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Cutting Motherhood in Two: Some Suspicions Concerning Surrogacy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Hilde Lindemann Nelson  and
James Lindemann Nelson
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Abstract

Surrogate motherhood—at least if carefully structured to protect the interests of the women involved—seems defensible along standard liberal lines which place great stress on free agreements as moral bedrocks. But feminist theories have tended to be suspicious about the importance assigned to this notion by mainstream ethics, and in this paper, we develop implications of those suspicions for surrogacy. We argue that the practice is inconsistent with duties parents owe to children and that it compromises the freedom of surrogates to perform their share of those duties. Standard liberal perspectives tend to be insensitive to such considerations; we propose a view which takes more seriously the moral importance of the causal relationship between parents and children, and which therefore illuminates rather than obscures the stake that women and children have in surrogacy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 4 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Ethics and Reproduction , Fall 1989 , pp. 85 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 by Hypatia, Inc.

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