Surrogacy is immoral

The argument

The objection here is to what surrogacy makes a child into. On this account the artificial production of a child is an extreme form of consumerism: it creates a market in which children are commissioned, paid for and delivered, structured like any other transaction in a service the buyer has specified. A child who arrives that way arrives as a product, and products are things whose value lies in meeting the requirements of whoever ordered them. The selection process is what proponents of this position take to demonstrate the point most clearly. A successful embryo is chosen from among a group of embryos on account of attractive characteristics it possesses — which is to say that some are picked and others are not, according to criteria set by the commissioning adults. That is the logic of a purchase rather than of parenthood. A parent receives the child they are given; a customer selects whichever specimen best matches their preferences, and in doing so treats the remainder as stock. What the arrangement disregards is the significance of gestation itself. Proponents hold that the months a child spends in the womb are not merely a period of incubation that any available body could supply, but the beginning of a bond between mother and child that matters to both. Surrogacy is designed around the assumption that this relationship can be contracted out and then severed on delivery, treating as a purchasable service something the argument regards as constitutive of the child's earliest relationship. A practice that commodifies human life and dissolves that bond by design is, on this view, immoral regardless of the intentions of those involved — and for that reason surrogacy should be illegal.

Context

The debate framing surrogacy as a 'market' implies that the product being bought and sold is children.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The market for surrogacy does not involve the buying and selling of children, but the sale of gestational labour. Surrogacy is not carried out because of a desire to create a genetically 'perfect' child, but because of a desire for a couple to have a child of their own that is related to at least one parent. Technical fertility innovations have all moved from being controversial to increasingly accepted over time, from sperm donation, to in-vitro-fertilisation (IVF), egg donation and gestational surrogacy. Surrogacy may also use donor sperm in which case the intended parents have no biological relationship to the baby or babies. There may be multiple surrogates, fathers, mothers, donors, and babies. It can get very complicated. Surrogacy exposes parenthood, not as a biological fact, but as a legally and socially constructed status with responsibilities and obligations as well as benefits

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Surrogacy does not commodify the life of a child, but rather the gestational labour of the surrogate who carries the genetic child of the intended parents that they are unable to do themselves.