Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T19:30:38.120Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Surrogate Tourism and Reproductive Rights

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 March 2020

Vida Panitch
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Commercial surrogacy arrangements now cross borders; this paper aims to reevaluate the traditional moral concerns regarding the practice against the added ethical dimension of global injustice. I begin by considering the claim that global surrogacy serves to satisfy the positive reproductive rights of infertile first‐world women. I then go on to consider three powerful challenges to this claim. The first holds that commercial surrogacy involves the commodification of a good that should not be valued in market terms, the second that it involves the exploitation of the labor of disadvantaged women, and the third that it depends on the illegitimate privileging of positive rights over negative rights. I reject the first of these challenges and argue that global surrogacy arrangements are indeed exploitative on the dual basis of what I call intracontractual injustice and intercontractual coercion. The latter, I contend, depends on a preexisting negative rights violation, which cannot be permitted for the sake of satisfying another's positive reproductive entitlement. I conclude not in favor of a global ban but with suggestions on how developing nations that permit commercial surrogacy might better protect the negative reproductive rights of their female citizens, thereby making them less vulnerable to exploitation.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 28 , Issue 2: Special Issue: Crossing Borders Special Issue , Spring 2013 , pp. 274 - 289
Copyright
Copyright © 2013 by Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, Elizabeth. 1993. Value in ethics and economics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Busby, Karen, and Vun, Delaney. 2010. Revisiting The Handmaid's Tale: Feminist theory meets empirical research on surrogate mothers. Canadian Journal of Family Law 26 (1): 13–93.Google Scholar
Canadian Assisted Human Reproduction Act (CAHRA). 2004. http://www.ahrc-pac.gc.ca/v2/index-eng.php (accessed August 17, 2012).Google Scholar
Goodin, Robert E. 1986. Protecting the vulnerable. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Kabeer, Naila. 1999. Resources, agency, achievements: Reflections on the measurement of women's empowerment. Development and Change 30: 435–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marx, Karl. 1867. Capital: A critique of political economy. Vol. 1. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ (accessed August 17, 2012).Google Scholar
Nolen, Stephanie. 2009. Desperate mothers fuel India's baby factories. Globe and Mail, February 13.Google Scholar
Okin, Susan Moller. 1990. A critique of pregnancy contracts. Politics and the Life Sciences 8 (2): 205–10.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Overall, Christine. 1987. Ethics and human reproduction: A feminist analysis. Boston: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar
Pande, Amrita. 2009. Not an ‘angel’, not a ‘whore’: Surrogates as ‘dirty’ workers in India. Indian Journal of Gender Studies 16: 141–73.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pande, Amrita. 2010. Commercial surrogacy in India: Manufacturing a perfect mother‐worker. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 35 (4): 96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pateman, Carole. 1988. The sexual contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Sample, Ruth. 2003. Exploitation: What it is and why it's wrong. New York: Rowman and Littlefield.Google Scholar
Satz, Debra. 2010. Why some things should not be for sale: The moral limits of markets. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shue, Henry. 1996. Basic rights: Subsistence, affluence, and U.S. foreign policy. 2nd ed. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Steinbock, Bonnie. 1988. Surrogate motherhood as prenatal adoption. In Surrogate motherhood: Politics and privacy, ed. Gostin, Larry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Subramanian, Sarmishta, 2007. Wombs for rent. Macleans, July 2.Google Scholar
Titmuss, Richard M. 1997. The gift relationship: From human blood to social policy. New York: New Press.Google Scholar
Twine, Frances Winddance. 2011. Outsourcing the womb: Race, class, and gestational surrogacy in a global market. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Walzer, Michael. 1984. Spheres of justice: A defense of pluralism and equality. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Warnock, Mary. 1985. A question of life: The Warnock report on human fertilization and embryology. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wertheimer, Alan. 1996. Exploitation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, Stephen. 2003. The exploitation argument against commercial surrogacy. Bioethics 17 (2): 169–97.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
World Health Organization (WHO). 1991. Guiding Principles on Human Organ Transplantation http://www.who.int/ethics/topics/transplantation_guiding_principles/en/index.html (accessed August 17, 2012).Google Scholar
World Health Organization (WHO). 2010. Reproductive Health Strategy. http://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/publications/general/rhr_10_14/en/index.html (accessed August 17, 2012).Google Scholar
World Medical Association (WMA). 1994. Stockholm resolution on physicians' conduct concerning human organ transplantation http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/physicianconduct.html (accessed August 17, 2012).Google Scholar