Surrogate motherhood is not work; it is exploitation

Regula Staempfli is a Swiss-born political philosopher and newspaper columnist. A left-leaning feminist, she has been involved in lobbying the European Union to ban commercial surrogacy. MercatorNet asked her to comment on a call by The Economist to legalise it.

MercatorNet: The Economist argues that banning surrogacy – as Sweden did recently – makes it more dangerous and costly, and leads to legal uncertainty. How would you respond to this?

Regula Staempfli: This is a classic argument and has been used for organ transplants as well. But human beings would never sell their organs or sell their wombs if it weren’t for financial necessity. They might offer their organs to family members, friends, or their community, but they would not sell a kidney unless they desperately needed money.

The same goes for surrogacy. Ask any woman if she wants to be pregnant for nine months and then sell the baby right after the birth. If it weren’t for the money, no woman would choose that fate (except, again, maybe for the sake of close family members). Surrogacy negates all human values, no matter what the remuneration is.

If we wanted safe global organ transplants and safe global surrogacy we would have to guarantee all human beings a basic income. My point is that legalising surrogacy just opens a new global market for human flesh, a rising market, if I may say so, for the future.

But as long as we live in a deeply unjust and inhuman global economy we cannot introduce a market for humans and their biological parts. Because that is — as the philosopher Immanuel Kant said — treating humans as a means to something else, which is deeply unethical.

Human beings — and I would argue this for animals as well — should be treated as ends in themselves. Life has value in itself and should not be turned into money. It should definitely not be commodified.

If women are paid fairly for their work in bearing children for other people, how can it possibly be regarded as exploitation?

There is no fair payment for being pregnant. Surrogate motherhood is not work; it is an obscene exploitation of human beings. Being pregnant is a status, not an act.

“My body belongs to me” was the slogan of the 1968 feminists. What happened to that and why are some feminists so much in favour of surrogacy?

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