Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-12-2018

Publication Title

Journal of Medical Ethics

Volume

44

Issue

8

Pages

1-18

Publisher Name

BMJ Publishing Group

Abstract

The law ordinarily recognizes the woman who gives birth as the mother of a child, but in certain jurisdictions, it will recognize the commissioning couple as the legal parents of a child born to a commercial surrogate. Some commissioning parents have, however, effectively abandoned the children they commission, and in such cases commercial surrogates may find themselves facing unexpected maternal responsibility for children they had fully intended to give up. Any assumption that commercial surrogates ought to assume maternal responsibility for abandoned children runs contrary to the moral suppositions that typically govern contract surrogacy, in particular assumptions that gestational carriers are not ‘mothers’ in any morally significant sense. In general, commercial gestational surrogates are almost entirely conceptualized as ‘vessels.’ In a moral sense, it is deeply inconsistent to expect commercial surrogates to assume maternal responsibility simply because commissioning parents abandon children for one reason or another. We identify several instances of child abandonment and discuss their implications with regard to the moral conceptualization of commercial gestational surrogates. We conclude that if gestational surrogates are to remain conceptualized as mere vessels, they should not be expected to assume responsibility for children abandoned by commissioning parents, not even the limited responsibility of giving them up for adoption or surrendering them to the state.

Comments

Author Posting © The Author(s), 2018. This article has been accepted for publication in Journal of Medical Ethics, Vol. 44, Iss. 8 (August 2018), following peer review, and the Version of Record can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2017-104331.

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