Prospective parents should adopt instead

The argument

The argument against surrogacy here does not turn on how surrogacy is practised but on what it is chosen instead of. There are many orphans, and many children living in orphanages because their parents couldn't afford to keep them. These are children who already exist, who are already in need of a loving caring family, and whose need is not hypothetical. Against that background, proponents argue, prospective parents face a choice that is usually not presented to them as one. Someone who wants a child and turns to surrogacy is not acting on a need that only surrogacy can meet; they want a child to raise, and there are children waiting to be raised. What surrogacy supplies that adoption does not is a biological connection, and on this view that preference cannot carry the moral weight placed on it when the alternative is a child who goes on without a family. The desire being served is for a particular kind of child rather than for a child. The duty is then stated directly: people have a moral duty to care for the already existing children in need of a loving caring family. The claim is that a child who exists and lacks a family has a stronger call on prospective parents than a child who does not yet exist and would be brought into being to satisfy them. Making new babies while existing ones remain unclaimed inverts that order of obligation, and does so in an already overcrowded world, adding to a population that is straining while children within it go uncared for. Because the obligation runs first to the children who are already here, and because surrogacy is the means of declining it, prospective parents should adopt instead and surrogacy should be illegal.

Premises

Counter-arguments

If there is a moral responsibility to adopt existing children before using surrogacy, it would therefore also be immoral to have children naturally while there are already children in the world living without homes. Additionally, there are many barriers to adoption that make it difficult and it can be psychologically hard on both the birth and adoptive parents, as well as the child itself. To adopt is a huge undertaking.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] There is no reason having children through surrogacy while there are children without homes is any worse than having children naturally.