Womb Rentals and Baby-Selling: Does Surrogacy Undermine the Human Dignity and Rights of the Surrogate Mother and Child?

Abstract

The question of surrogacy has dominated much of the European human rights agenda over the last two years, at the time writing, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe hopes to adopt a resolution on surrogacy in the coming months. There is, however, danger in taking action at a supranational level to address the European ‘surrogacy problem’, without first honestly answering the question: does surrogacy undermine the human dignity and rights of the surrogate mother and child? This paper presents the case that surrogacy, by its nature, necessarily undermines the human dignity of both the woman and child born through such arrangements, and thus neither commercial nor altruistic surrogacy can ever be justified.

Keywords:

• surrogacy
• surrogate mother
• child
• rights
• prostitution
• commodification
• exploitation
• identity

Notes on contributor

Clara Watson gained her Law degree from the London School of Economics in 2014 and her Masters in Bioethics and Medical Law at St Mary's University, Twickenham in 2015. Before graduating, Clara was Head of Advocacy for the UK Chapter of the World Youth Alliance, an organisation which works to promote the dignity of the human person at an international and grassroots level. She has a keen interest in theology, bioethics, and art and is dedicated to defending the rights of the unborn child.

Notes

1 Dr Petra de Sutter was appointed as rapporteur of the report ‘Human Rights and Ethical Issues Related to Surrogacy’ whilst retaining her position as Head of Reproductive Medicine at a Belgian hospital which offers surrogacy, and maintaining a partnership with an Indian surrogacy clinic, ‘Seeds of Innocence’.

2 Here, ‘alienated labour’ is understood in the Hegelian sense as: (1) the situation when the product of labour is separated from its producer; (2) where it is separated from the producer precisely because the producer surrendered it to someone else, more generally, the market (Van Nierkerk and Van Zyl 1995, p.346).