Towards the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood

Surrogacy is not liberty. It is a crime. Women will not settle for junk liberty.We want real freedom – the substance, not just the appearance. We want real nourishment for our spirits. We want human dignity. We want it for all of us. We want it for women in Thailand and Bangladesh and Mexico as well as for the women who have not yet been born.-Gena CoreaIn this eloquent and blistering rejection of surrogacy, a range of international activists and experts in the field outline the fundamental human rights abuses that occur when surrogacy is legalised and reject neoliberal notions that the commodification of women's bodies can ever be about the ‘choices' women make.They outline a range of harms that follow – to the women who are so-called surrogates, to the children born of surrogacy arrangements, to the ‘intending parents' who a delivered of a child through forced separation from its mother.Catherine Lynch rails against surrogacy as the creation of babies for the express purpose of removal from their mothers, outlining the tragic outcomes for adopted people. Phyllis Chesler argues that commercial surrogacy is matricidal, 'slicing and dicing biological motherhood' into egg donor, ‘gestational' mother and adoptive mother. Laura Nuño Gómez describes the surrogacy paradigm as an ethics-free zone, in which 'buying whatever is for sale is possible as long as there is an agreement and that it is legal.' And Melissa Farley debunks the myth of ‘choice' in surrogacy, arguing that in a male-dominated and racist system, the exploitative sale of women in surrogacy, like in prostitution, is inherently harmful. Rich women do not make the choice to become surrogates or prostitutes.Other contributors to this collection include Renate Klein, Gary Powell, Marie-Josephe Devillers, Rita Banerji, Laura Isabel Gomez Garcia, Eva Maria Bachinger, Alexandra Clement-Saby and Taina Bien Aime.Harm cannot be regulated, because this would mean spreading and universalising it