ABSTRACT
Morality issues, defined as those related to the moral status of the human body and the regulation of life-and-death questions, are a window of opportunity for the rise of value politics in the European Union (EU). Two cases that have recently emerged on the EU agenda, prostitution and surrogacy, show how the debates on these questions interact with political narratives revolving around official European values enshrined in the treaties. The findings of this chapter suggest that morality issues are partly “business as usual”, in that they are deferred to experts or to the domestic politics of member states in order to avoid normative conflicts at the EU level, like in the case of surrogacy. However, sometimes they are also politicised by political entrepreneurs and civil society organisations to become the objects of EU-driven policy evolutions, as illustrated by the neo-abolitionist turn regarding prostitution. Overall, European values are enhanced as key resources for symbolic politics leading to a reformulation of other normative sources such as national cultures or religious traditions and - occasionally - to the empowerment of alternative voices.
