Debating Surrogacy

Anca Gheaus is a political philosopher interested in justice and the normative significance of personal relationships, and is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children (2018) and published numerous journal articles and book chapters, primarily on issues concerning childrearing, gender justice, love, non-ideal theory, relational versus distributive egalitarianism, and methodological issues in political theory.

Christine Straehle is Professor for Practical Philosophy at the University of Hamburg and Professor of Ethics and Applied Ethics at the University of Ottawa. Before her appointment in Hamburg, she was also the inaugural and founding director of the Centre for Philosophy, Politics and Economics in the Faculty of Philosophy at Groningen University in 2016, where she also held the Chair in Philosophy and Public Affairs. She was awarded several prizes and prestigious fellowships, such as the Kitty Newman Prize for Social Philosophy from the Royal Society of Canada in 2019, and, most recently in 2023, a senior research fellowship at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Studies.

Introduction, Anca Gheaus and Christine Straehle
Surrogacy defined
Surrogacy and The Law
Ethical Worries Surrounding Surrogacy
The Book

Part One:

Defending Surrogacy as Reproductive Labour, Christine Straehle
Introduction

I. Surrogacy and Free Occupational Choice
I.1. Why is freedom of occupational choice important in liberal theory?
I.2. Two Justifications for the Right to Freedom of Occupational Choice

II. Surrogacy, Autonomy and Individual Agency
II.1. Reasons for Limits: Harm to Self, Harm to Society and Professionalization
II. 2. Surrogacy and the Limits of Freedom of Professional Choice

III. Surrogacy, Commercialization, Reproduction and Parenting
III.1. Surrogacy as Commercialization vs Surrogacy as Parenting
III.2. Surrogacy and gendered society
III.3. Surrogacy as Harm to Society: applying market norms to the family sphere

IV. Surrogacy As Work
IV.1. Professional requirements and justifiable limits
IV. 2. Surrogacy as licensed work

Conclusion
Notes

Against Private Surrogacy: A Child-Centered View, Anca Gheaus
I. Introduction

II. The intuitive case against surrogacy

III. Parents, their rights, and the interests of children
III.1. General assumptions
III.2. The right to become a parent
III.3. Parents' rights and children's interests
III. 4. Two caveats

IV. What is surrogacy? Three models
IV.1. The child-trafficking model
IV.2. The privately arranged adoption model
IV.3. The provision of services and gametes model

V. Full Surrogacy with intending parents' gametes
V.1. Child-centered appeals to genetic connections and the right to parent
V.3. Appeals to the gestational connection
V.4. Creatures of attachment: the general impermissibility of surrogacy agreements

VI. Harm to children? The challenge from the non-identity problem

VII. Conclusion: a respectful and humane form of surrogacy

Notes

Part Two

What's in it for the Baby? - Weighing Children's and Parents' Interests in Commercial Surrogacy Agreements - A Reply to Gheaus, Christine Straehle
I. Introduction

II. Where we agree: The interests of children

III. Where we disagree: Relationships

IV. Where we disagree: the role of the state

Conclusion

Notes

Women and Children First - A Reply to Straehle, Anca Gheaus
I. Introduction

II. Where we agree: gestating for another

III. Where we disagree: the women

IV. Where we disagree: the children

V. Is Straehle's hybrid defence of surrogacy stable?

Conclusions

Notes

Index