ABSTRACT
There is very broad consensus among feminists concerning the need to protect women’s access to safe, legal abortions, and more generally to protect women from governmental interference in reproductive lives. There have emerged deep and difficult divisions concerning the appropriate stance with respect to contract motherhood. As the practice of contract motherhood has emerged in society, the most typical situation giving rise to it is that of a traditional, heterosexual married couple (the intended receiving parents) who want to have one or more children but are unable to because the wife is infertile, that is, unable to conceive and/or to sustain a pregnancy. There is one sense of the verb “exploit” that means simply “to make use of; utilize; turn to account.” One way of treating people as mere means, and not as ends in themselves, is by treating them as commodities, things, property. Thus commodification of persons is, on the present account, a species of exploitation of persons.
