Commercial Surrogacy as Illegitimate Work

Luara Ferracioli (University of Sydney)

Is surrogacy a form of legitimate work? Or does the nature of pregnancy and parenthood render surrogacy illegitimate? In this presentation I argue that the best strategy in defence of commercial surrogacy—which I call the “surrogacy-as-legitimate-work” strategy—relies on two implicit assumptions and that once we make them explicit, we are forced to see that commercial surrogacy inevitably leads to a conflict of core moral rights. As I hope to show, if commercial surrogacy is a type of work, it is work that cannot simultaneously protect the right of the surrogate mother to opt out and the right of the commissioning couple to exercise ultimate authority over the foetus.