The product is a baby; the price is an incubator willing to dedicate nine months of their life. It appears to be a simple enough trade, but the intricacies of surrogacy have been a controversial subject for years — even more so with its growing popularity in Hollywood families.
In January, singer Meghan Trainor announced the birth of her third child via surrogacy, sparking a heated debate over whether surrogacy is an ethical way to create life.
In ordinary discussions surrounding female bodily autonomy, the question of willingness is usually the decider of right versus wrong. Did she make the choice or did someone else? If the answer is the prior, then we can accept that all was done in goodwill.
However, when it comes to surrogacy, willingness is deconstructed into a million other little questions. Is it a commercial or altruistic surrogacy? What are the financial and physical statuses of the mother? What about the carrier?
The underlying goal of these questions attempts to uncover how much stability — be it social or financial — is required in order to activate a surrogate’s autonomy. At what point does paying a woman for her womb cross the moral line, and when does an act become a choice?
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Surrogacy can be broken down into a number of categories. Traditional surrogacy uses the carrier’s egg, whereas gestational surrogacy involves the creation of an embryo with the intended mother’s eggs. On the compensatory side, commercial surrogacy requires monetary reimbursement and altruistic does not.
Most of the ethical conversation surrounding surrogacy can be traced back to commercial surrogacy. There are arguments that commercial surrogacy takes advantage of women who are financially disadvantaged. The costs of surrogate motherhood are high and unattainable for many Americans, leaving its primary customer base to be exclusively wealthy.
When money is involved, the debate of commercial surrogacy can quickly evolve into a classism conversation.
Commercial surrogacy can also be seen as a system that treats female bodies as a commodity. There have even been cases where surrogacy was used as a tool for human trafficking. Groups of Thai women were lured to Georgia under the guise of commercial surrogacy and instead underwent nonconsensual egg theft.
Although it is evident that trafficking is not representative of all surrogacy, it begs people to consider the lack of protections in place for women who might be considering surrogacy to make ends meet.
The psychological effects of surrogacy also need to be considered when dictating ethical practice. One 2021 Canadian study suggests that surrogacy can result in higher rates of new mental illness diagnoses compared to mothers carrying their own children, both during pregnancy and after.
However, it would be easy for someone to conflate concern for surrogates’ mental health and wellbeing with the notion that non-biological families are somehow unnatural or inferior to fit a harmful agenda.
The controversy of commercial surrogacy is not the formation of a family with the help of another individual, but rather whether or not the surrogate is treated with humanity.
If potential parents decide they no longer want a child, or find a new carrier, then their surrogate might experience not only the mental and physical repercussions of pregnancy, but the financial ones as well.
Within altruistic surrogacy, there is less room for misconduct. The only compensation surrogates receive is for pregnancy-related expenses, meaning they leave the transaction in the same economic state as when they entered. With nothing to gain from pregnancy besides the satisfaction of helping someone create a family, surrogates are less likely to carry a child based on outside financial pressure.
A power dynamic between surrogate and parent is established as soon as one person has more to lose. Whether this dynamic is then abused is where the ethical dilemma lives, and it is up to us to decide whether or not the possibility of immorality is enough to condemn the practice itself.
Hailey is a senior in Business.
