Hey readers,
It's Sigal. Here at Future Perfect, I often write about the ethical questions I think readers are wrestling with. But as we embark on a new year, I thought I'd try out something new: giving you the chance to ask your questions directly.
Unlike in a traditional advice column, I won't just give you my answer. Instead, I'll show you how to find your own by teasing out the conflicting values at stake in the question.
To kick us off, here's a question I got from a longtime reader:
How should I feel about surrogate pregnancy? There are some aspects of it that make me uncomfortable: the commodification of bodies, the amount of money it costs (and the power structure or potential exploitation that comes with money), the time and resources it takes, the "selfishness" of wanting a biological child, the fact there are children in need of adoption.
On the other hand, I see its virtues, particularly for queer families. Why shouldn't a gay couple have the choice to have children who are biologically related to them? It seems unfair to shame them for a desire that's totally natural and definitionally human.
Reader, your timing is impeccable. Right after you submitted this question, Pope Francis made headlines by calling paid surrogacy "despicable" and saying it should be banned worldwide. The practice whereby someone carries and delivers a baby (sometimes genetically related, but most often not) who is then raised by another individual or couple is already prohibited in some countries and a few US states. Yet growing demand from infertile straight couples, queer people, and others means the global surrogacy industry is booming.
The pope cited some of the same concerns you did: What if this practice commodifies kids, or exploits poorer people who see surrogacy as their only way to make a living? (There are real-world stories of someone agreeing to be a surrogate because they need to, say, pay off family debt.) But he did not express the same sensitivity you did to the other side of the equation — the value of enabling people to have children when they aren't able to conceive naturally.
It's clear that you hold multiple values simultaneously. You value people's right to be free from exploitation and commodification. You also value people's freedom to have kids, especially ones who are genetically related to them, recognizing that as an urge that is so core to so many of us.
Many opponents of surrogacy would try to convince you that your second value is silly and should be discarded. Here's a representative comment I found on Reddit, that fount of philosophical knowledge (but actually!): "No one's entitled to a baby. If you can't have biological children of yours, deal with it. You have no right to exploit poor women's bodies for your own sake."
The Redditor is right that nobody has an absolute right to have a baby — otherwise, things like kidnapping would be legal! But people may still have a qualified right — the kind of right that we generally honor but that can be restricted to protect the interests of others.
Considering childbearing in these terms seems very reasonable. Think about it: What do we even mean when we talk about "rights"? Rights aren't some objective thing, handed down from the heavens. They're a legal fiction we've concocted and are continually reinventing to express that we see a strong basis for giving people certain protections and liberties.
And it's hard to think of a stronger basis for rights than our biology, which predisposes us toward childbearing so powerfully that for some people it feels like a need and not just a want. (Remember the biblical story of Jacob and Rachel? Struggling with infertility, Rachel cries, "Give me children, or I shall die!" They end up using her maid as a surrogate. I wonder what the pope makes of that.)
So I don't think either of your values is silly. Both are legitimate, which means you've got a genuine dilemma on your hands. (Though some people, like celebrities, choose to hire a surrogate for cosmetic or other elective reasons, I'm focusing on situations where pregnancy is impossible or medically risky.)
Value pluralism
I look at dilemmas like this through the lens of value pluralism, the idea — developed by philosophers like Isaiah Berlin and Bernard Williams — that we all have multiple values that are equally valid but that sometimes conflict with each other. There's no objective single standard by which to compare them all, so in cases of conflict between them, there may be no one right answer about which to prioritize. The best we can do might be to try to find a balance between them.
In fact, people have been trying to do that for thousands of years — including when it comes to surrogacy, as the biblical example shows. They've come up with different ways to navigate trade-offs between competing values, depending on the social mores and technologies of the time. We can learn from the concerns they've surfaced along the way.
It helps that surrogacy is not one monolithic thing. For starters, there's a big distinction between commercial surrogacy (where you pay someone to carry a baby) and altruistic surrogacy (the unpaid version, where the surrogate carries the baby as a literal labor of love). It's not easy to find an altruistic surrogate — after all, pregnancy is dangerous business — but if you're lucky enough to know someone willing to freely volunteer for the role, opting for that is a good way to avoid most of the concerns about commodification or exploitation.
Within commercial surrogacy, a second distinction has to do with where the surrogate lives. There might be a real moral difference between hiring a surrogate in a developing country and hiring one in, say, the US.
In countries like Georgia, for example, surrogacy agencies have recruited at domestic violence shelters — some people see surrogacy as the only way to win financial freedom from an abusive spouse. But American surrogates are typically not low-income; they're usually middle-class white women with husbands and kids of their own, and they have other economic opportunities available to them. The better surrogacy agencies screen out low-income candidates, who are at risk of coercion. That empirical context means there's less (though not zero) potential for exploitation in the US, compared with international surrogacy.
Unenforceable contracts
Even within wealthy countries, there's a third distinction that matters ethically, and it has to do with the contract between intended parents and their surrogate. Contracts set the expectation that a surrogate will give up their parental rights and hand the baby over to the intended parents as soon as it's born — but is that legally enforceable if they change their mind? If it's enforceable, what does that mean for the surrogate's agency?
"At the very least, surrogate contracts should not be enforceable," argues philosopher Elizabeth Anderson, meaning that a written agreement could be used to detail the intentions of the parties but couldn't be used to take somebody to court to force compliance. She reasons that parental rights are not freely alienable property rights that parents can allocate at will — they're trusts, to be managed in the child's best interests. So no contract should force a surrogate to relinquish a child if the come to believe that the child would be better off in their custody.
While some defenders of surrogacy say respecting personal autonomy requires respecting someone's choice to sign away a baby, Anderson counters that an enforceable contract actually undercuts the surrogate's autonomy, because it means they aren't "free to develop an autonomous perspective" on their relationship with the child over time.
This gets to the issue of consent: Yes, a surrogate can sign a contract thinking they'll stay emotionally unattached to the baby, but can they really know how they'll feel about the child once it's born? If not, some argue that truly informed consent is not possible. One way to deal with that is to be prepared to take the consequences seriously if the surrogate has misgivings after the baby is born, rather than seeking to legally enforce the agreement to give up the child.
Ultimately, there's no perfect, value-neutral way for anybody to bring children into this world. Your goal is not to achieve some fantasy of ethical perfection. It's to live in line with your values as best you can.
For example, if commercial surrogacy is the only way for you to have a kid but you find the concerns Anderson raises compelling, you might try to arrange a domestic surrogacy agreement that would not be enforced. Nobody can give you an objectively "right" answer about how much weight to put on each value and the concerns related to it. That's a choice — one that only you can make.
—Sigal Samuel, senior reporter
Have a philosophical or ethical question you want answered? Email me at sigal.samuel@vox.com. I can't reply to every email, but I will read them and might just tackle yours next! I promise to keep your question anonymous if that's your preference. Keep an eye out for upcoming editions of the Future Perfect newsletter to see if your question has been answered.
