Surrogate Pregnancy: Buying and Selling Life

An excellent article by Clare O Neil in the Sydney Morning Herald where she argues about the moral, commercial and societal difficulties that surrogacy poses. Here's a snippet

 

A second, more complex set of moral concerns is that commercial surrogacy could commodify pregnancy, babies and motherhood, leading to the breakdown of cultural beliefs we may not wish to change.

Babies and pregnancy are seen by society as sacrosanct. Through commercial surrogacy, they are given a price, and sold and exchanged much like other goods and services. If we allow babies to be bought, why not a two-year-old child? Should we allow babies to be sold at auction? For many, these (albeit extreme) hypotheticals feel intuitively wrong, contravening a basic belief that some things simply should not be bought and sold.