Commercial Surrogacy Research Paper Thesis

In this paper, I will argue that commercial surrogacy neither degrades, nor commodifies, human life and that the exchange of money for surrogacy is not degrading to the labor of pregnancy, but instead shows that there is inherent value in the labor of pregnancy. My argument for this is that surrogacy is a service that many women voluntarily chose to provide in order to help couples that are unable to create a child themselves. It is not only wrong that this service be viewed as degrading; it is in fact fulfilling for many women. Many women feel that by being a surrogate they are able to forever enhance the lives of another couple by providing them with a child they could not otherwise have. One objection to this might be that the intended parents …show more content…
They do so because they recognize the opportunity they have to grant a child to a family that would otherwise be childless. Through their commitment to being a surrogate mother for a family, in the case of commercial surrogacy, the surrogate mother not only receives monetary compensation, but also the satisfaction that she changed a family’s life for the better by offering them the opportunity to raise and love a child. The women who volunteer to be involved in the process of commercial surrogacy do not feel that the value of their pregnancy is being degraded, but instead they come to more fully understand just how valuable their ability to have a pregnancy …show more content…
The true issue behind this objection is that women are not awarded the same access to education and professional training as men are. If women were awarded the same access to education as men are, the objection presented would be void. Simply because commercial surrogacy is among the options an uneducated woman is left with does not make it degrading. In fact, commercial surrogacy is not the degrading part of this scenario at all, the fact that the women were not valued enough in the first place to be encouraged to pursue an education is the truly degrading part of this objection. Furthermore, commercial surrogacy still allows women to have control over their own body, to get paid a decent salary, and allows the women to feel they fulfill a meaningful purpose while they are making an income. Additionally, women without an education or skills that can be applied to a profession do have more options than simply being forced into commercial surrogacy, and it can be argued that among the options that are left for the uneducated woman to make an income, commercial surrogacy is among the most respectable of her options. I would argue that commercial surrogacy in the objection is not the issue, but instead it is proof that women hold an inherent value to society in spite of the inequality that exists in education and other