Offering a for-and-against look at surrogacy, this book focuses on questions which bear on its justifiability: Is providing gestational services a permissible way of employing a woman's body? Indeed, is it a legitimate form of work? Are the children born out of surrogacy in any way wronged by surrogacy agreements?

Anca Gheaus is a political philosopher interested in justice and the normative significance of personal relationships, and is co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Childhood and Children (2018) and published numerous journal articles and book chapters, primarily on issues concerning childrearing, gender justice, love, non-ideal theory, relational versus distributive egalitarianism, and methodological issues in political theory.
Christine Straehle is Professor for Practical Philosophy at the University of Hamburg and Professor of Ethics and Applied Ethics at the University of Ottawa. Before her appointment in Hamburg, she was also the inaugural and founding director of the Centre for Philosophy, Politics and Economics in the Faculty of Philosophy at Groningen University in 2016, where she also held the Chair in Philosophy and Public Affairs. She was awarded several prizes and prestigious fellowships, such as the Kitty Newman Prize for Social Philosophy from the
Royal Society of Canada in 2019, and, most recently in 2023, a senior research fellowship at the Swedish Collegium of Advanced Studies.

• Introduction, Anca Gheaus and Christine Straehle


• Surrogacy defined


• Surrogacy and The Law


• Ethical Worries Surrounding Surrogacy


• The Book


• Part One:


• Defending Surrogacy as Reproductive Labour, Christine Straehle


• Introduction


• I. Surrogacy and Free Occupational Choice


• I.1. Why is freedom of occupational choice important in liberal theory?


• I.2. Two Justifications for the Right to Freedom of Occupational Choice


• II. Surrogacy, Autonomy and Individual Agency


• II.1. Reasons for Limits: Harm to Self, Harm to Society and Professionalization


• II. 2. Surrogacy and the Limits of Freedom of Professional Choice


• III. Surrogacy, Commercialization, Reproduction and Parenting


• III.1. Surrogacy as Commercialization vs Surrogacy as Parenting


• III.2. Surrogacy and gendered society


• III.3. Surrogacy as Harm to Society: applying market norms to the family sphere


• IV. Surrogacy As Work


• IV.1. Professional requirements and justifiable limits


• IV. 2. Surrogacy as licensed work


• Conclusion


• Notes


• Against Private Surrogacy: A Child-Centered View, Anca Gheaus


• I. Introduction


• II. The intuitive case against surrogacy


• III. Parents, their rights, and the interests of children


• III.1. General assumptions


• III.2. The right to become a parent


• III.3. Parents' rights and children's interests


• III. 4. Two caveats


• IV. What is surrogacy? Three models


• IV.1. The child-trafficking model


• IV.2. The privately arranged adoption model


• IV.3. The provision of services and gametes model


• V. Full Surrogacy with intending parents' gametes


• V.1. Child-centered appeals to genetic connections and the right to parent


• V.3. Appeals to the gestational connection


• V.4. Creatures of attachment: the general impermissibility of surrogacy agreements


• VI. Harm to children? The challenge from the non-identity problem


• VII. Conclusion: a respectful and humane form of surrogacy


• Notes


• Part Two


• What's in it for the Baby? - Weighing Children's and Parents' Interests in Commercial Surrogacy Agreements - A Reply to Gheaus, Christine Straehle


• I. Introduction


• II. Where we agree: The interests of children


• III. Where we disagree: Relationships


• IV. Where we disagree: the role of the state


• Conclusion


• Notes


• Women and Children First - A Reply to Straehle, Anca Gheaus


• I. Introduction


• II. Where we agree: gestating for another


• III. Where we disagree: the women


• IV. Where we disagree: the children


• V. Is Straehle's hybrid defence of surrogacy stable?


• Conclusions


• Notes


• Index