How the European union deals with surrogacy. Birth without borders as a driver of value conflicts?

Abstract

Surrogacy has appeared in the European Union (EU)’s agenda since the early 2010s following the rulings of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), the advisory opinions of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and the rejection of this practice by the European Parliament (EP). This is part of a broader evolution imposing surrogacy as a transnational issue setting major ethical challenges. Against this background, our research question is two-fold. First, is the EU likely to develop a full-fledged regulatory framework on surrogacy? Second, is surrogacy a bone of contention that fosters morality politics at the EU level? Morality politics is here defined as a political style characterized by two features: a dynamics of politicization leading to uncompromising value conflicts; the primacy of “first principles”, frequently with a religious dimension, over interests. Our findings suggest that surrogacy does not fully develop into an EU policy area. This is largely explained by the resistance of European institutions to engage in a morality politics-like debate. In other words, this is precisely the controversial dimension of surrogacy and the impossibility to deal with it in the usual EU policy style based on compromise and avoidance of value clashes that prevent any EU regulation.

Keywords:

• Surrogacy
• values
• morality politics
• gender
• human dignity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The data are the outcome of a survey carried out by Billendi in December 2020 on behalf of the Cevipol-Institute of European Studies, ULB, under the coordination of François Foret. Country cases are France, Germany, Hungary Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom. More information can be found at https://goodgod.eu/the-project/

2 Question reference: E-002995/2016.

3 See Question E-010214, 09 November 2011.

4 See Question E-010207, 24 June 2015.

5 See Question E-000886, 08 February 2017.

6 See Amendment 345, Amendments tabled in committee, PE569.706, 05 November 2015.

Additional information

Funding

This publication is an outcome of the project “ValEUR: Governing Values, Governing through Values, Governed by Values? The European Union as a Risk Polity” (http://valeur.ulb.be) conducted between 2015 and 2019 with the financial support of the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles (ARC grant) and of the Fond National de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes on contributors

François Foret

François Foret is Professor of Political Science and researcher at the Cevipol-IEE, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

Fabio Bolzonar

Fabio Bolzonar is a scientific collaborator at Cevipol/IEE, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.