Should surrogacy be legal?

Surrogacy is about a woman's bodily autonomy

Question: Should surrogacy be legal?
Position1 of 3›: Yes, surrogacy should be legal.
Argument‹4 of 4: Surrogacy is about a woman's bodily autonomy

Women can utilise their bodies however they choose, including surrogacy.

The argument

The argument places surrogacy within the general principle of bodily autonomy. A woman should have full control of her own body, and that control is not a set of permissions granted for particular purposes but the default position from which any restriction has to be justified. Carrying a pregnancy for someone else is a use of her body, and if the principle means anything, the decision about whether to do so is hers. The reasons a woman might choose it are varied and none of them disqualifying. Some become surrogates because of financial gain, which is an ordinary reason to undertake something demanding and not one the law treats as suspect elsewhere. Others do it for the pleasure that comes from an altruistic act — enabling a family that could not otherwise exist. The mix of motives is the same mix that attends most significant decisions, and proponents of this position see no basis for inspecting it more closely here than anywhere else. What prohibition amounts to, on this view, is the state overriding that judgment. It does not merely regulate the arrangement; it removes the option entirely, declaring that no woman may make this choice about her own body whatever her circumstances or her reasons. The justification usually offered is protective, but the protection is directed at the woman herself, which means it rests on the assumption that she cannot be trusted to weigh the decision and its consequences. That is a paternalistic attitude, and it is one that would not be accepted in other contexts where adults accept risk and inconvenience for payment or for the benefit of others. Proponents conclude that the choice belongs to the woman making it. Because surrogacy is a question of a woman's bodily autonomy, the state should not act to remove that choice, and surrogacy should be legal.

Context

The bodies of women have long been political battlegrounds subject to laws on what women can and cannot do with their bodies.

Premises

[P1]Women should have full control over their own bodies, which includes the choice to become a surrogate. [P2] Women may choose surrogacy for financial gain or the satisfaction of an altruistic act. [P3] For the state to remove that choice rests on a paternalistic assumption that women cannot decide for themselves. [C] Therefore, because surrogacy is about a woman's bodily autonomy, surrogacy should be legal.

Counter-arguments

Women should not be able to “sell their bodies” and to do so is immovably exploitative and wrong. An act that serves to exploit women is not a truly free choice - it is an act of exploitation that should not be allowed.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Women who enter into surrogacy do not do so entirely out of free will. A woman cannot freely 'choose' something which is inherently exploitative.

Baker, B. (1996) A case for permitting altruistic surrogacy. Hypatia, 11(2), 34-48 Ekman Kajsa Ekis (2013) Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Sef, Spinifex: Melbourne. HumanRights Campaign. https://www.hrc.org/resources/overview-of-the-surrogacy-process Krawiec and Busby, K. & Vun, D. (2009) Revisiting The Handmaid's Tale: Feminist Theory Meets Empirical Research on Surrogate Mothers, 26 CAN. J. FAM. L. 13(44). Teman, E. (2010) Birthing a Mother: The surrogate body and the pregnant self. Los Angeles: University of California Press. van den Akker, O. (2017) Surrogate Motherhood Families.London:Palgrave MacMillan. Yehezkel Margalit, In Defense of Surrogacy Agreements: A Modern Contract Law Perceptive, 20 Wm. & Mary J. Women & L. 423 (2014), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmjowl/vol20/iss2/6