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Surrogate Motherhood and the Best Interests of Children

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2021

Angela R. Holder
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Extract

Commercial surrogacy presents complex legal issues; the problems that it does not present are those of high tech reproductive medicine. All the new techniques for overcoming infertility, such as in vitro fertilization and the like, are medically complex but—as long as they involve a married couple and no third-party donors—legally simple. Surrogacy is so medically uncomplicated that it can be done without any physician involvement, but it is the most legally complicated means of providing a baby for an infertile couple.

From a time in England when fathers could sell their children into slavery to a day in which the legal system supposedly protects the best interests of the child, the common law increasingly respects the rights of children as individuals with constitutional rights and not as chattels of their parents. If the courts accept commercial surrogacy as a legitimate enterprise, it seems that we have again reverted to the concept of child as chattel.

Type
Ethics
Information
Law, Medicine and Healthcare , Volume 16 , Issue 1-2 , Spring 1988 , pp. 51 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 1988

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References

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