ABSTRACT
One of the foundations of a responsible ethic concerning sexuality is to see sexual acts as personal acts involving the whole person. Just as lust is wrong because it disregards the whole person and her human dignity, so commercial surrogacy is immoral because it isolates and uses a person’s reproductive capacity apart from her personal life. The surrogate’s womb is thus commoditized, reduced to the status of the animated tool of reproductive technologies.
Though surrogacy is often perceived as a fair deal between rich couples who want children and poor women who are in need of financial assistance, such relationship could also lead to a form of exploitation of the poor; and exploitation is ethically wrong. The relationship between rich people looking for potential surrogate and the potential surrogate is an exploitative one between employer-employee. The fact of hiring a human being to give birth is also seen as being morally challenging. In this sense, a member of the New York State Assembly once said that, “we are talking about the rich and poor here. There is no escaping it....This is where the rich hire the poor. I don’t mind the rich hiring the poor to mow the lawn. I used to be one of the hirees of that situation. I don’t mind the rich hiring the poor to clean their house, but I think it is immoral for the rich to hire the poor to have their children.”19
It should be noted that a rich person profiting from the poverty of any member of the society remains a moral or ethical problem;an industrialization of women with an increasing demand of children born out of surrogacy. Another danger is that it assists to form what can be called industrialization of women’s womb, with surrogacy becoming a gender-specific form of industrial labour”. Andrew Kimbrell in this sense notes that with “the infiltration of consumerist values into women’s reproductive processes, women are treated as anonymous baby factories.”20 For Twine, “Gestational surrogacy is a form of industrial labor that has not been previously considered by economists or economic sociologists in their discussions of outsourcing yet it represents a growing segment of the reproductive tourism or medical tourism market. Women, typically the mothers of young children and from poor or lower middle class backgrounds, are selling their reproductive labour on an increasingly competitive global market.”21 According to Twine also, “such industry has become “transnational, thereby ignitng a reproductive tourism industry with people from wealthier countries rushing to look for cheaper surrogate mothers in poorer countries and this poses ethical questions as well.”22
Though IVF and surrogacy can be difficult for everybody to perform, they however reveal another aspect related to them that is quite easy to perform and which vulgarization poses an ethical treat: that of artificial insemination. Such vulgarization, because of its profit driven ideology, can go out of control and surrogacy and the danger of baby selling Surrogacy and mainly commercial surrogacy is considered by its opponents as a disguised form of child trade or child selling. Surrogacy becomes therefore a multibillion business like any other only that in this case, the object of trade is human babies.
