Encyclopedia of Opinion
Question
Should surrogacy be legal?
Position‹2 of 3›
No. Surrogacy should be illegal.
Argument‹4 of 5›

Surrogacy has long-term negative impacts

Surrogacy has long-term negative impacts upon both surrogate and child.

The argument

The argument is about duration rather than about the arrangement itself. Surrogacy is typically defended as a transaction that concludes: terms are agreed, a child is born, the parties separate and resume their lives. The objection is that the people involved cannot always just move past it, and that the effects which persist fall on the two participants who had least say in the terms. The first is the child. A person born through surrogacy has origins that differ from the ordinary account, and may struggle to deal with them. The difficulty is not that the arrangement was concealed or handled badly; it is that questions about who carried them, why that person did so, and what the relationship between the parties amounted to do not have settled answers within the framework surrogacy provides. Those questions typically arise years after the adults involved have concluded their business, and they arise for someone who was not party to the agreement that produced them. The second is the surrogate. Proponents of this position stress that consent given in advance may not be informed in the relevant sense: surrogates might not appreciate how attached they are to the baby until it is born. Attachment formed over a pregnancy is not something a person can accurately predict beforehand, and therefore not something they can meaningfully contract away. A woman may consequently find herself bound by an undertaking she made without access to the experience that would have told her what she was undertaking, and be affected long term as a result. What follows is a claim about legality rather than about individual choices. If the harms are lasting, fall on parties who could not have anticipated them, and are produced by the structure of the arrangement rather than by its mishandling, then better regulation cannot reach them and surrogacy should be illegal.

Premises

[P1]Surrogacy creates lasting psychological burdens for children, who may struggle to come to terms with their unusual origins. [P2] Surrogate mothers often underestimate their attachment to the baby until birth, leaving them with long-term emotional harm. [C] Therefore, because surrogacy inflicts enduring negative impacts on those involved, it should be illegal.

Counter-arguments

The majority of adolescents who were born from surrogacy have been described as feeling indifferent about the circumstances of their conception. Studies have also shown that surrogacy has no psychological effects on surrogate mothers from six months onwards.

Rejecting the premises

[P1]There is no evidence of long-term effects on either surrogate or child.

Further reading

Zadeh, S., Ilioi, E., Jadva, V. & Golombok, S. (2018)The perspectives of adolescents conceived using surrogacy, egg or sperm donation, Human Reproduction, 33(6), 1099–1106 https://doi.org/10.1093/humrep/dey088 Jadva, V., Imrie, S. & Golombok, S. (2015) Surrogate mothers 10 years on: A longitudinal study of psychological well-being and relationships with the parents and child. Human Reproduction, 30(2):373-9. doi: 10.1093/humrep/deu339 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.