Surrogacy and Abortion

In her lecture entitled, Fertility Tourism and the Ethics of Intercountry Surrogacy: Renting Wombs in the Global Marketplace, Professor Molly Shanley discussed the morality of surrogacy agreements that span across the world. Much like our current discussions in class, Professor Shanley presented the opposing argument of the exploitation of women’s bodies in foreign countries for cheap surrogacy, and then refuted it with a pro-choice argument wherein women have the right to choose what to do with their bodies. After hearing her argument, I could not help but to draw comparisons to another debate involving a pro-choice argument: abortion.

From the viewpoint of a family attempting to find a surrogate, I assume that the family values life so much that they would be against pro-choice abortion. I believe it would be contradictory for a family to attempt to find a surrogate to carry their child, while also believing that aborting a human life is acceptable.

However, there is a problem with this argument. If someone were pursuing a surrogate, they would be pro-choice because they would believe that a woman could choose what to do with her body. However, having the option to abort a child is also pro-choice. If wanting to create a child drives a family to surrogacy, they clearly value life. However, being against abortion (valuing every life) would not be pro-choice. Could it be that families attempting to find a surrogate are pro-choice on the topic of surrogacy, but not pro-choice on the topic of abortion due to their value of human life? I believe that this seems to be the case, but this scenario would contradict the pursuers of surrogates in their support of pro-choice.

            I suppose that a solution to this problem could be to believe in a form of ethical relativity, where an individual or a society decides what is morally correct. However, one could not simply take a stance on pro-choice in general; it would entail assessing the moral correctness of pro-choice for each individual scenario because it appears that the value of life possessed by surrogate pursuers creates pro-choice contradiction when it comes to surrogacy and abortion.