Towards the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood

In this eloquent and blistering rejection of surrogacy, a range of international activists and experts in the field outline the fundamental human rights abuses that occur when surrogacy is legalised and reject neoliberal notions that the commodification of women’s bodies can ever be about the ‘choices’ women make. They outline a range of harms that follow—to the women who are so-called surrogates, to the children born of surrogacy arrangements, to the ‘intending parents’ who are delivered of a child through forced separation from its mother. Catherine Lynch rails against surrogacy as the creation of babies for the express purpose of removal from their mothers, outlining the tragic outcomes for adopted people. Phyllis Chesler argues that commercial surrogacy is matricidal, “slicing and dicing biological motherhood” into egg donor, ‘gestational’ mother, and adoptive mother. Laura Nuño Gómez describes the surrogacy paradigm as an ethics-free zone, in which “buying whatever is for sale is possible as long as there is an agreement and that it is legal.” And Melissa Farley debunks the myth of ‘choice’ in surrogacy. Rich women do not make the choice to become surrogates or prostitutes.