Department of Philosophy, Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
Department of Medical Education, University of Illinois College of Medicine, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
J Med Ethics. 2018 Aug;44(8):551-554. doi: 10.1136/medethics-2017-104331. Epub 2018 Apr 12.
The law ordinarily recognises the woman who gives birth as the mother of a child, but in certain jurisdictions, it will recognise the commissioning couple as the legal parents of a child born to a commercial surrogate. Some commissioning parents have, however, effectively abandoned the children they commission, and in such cases, commercial surrogates may find themselves facing unexpected maternal responsibility for children they had fully intended to give up. Any assumption that commercial surrogates ought to assume maternal responsibility for abandoned children runs contrary to the moral suppositions that typically govern contract surrogacy, in particular, assumptions that gestational carriers are not 'mothers' in any morally significant sense. In general, commercial gestational surrogates are almost entirely conceptualised as 'vessels'. In a moral sense, it is deeply inconsistent to expect commercial surrogates to assume maternal responsibility simply because commissioning parents abandon children for one reason or another. We identify several instances of child abandonment and discuss their implications with regard to the moral conceptualisation of commercial gestational surrogates. We conclude that if gestational surrogates are to remain conceptualised as mere vessels, they should not be expected to assume responsibility for children abandoned by commissioning parents, not even the limited responsibility of giving them up for adoption or surrendering them to the state.
法律通常将分娩的女性认定为孩子的母亲，但在某些司法管辖区，它将承认委托夫妇为商业代孕所生子女的合法父母。然而，一些委托父母实际上已经抛弃了他们委托的孩子，在这种情况下，商业代孕者可能会发现自己意外地承担起对他们原本打算放弃的孩子的母亲责任。任何认为商业代孕者应该为被遗弃的孩子承担母亲责任的假设，都与通常支配合同代孕的道德假设相悖，特别是代孕者在任何道德意义上都不是“母亲”的假设。一般来说，商业代孕者几乎完全被视为“容器”。从道德意义上讲，仅仅因为委托父母出于某种原因而抛弃孩子，就期望商业代孕者承担母亲责任，这是非常不一致的。我们确定了一些儿童被遗弃的情况，并讨论了它们对商业代孕者的道德概念化的影响。我们得出结论，如果代孕者仍然被视为仅仅是容器，就不应该期望他们为委托父母抛弃的孩子承担责任，甚至不应该承担将孩子送养或交给国家的有限责任。
