Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [48]
But gestational surrogacy does not resolve the moral quandary. It may be true that gestational surrogates will be less attached to the children they bear than surrogates who also provide the egg. But dividing the role of mother three ways (adopting parent, egg donor, and gestational surrogate) rather than two does not settle the question of who has the superior claim to the child.
If anything, the outsourcing of pregnancy that has occurred due in part to IVF has cast the moral issues in sharper relief. The substantial cost savings for prospective parents, and the enormous economic benefits, relative to local wages, that Indian surrogates derive from the practice, make it undeniable that commercial surrogacy can increase the general welfare. So, from a utilitarian point of view, it’s hard to argue with the rise of paid pregnancy as a global industry.
But the global outsourcing of pregnancy also dramatizes the moral qualms. Suman Dodia, a twenty-six-year-old Indian who was a gestational surrogate for a British couple, had previously earned $25 per month working as a maid. For her, the prospect of earning $4,500 for nine months’ work must have been almost too compelling to resist.60 The fact that she had delivered her own three children at home and never visited a doctor adds poignancy to her role as a surrogate. Referring to her paid pregnancy, she said, “I’m being more careful now than I was with my own pregnancies.”61 Although the economic benefits of her choice to become a surrogate are clear, it’s not obvious that we would call it free. Moreover, the creation of a paid pregnancy industry on global scale—as a deliberate policy in poor countries, no less—heightens the sense that surrogacy degrades women by instrumentalizing their bodies and reproductive capacities.
It is hard to image two human activities more dissimilar than bearing children and fighting wars. But the pregnant surrogates in India and the soldier Andrew Carnegie hired to take his place in the Civil War have something in common. Thinking through the rights and wrongs of their situations brings us face to face with two of the questions that divide competing conceptions of justice: How free are the choices we make in the free market? And are there certain virtues and higher goods that markets do not honor and money cannot buy?
5. WHAT MATTERS IS THE MOTIVE / IMMANUEL KANT
If you believe in universal human rights, you are probably not a utilitarian. If all human beings are worthy of respect, regardless of who they are or where they live, then it’s wrong to treat them as mere instruments of the collective happiness. (Recall the story of the malnourished child languishing in the cellar for the sake of the “city of happiness.”)
You might defend human rights on the grounds that respecting them will maximize utility in the long run. In that case, however, your reason for respecting rights is not to respect the person who holds them but to make things better for everyone. It is one thing to condemn the scenario of the suffering child because it reduces overall utility, and something else to condemn it as an intrinsic moral wrong, an injustice to the child.
If rights don’t rest on utility, what is their moral basis? Libertarians offer a possible answer: Persons should not be used merely as means to the welfare of others, because doing so violates the fundamental right of self-ownership. My life, labor, and person belong to me and me alone. They are not at the disposal of the society as a whole.
As we have seen, however, the idea of self-ownership, consistently applied, has implications that only an ardent libertarian can love—an unfettered market without a safety net for those who fall behind; a minimal state that rules out most measures to ease inequality and promote the common good; and a celebration of consent so complete that it permits self-inflicted