ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that a fundamental moral issue in the surrogacy debate is the nature and extent of women’s freedom: their freedom to control their bodies, their lives, their reproductive powers, and to determine the social use of those reproductive capacities. There are social and technological contexts which provide a way for women to benefit through the free use of their reproductive powers. Much is made of the inevitable exploitation of women which will follow from socially and/or legally sanctioned surrogacy arrangements. Women will best be protected when they are recognized as autonomous adults with full rights. Some critics of surrogacy argue that children born of surrogates may be disturbed when, in later life, they learn of the arrangement which brought them into the world. Other critics of surrogacy may express qualms about relations between classes because of a newly discovered aversion to capitalism as the culture of money.
