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

Women should have full control of their bodies, and this includes being able to choose surrogacy. Women may become surrogates because of financial gain or due to the pleasure that comes from an altruistic act. The state should not act to remove this choice which comes from a paternalistic attitude that assumes women can’t make a decision themselves.

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