Surrogacy allows people unable to have children naturally to have them

The argument

For those who want children the inability to have a child naturally can be frustrating and stressful, whether it be due to infertility, an LGBT couple who cannot naturally conceive, or a host of other reasons. What those situations share is that the obstacle is not any want of commitment or capacity to raise a child, but a biological fact about conception that no amount of effort on the prospective parents' part can alter. Using a surrogate allows potential parents the possibility of attaining the dream of having children in spite of it. The argument then places this within a rights framework rather than treating it as a private wish the law may accommodate or not. Within the framework of reproductive rights, the right to parent is seen as a human right, so gender identity and sexual orientation can not be discriminated against. That bears on the legal question directly: if parenting is a right rather than a privilege, a prohibition on surrogacy does not merely withhold one option among several — it removes the only available means by which particular groups of people, those who cannot conceive and same-sex couples, could exercise a right that others exercise without needing anyone's permission at all. Additionally, surrogacy carries with it the bonus of one or both parents being able to be biologically related to the child. To many potential parents, this is an important aspect of surrogacy, and it is what distinguishes it from the alternative usually offered in its place, especially when adoption can be extremely complex. Where adoption is slow, heavily gatekept and uncertain in its outcome, surrogacy offers a route that is both available and capable of producing the biological connection many parents are seeking. Keeping surrogacy legal is what keeps that route open.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There is no “right to a child”. Even though infertility is unimaginably difficult for affected couples, no one is owed the life of another person. Surrogacy is more available for the wealthy and there is a risk that potential surrogates living in poverty could be coerced into surrogacy.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] It is not an injustice that some people are unable to have children - there is no 'right' to a child.

Further reading

Baker, B. (1996) A case for permitting altruistic surrogacy. Hypatia, 11(2), 34-48 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.