INTERNATIONAL SURROGACY AGREEEMENTS. LEGAL REGULATION AT THE INTERNATIONAL LEVEL. Eds K Trimmings and P Beaumont Oxford: Hart (www.hartpub.co.uk ), 2013. xxvii + 559 pp. ISBN 9781849462808. £65.
| Published date | 01 May 2014 |
| Date | 01 May 2014 |
| Pages | 312-313 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2014.0225 |
| Author | Horatia Muir-Watt |
Should – and if so, how should – the international surrogacy market be regulated? Is access to cross-border surrogacy a right attaching to the free movement of persons, or a risk for women in developing countries? Is this an issue of personal ethics or of global economics? Arguments pit personal autonomy against public policy; democracy against sovereignty; the right to a child against the protection of women; anthropology against discrimination. The heated moral, religious and political debates which in recent years have followed spectacular revolutions in reproductive technology are naturally reflected in widely divergent national standpoints, of which international surrogacy agreements – that is, between intended parents issuing (usually) from a surrogacy-hostile jurisdiction and a surrogate in a surrogacy-friendly environment – have become the focal point. The ensuing conflicts of laws are all the more complex in that they also take place in the wake of the liberalisation of same-sex marriage in a growing number of jurisdictions, so that the issue of surrogacy arises as one of the right to a child; restricting its benefit to sterile heterosexual couples then appears as inherently discriminatory. But the backdrop of such conflicts is also one of increasing global economic and social inequality. Whereas the cross-border demand for children tends to come from developed Western (often surrogacy-hostile) countries (such as France), some developing states (such as India), when not strictly prohibitive on religious grounds, have encouraged or abetted a growing surrogacy industry which cannot but take its toll on a generation of young women.
This highly informative book contains, first of all, a remarkable wealth of comparative legal materials on surrogacy, in the forms of national reports, covering a large number of jurisdictions from both sides of the international surrogacy market. These reports reveal that the legal issues – and potential conflict of laws – are as intractable as the moral debates. They range from the cross-border consequences of the criminalisation of surrogacy, or indeed its constitutional prohibition, to the intricate challenge of the effects of surrogacy, when permitted, on family relationships from the perspective of all the persons involved in the conception and birth of the child. Here, we find the (contract law) issue of the rights of the surrogate to withhold the child, and the obligations of the intended parents if the child...
To continue reading
Request your trial