Finally, feminists and conservatives can agree on something: Commercial surrogacy is harmful to women.
This week, the New York state Senate passed the “Child-Parent Security Act,” which would legalize commercial surrogacy in the state. The practice is already legal in 47 other states, but some progressives are not so supportive of it.
In a letter responding to the New York vote this week, Steinem wrote that it’s not all surrogacy she’s concerned about. It’s the commercialization of the process.
“The danger here is not the use of altruistic surrogacy to create a loving family, which is legal in New York now, but the state legalizing the commercial and profit-driven reproductive surrogacy industry,” she wrote. “The bill also allows for any woman, from anywhere in the world, to be brought to New York, by anyone, in order to carry a commercialized pregnancy. This carries the big risk of human trafficking for reproductive and other exploitation of both women and children.”
The issue of surrogacy has been posed as a solution not only for infertile couples, but also for gay and lesbian couples who’d like to have their own kids. But Deborah Glick, a New York assemblywoman who is the first openly gay member of the state legislature, says it’s not that simple.
“It is pregnancy for a fee,” she told the New York Times, “and I find that commodification of women troubling.”
Likewise, in a letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has supported the bill, dozens of disparate activists — from religious leaders to Steinem and “The Vagina Monologues” author Eve Ensler — opposed the bill. The letter reads:
Progressives such as Steinem are concerned about commercial surrogacy for a number of reasons, one being that such an arrangement could infringe on a woman’s choice to abort her baby. But that’s not the only reason it’s a complicated issue. Surrogacy opens up questions of custody rights, as surrogate mothers sometimes decide they’d like to keep the baby. It also turns a woman’s womb into a tool to be monetized.
As much as the complaint that America is turning into “The Handmaid’s Tale” rings false, the issue of surrogacy draws a much more accurate parallel. “Surrogacy degrades a pregnancy to a service and a baby to a product,” Jennifer Lahl wrote for Verily in 2017. “I wish the harms of surrogacy existed only in the confines of dystopian novels and TV series. Unfortunately, they exist in the real world.”
Lahl, who founded the Center for Bioethics and Culture, said she “became interested in helping women exploited by third-party reproduction when I saw it happening all around me throughout my 25-year career as a pediatric critical care nurse, a hospital administrator, and a senior-level nursing manager.”
Surrogacy, she explains, is not as benign as it seems. The process, which can cost from $20,000 to $200,000, is an option only for wealthy families, and it often hurts the financially needy women who offer it. Lahl wrote:
The three countries have since outlawed commercial surrogacy, and states in the U.S. should be wary as well. As New York’s bill continues to be discussed in the state legislature (it won’t make it to Cuomo’s desk unless the Assembly passes it), two disparate parties have the opportunity to come together. Commercial surrogacy carries with it the potential for trafficking and the commodification of women, a problem that both feminists and conservatives can agree is important to fight.
