy and abortion\u00a0varies from state to state depending on each state’s child support guidelines and the extent to which obtaining custody of a living child will be profitable). So the woman\u00a0who seeks to get paid for having an abortion gets paid at least $83,333 per month of pregnancy, 30X as much as the woman who gets paid for having a baby. Add in the fact that surrogacy fees are income and therefore taxable while abortion fees are potential tax-free if considered to be payment for physical damage and\/or a pre-payment of tax-free child support (see this Forbes article<\/a>), the abortion retailer may actually be netting 50X per month of pregnancy compared to the incubation retailer.<\/p>\n

I can’t figure out if these discrepancies are a sign of an immature or a mature market…<\/p>\n

Related:<\/p>\n