NHS Follies: Rent a Womb--Paying for Surrogate Mothers While Rationing Health Care to the Elderly

This is unbelievable: The NHS is seriously considering paying 15,000 Pounds (about $32,000) to surrogate mothers to gestate babies for infertile couples. This, from the same NHS that rations care to the elderly. From the story:

Surrogate mothers could be given up to £15,000 of Health Service money to have children for gay couples, it emerged yesterday.

An NHS trust is considering funding the service for infertile couples - whether they are heterosexual or of the same-sex. If the proposals are approved, the Health Service will pay for IVF cycles and the expenses surrogate mothers are allowed...Surrogates would also be able to claim damages if things went wrong.

The issue isn't gay couples, the issue is restricting care to some populations while going to extreme measures to assist others. More to the point, paying women to be surrogate mothers is to include an expensive non medical procedure as a health benefit. Here is what I mean: If a woman is infertile, helping her conceive and carry to term is health care to her. Paying somebody else to do that job isn't health care at all, it is social policy. Helping gay couples is similarly not health care but paying for a social policy to circumvent fundamental biological impediments.

In addition to which: Paying surrogate mothers publicly turns these women's bodies into commodities while at the same time pandering to a sense of entitlement of a "right" to have a child. Frankly, I don't think it should be legal to pay women to carry someone else's baby. But surely, if it is going to happen, those who want the baby should be responsible for the costs.

No health care financing system can pay for everything. But when it begins to fund non medical services, it is a symptom of a system that has gone terribly awry.