Reply to Is it ethical to outsource pregnancy?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]It’s interesting to me how upset people here are about OP‘s motivations, as if that has any impact on the morality of the act. I think that the morality comes from how you perform the act, not whether you were doing it from an “acceptable” set of motivations. You can have an unethical surrogacy that you entered into for medical reasons only. You can have an ethical surrogacy because the idea of being pregnant seems yucky to you.

The ethics in it are about how you treat the other person, not what your decision-making process to get there is. [/quote]

This, exactly.  [/quote]

I am the PP who replied 2nd, saying that as long as the surrogate is extremely well compensated for her time and effort, and there is absolutely zero coercion, and both parties fully understand the terms of the surrogacy contract, that it's not unethical. I'm actually a legal ethicist, and this is how I would evaluate the situation from a legal standpoint. Power and consent are the key factors.

Intent/motivation is an extremely difficult factor in an ethical consideration, and usually not one we can place too much emphasis on. It's very complicated and hard to parse. OP says she wants a surrogate because of vanity and she doesn't like pregnancy. That sounds shallow to people. But what if OP has a history of eating disorders, that changes the dynamic for many people. Because suddenly OP's "intent" is more understandable. But why? Intent is such a murky area and the language we use is always imprecise. We're describing feelings and thoughts that are so personal it may be hard to convey them accurately. From an ethical standpoint, it is best to identify whether a situation can be considered ethical (or unethical) no matter what the parties' motivations. This is not always possible, but that's generally my goal.

After all, what if you decide surrogacy is ethical ONLY if the person hiring the surrogate cannot get pregnant, and then after the surrogacy is over, the surrogate reveals she only did it so that she could use the money to buy heroin for herself as she neglects her own children. Does the surrogate's motivations change the ethics of whether she should have been hired in the first place? (This is a thought experiment, I know no one would want to hire a surrogate who was addicted to herion, my point is simply that it can be very hard to police everyone's motives because they are not always apparent).[/quote]

Isn't the payment automatically economic coercion? More money does NOT equal ethics. 
But I think all Capitalism is automatically exploitative, we just have to choose what we can handle within a flawed system.

Commodifying babies is a step too far. [/quote]

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