Cooper Donna, Trowse Philippa
Senior Lecturer.
Lecturer in the QUT Law Faculty.
J Law Med. 2020 Aug;27(4):914-927.
Draft legislation has been approved by the Union Cabinet in India seeking to limit surrogacy to altruistic arrangements with intended parents who are either Indian citizens or couples residing outside the country but of Indian origin. This follows longstanding debates as to whether commercial surrogacy should be permitted. The primary argument against such arrangements has been the potential to exploit and cause harm to surrogate women. There is considerable literature on the exploitation debate, but little has been written about whether these transactions cause harm to surrogate women. Our article addresses this gap in the literature and develops a three-step framework using Mill's harm principle through which to assess whether harm has occurred. We apply this framework to a sample of women who provided surrogacy services in India between 2006 and 2015, the period just before the government moved to ban overseas couples from accessing commercial surrogacy.
印度联邦内阁已批准一项法律草案，该草案旨在将代孕限制在与意向父母的利他性安排上，这些意向父母要么是印度公民，要么是居住在国外但具有印度血统的夫妇。此前，关于是否应允许商业代孕一直存在长期争论。反对这种安排的主要论点是存在剥削代孕女性并对其造成伤害的可能性。关于剥削问题的争论有大量文献，但关于这些交易是否对代孕女性造成伤害的论述却很少。我们的文章弥补了这一文献空白，并运用密尔的伤害原则建立了一个三步框架，用以评估伤害是否已经发生。我们将这个框架应用于2006年至2015年期间在印度提供代孕服务的女性样本，这一时期恰好在政府禁止海外夫妇进行商业代孕之前。
