Technology in Ethics: Surrogacy

Surrogacy is definitely a practice that is becoming more and more relevant.  I believe Professor Molly Shanley said that experts have yet to collect significant information on surrogate children because most of them are younger than 6 years old.  As Nick already touched on, surrogacy introduces a wave of new ethically controversial ideas.  Pro-choice/Exploiting underprivileged wombs is one of the most prominent.  Nick also discussed how families searching for a surrogate would most likely be against abortion.  We discussed this idea and it is based on the notion that surrogate-seeking families have obviously tried, unsuccessfully, to have children.  They decided to find a surrogate because the idea of a human life that would be theirs is something they have always wanted.  Using this logic they should find the idea of abortion repulsive, right?  Nick also discussed how this is contradictory because these families are pro-life on one topic (abortion) and pro-choice on another (surrogacy).  This has lead me to think about the role of technology in ethics.  Without technology, surrogacy would be impossible and this contradiction would have been prevented.  Does anyone have any opinion on the role of technology in ethics and what role it will likely assume as it continues to become a more integral part of our lives?

Fertility Tourism, Do the Ends Justify the Means?

When listening to Molly Shanley's March 10th lecture on Fertility Tourism and the Ethics of Inter-country Surrogacy, I was surprised to learn that Professor Shanley believes that fertility tourism is ethical. While Shanley notes that surrogacy often creates an unnatural hierarchy of humans (and often social classes), can created a skewed vision of family, and seems outright exploitative (and potentially reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel where