Abstract

This dissertation is a study of a variety of approaches to surrogacy, also known as surrogate or contract motherhood, as a public problem. Through the examination and critical evaluation of these approaches, I indicate directions for moral inquiry and moral epistemology in studying surrogacy or any other ethical and political problem. ;In the first chapter, surrogacy is situated with respect to the new reproductive technologies developed in the last few decades and the last few years. The history of contract motherhood is outlined, and its literature is described. I also discuss in some detail many of the court cases that have been adjudicated with regard to surrogacy, since much of the way the phenomenon is understood and publicly debated originates in the unfolding of these cases. ;The next two chapters catalog and analyze the range of approaches to surrogacy characteristic of ethical analysis that is based on liberal ideology. One such approach describes and appeals to the rights that pertain to individuals, rights that are usually, in this context, considered to be deontologically grounded and/or founded in the U.S. Constitutional legal tradition. Another closely-related approach is that of the medical ethics tradition which concentrates on rights and also on consequentialist reasoning, and focuses on concerns like informed consent. I criticize these views for being blind to the powerful social arrangements in which practices like contract maternity are organized. ;In the final two chapters, I attend to a variety of feminist approaches to surrogacy which problematize the social positions of women with respect to the new reproductive technologies and which focus on discriminatory structures in which the lives of women are organized. In Chapter 4, I focus on liberal, radical, cultural, and Marxist and socialist feminist discussions of surrogacy. Most of these viewpoints, although they capture the specificity of the operations of some social structures, pay insufficient attention to race . In Chapter 5, I describe African-American women's different relation to the organization of reproduction and indicate some black feminist views both about the nature of family and the nature of ethics. I suggest that epistemology is social group-based, and that ethics is, too, and that intergroup understanding requires centering the accounts of dominated groups that have been omitted from knowledge-maker status by the organization of philosophy as a center of the operation of expertise