Spare us the tabloid dramatics

THERE can be no doubting that human trafficking is unacceptable, but is surrogacy, the act of carrying a child that is not one’s own to give or sell to somebody unable to conceive, a form of human trafficking?

That is the question I kept asking myself while watching TV One’s current affairs show Sunday as it focused on Lower Hutt woman Carla Chambers and her arrest and conviction in San Diego for her involvement in a designer baby-selling ring.

While this story bristled with angles, ethics and the previous form of Chambers, who was found guilty of fraud in Wellington 12 years ago as a result of running a surrogate mother scheme, the presentation and editing of the story was so overly dramatic it bordered on the absurd.

In a medley of spliced-up emotive utterances from the reporter, surrogates, an FBI special agent, and a specialist lawyer in surrogacy whose claim to fame is that he acted for Elton John’s surrogacy, the following shock-horror quotes were run together in a fashion that made Chambers sound like the nextworst thing since Charlie Manson.

For example: ‘‘This unlikely grandmother and 52 year-old nurse’’ ran ‘‘a black market in babies’’, according to reporter Phil Vine.

‘‘She’s a horrible woman,’’ said the voice and head shot of a surrogate.

‘‘She’s an evil person,’’ voice and head shot of surrogate added. ‘‘She had control of my mind,’’ another surrogate said.

A surrogacy lawyer said it was ‘‘the most evil thing you can imagine’’. Another voice and head shot of a surrogate said: ‘‘To think I was part of that makes me sick’’. ‘‘She’s very ugly,’’ another offered, and Vine said the case ‘‘even shocked seasoned FBI agents’’.

‘‘For Pete’s sake, get on with it,’’ an exasperated television reviewer said.

Indeed, on the charge of ‘‘ugly’’, still photographs and footage of Chambers revealed her to be a deeply unattractive woman with a forehead that appeared to be Neanderthal in slope.

She was also caught on film dressed in a passion-killer nightie ripping the windscreen wipers off a van as she shot angry glances at a camera.

Vine flew to San Diego to report on Chambers’ court case, delivering a piece-to-camera as he mingled with American journalists and camera crews while boasting to the Kiwi audience that Sunday was the only New Zealand programme to have made ‘‘the connection’’.

Then the former long-time Fair

The presentation and editing of the story was so overly dramatic it bordered on the absurd.

Go reporter strutted his doorknocking and confrontingunsavoury-types-with-amicrophone stuff, firing questions and giving them the old ‘‘don’t walk away Renee’’ treatment, as she and her lawyer walked to the door of the court house.

Also accompanying Vine was Kim, a surrogate who’d been duped by Chambers into flying to a specially set-up Ukrainian laboratory where she became the host surrogate to a designer baby (Caucasian, blonde haired and blue eyed), which she had been led to believe was going to a childless couple she had been shown in a bogus catalogue.

FBI investigations found that there were no couples, that the babies were ‘‘designed’’ on spec to be sold to the highest bidder, some fetching up to $180,000.

Kim, who had five children of her own, was carrying the designer baby when the FBI informed her of the baby ring. Quite possibly as a result of this revelation, she miscarried.

When she turned up at the court house to confront Chambers, she carried a gruesome photograph of her dead foetus, which she implored Chambers to look at. (On learning of Kim’s miscarriage Chambers had coldly asked for ‘‘proof of her foetal demise’’.)

Another surrogate, called Heather, told of how surrogates spoke to each other in a close-knit online community, and were like ‘‘a sisterhood’’.

While both Kim and Heather came across as decent people, the reporter never asked how much, or if any, monetary payment they received from Chambers for their services.

They were presented in the Sunday piece as innocent victims of an evil mastermind who recruited them online, and in the words of the FBI agent, fed them lies upon lies.

By the end of the segment the story managed to rise above its shock-horror tone to ask worrying questions about whether the surrogate born babies who might be genetic brothers and sisters would ever have access to their genetic histories, and if there was any record of who the babies had been sold to.

When the practice of surrogacy first burst onto the scene, those against voiced their deep apprehension and concern about the can of worms it could open.

In the Sunday piece we saw how terribly out of control the complex reality of it has become. It was both a fascinating and sad topic, but it could have been told better without the tabloid editing and the dramatics.