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.
Introduction, Anca Gheaus and Christine Straehle Surrogacy defined Surrogacy and The Law Ethical Worries Surrounding Surrogacy The Book Part One: Defending Surrogacy as Reproductive Labour, Christine Straehle Introduction I. Surrogacy and Free Occupational Choice I.1. Why is freedom of occupational choice important in liberal theory? I.2. Two Justifications for the Right to Freedom of Occupational Choice II. Surrogacy, Autonomy and Individual Agency II.1. Reasons for Limits: Harm to Self, Harm to Society and Professionalization II. 2. Surrogacy and the Limits of Freedom of Professional Choice III. Surrogacy, Commercialization, Reproduction and Parenting III.1. Surrogacy as Commercialization vs Surrogacy as Parenting III.2. Surrogacy and gendered society III.3. Surrogacy as Harm to Society: applying market norms to the family sphere IV. Surrogacy As Work IV.1. Professional requirements and justifiable limits IV. 2. Surrogacy as licensed work Conclusion Notes Against Private Surrogacy: A Child-Centered View, Anca Gheaus I. Introduction II. The intuitive case against surrogacy III. Parents, their rights, and the interests of children III.1. General assumptions III.2. The right to become a parent III.3. Parents' rights and children's interests III. 4. Two caveats IV. What is surrogacy? Three models IV.1. The child-trafficking model IV.2. The privately arranged adoption model IV.3. The provision of services and gametes model V. Full Surrogacy with intending parents' gametes V.1. Child-centered appeals to genetic connections and the right to parent V.3. Appeals to the gestational connection V.4. Creatures of attachment: the general impermissibility of surrogacy agreements VI. Harm to children? The challenge from the non-identity problem VII. Conclusion: a respectful and humane form of surrogacy Notes Part Two What's in it for the Baby? - Weighing Children's and Parents' Interests in Commercial Surrogacy Agreements - A Reply to Gheaus, Christine Straehle I. Introduction II. Where we agree: The interests of children III. Where we disagree: Relationships IV. Where we disagree: the role of the state Conclusion Notes Women and Children First - A Reply to Straehle, Anca Gheaus I. Introduction II. Where we agree: gestating for another III. Where we disagree: the women IV. Where we disagree: the children V. Is Straehle's hybrid defence of surrogacy stable? Conclusions Notes Index
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.
Reviews for Debating Surrogacy
For an excellent sense of what can lead to principled disagreement about whether surrogacy is permissible-even between those who accept that women should be free to make reproductive choices-read no further than this debate. The exchange of views Gheaus and Straehle offer is intelligent, well-informed, clearly written and philosophically literate with each side's position founded on important normative commitments about what it means to be a parent and what is owed to the future child. * David Archard, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Queen's University Belfast * Surrogacy continues to attract controversy—understandably so. In this book, Gheaus and Straehle outline, in the form of a debate, philosophical arguments for and against. They do with clarity, rigour, imagination, and intellectual generosity towards each other. A must-read not just for applied ethicists but for anyone who is interested in this difficult issue. * C'ecile Fabre, All Souls College, Oxford *
