What do you think about paying surrogates? If you are fine with surrogacy, then possibly paying the surrogate mom may not strike you as a problem. I’ve come to realize I don’t think it’s the transaction of money that is the problem, but rather surrogacy itself.
In any event, a British court has ruled on this matter:
A senior family court judge allowed a British couple to keep a newborn child even though they had technically broken the law by giving more than “reasonable expenses” to the American natural mother. …
His comments, among the first in recent years on the subject by a senior legal figure, will be taken by many infertile couples as a welcome sign that they can now pay women to bear children for them without fear of breaking the law, and so be denied a family.
Given that surrogacy is not the question here, but rather paying a surrogate mom, I’m a bit at a loss for what to say. It strikes me as close to impossible that a woman would “make a living” by surrogacy, and if a couple pays for expenditures and then some, I don’t think that in itself ought to be illegal. Whether it is moral to ask someone else to have a baby for you is a different matter.








This opens up the possibility for all sorts of problematic scenarios. What happens if the couple is suddenly unable to pay the amount they promised the surrogate mother in the contract? Who does the baby belong to? Or what happens if the baby dies in childbirth? Do they get their money back? Are there any conditions under which the surrogate mother can decide to abort the child (e.g. psycological stress)?
I’d like to think that instead of trying to answer these questions people reconsider surrogacy as an immoral violation of nature’s laws. But then again, this hasn’t really happened with sperm dononation. One can only hope.