Today I want to talk about a phenomenon I’ve often observed but don’t fully understand. It’s the belief of some pregnant women that they are mere vessels, carrying this baby on behalf of someone else.

I can certainly relate to the feeling that perhaps your parenthood wasn’t meant to be, but I don’t follow to the next step of diminishing your ties to the child you are carrying. Women who take this position appear very at peace and unconflicted about the relinquishment choice. They seem to view themselves as surrogates, intended to give life but not be an ongoing part of that life. You hear them saying things like, “She was meant to be the Johnsons’ child; I just brought that reality to life” or “He was always their baby; I just helped it happen.”

(On the adoptive parent side, adoptive mom Rosie O’Donnell once infamously expressed this notion to her kids this way: “God put you in the wrong tummy.”)

Speaking of God, this way of thinking is often connected to religious belief, but I’m not entirely sure why. I’m a believer myself, and I never for one second felt that my child was meant for someone else.

Maybe that’s because the “vessel” mindset reminds me too much of Margaret Atwood’s A Handmaid’s Tale, which, if you’ve never read it, is all about the idea of women bearing children on behalf of others. (The novel also has a ritual conception scene that will completely gross you out.) Something in me really dislikes the idea that I underwent a time of great pain and struggle in order to make another woman’s dream come true. And call me self-important, but I will never discount my own everlasting value to my child.

In the end, I suppose it’s a matter of whatever mental strategy gets a woman through a difficult time. We all deal with things in different ways, so I’m not going to object to someone’s personal views on what their relinquishment meant to them, even when they are views I don’t understand. But what I do object to – heartily – is agencies or facilitators that consciously encourage this kind of detachment.

You cannot surrender what is not yours. And maybe that’s the point – agencies know it’s easier to sign the papers if you don’t view the baby as your own in the first place. Agencies that lack a strong sense of ethics build on that in order to guarantee that the papers get signed.

Maybe women who minimize their connection to their child will continue to feel that they were nothing more than a surrogate, throughout their entire lives. But I worry about those who do come to realize their own connection to their child – after it’s too late. And I will always strenuously object to any agencies or facilitators that encourage women to think of this baby as “for Mr. and Mrs. X.” Whether a woman raises her child or not, that child is always hers, though perhaps someone else’s as well.