Debating Surrogacy

Description

Surrogacy is the commissioning of a woman to gestate and give birth to a child for another would-be parent. The practice raises several ethical questions, such as the commodification of the surrogate and of the baby, and the exploitation of the surrogate, issues which have been extensively debated. This book offers a fresh take on surrogacy, by concentrating on questions which bear on its justifiability: Is providing gestational services a permissible way of employing a woman's body? Indeed, is it a legitimate form of work? Are the children born out of surrogacy in any way wronged by surrogacy agreements?

In the first part of the book, Christine Straehle proposes an account of surrogacy work as legitimate work for women, as a way to realize certain goals in women's lives through the fruit of their labour. She defends a right to become a surrogate as necessary to protect women's autonomy. Anca Gheaus criticises surrogacy by arguing that it always wrongs children—whether or not it also harms them—by disrespecting them; therefore, gestational services are impermissible. In the second part, Straehle responds to Gheaus, questioning that children are wronged by the practice of surrogacy. Instead, she defends an intentional model of parental rights, which indicates that having a child through surrogacy should count as a ground to assign parental rights. In her response, Gheaus objects that Straehle's view fails to properly account for the interests of either surrogates or children. However, she accepts that women may gestate without the intention to have custody over the newborn, and is therefore open to some kind of post-surrogacy practice that would radically depart, in the allocation of legal parenthood, from any historical or currently proposed form of surrogacy.

About the authors:

Anca Gheaus is a political philosopher interested in justice and the normative significance of personal relationships, and is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children (2018) and published numerous journal articles and book chapters, primarily on issues concerning childrearing, gender justice, love, non-ideal theory, relational versus distributive egalitarianism, and methodological issues in political theory. Christine Straehle is Professor for Practical Philosophy at the University of Hamburg and Professor of Ethics and Applied Ethics at the University of Ottawa. Before her appointment in Hamburg, she was also the inaugural and founding director of the Centre for Philosophy, Politics and Economics in the Faculty of Philosophy at Groningen University in 2016, where she also held the Chair in Philosophy and Public Affairs. She was awarded several prizes and prestigious fellowships, such as the Kitty Newman Prize for Social Philosophy from the Royal Society of Canada in 2019, and, most recently in 2023, a senior research fellowship at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Studies.

Table of contents