First off, Amy Benfer over at Salon’s Broadsheet discusses a NY Times article with an obnoxious writer but a subversive photographer. The piece in question is about surrogate motherhood and it underlines a lot of the class issues involved.
The issues involving surrogacy seem relatively straightforward to me. As I generally see it described, reproductive rights first and foremost focus on the person bearing the child and deal with the source of the genetic material and of the fetus secondarily. This does mean that females are the primary beneficiaries of said rights, at least until we develop artificial wombs or a way to splice in seahorse DNA. That said, I don’t think that, absent considerations of bearing the child, providing the egg is actual deemed a more protected activity than providing sperm.
It seems like the easiest way to deal with surrogacy within this framework is to say that any deal to act as a surrogate does not abrogate the pregnant person’s reproductive rights. In essence, contracting a surrogate is a crapshoot. You could get treated as a normal creditor, if they don’t go through with it you get most of your money back unless the person goes bankrupt or something. Presumably most arrangements would involve a large payment once the deal is done.
In the period immediately after giving birth, I suspect a reproductive rights framework would allow the surrogate to keep the child (again with breach of contract provisions kicking in). Beyond that we go up to four actors: child, pregnant person, genetic material contributors, and whoever raises the child. At that point, I don’t think the reproductive rights framework is particularly helpful.
Anyways, so does this kinda suck for people hiring a surrogate? Yes, but at least it provides them a predictable environment.
The other post of interest is one that I have a harder time discussing. Michael Berube, who has a child named Jamie with down syndrom, has a post up discussing a rather civil argument he’s having with Peter Singer who thinks he’s closer in spirit to some rational alien than the average person with relevant genes. It’s well worth reading and funnier than you might expect. Earlier on Berube had done a post on how he reconciles rights for the disabled with reproductive rights including an earlier one more focused on the Terry Schiavo debacle.
The short version as I see it is opposition to mandatory genetic testing, providing those that do test accurate and often encouraging data about environmental conditions, government support to improve prenatal and natal care, but ultimately preserving the right of the pregnant woman to ultimately make what call she will. That said, preserving said right doesn’t necessarily preclude condemning things like sex selection as legal but bad.
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