Note: The ethical judgments on this page refer exclusively to the action — never to the person who performs it. Every person possesses inalienable dignity, regardless of what they do or have done. Cf. Note on Ethical Judgments.
The assumption of the pregnancy and birth of a child by a woman (surrogate) on behalf of other persons (intended parents), with the contractual obligation to surrender the child after birth. Surrogacy is an intrinsically evil act and a form of instrumentalization, because it makes the child the object of a contract and thereby a commodity, and degrades the surrogate in her bodiliness to a means of production.
Surrogacy, Money, and Power
In commercial surrogacy, money and power combine into a particularly grave form of oblivion of the person: the economic power of the intended parents makes it possible to purchase another woman’s pregnancy — the child is ordered, handed over, and paid for. The dignity of the person — both of the surrogate and of the child — is subjected to the calculus of money. Altruistic surrogacy likewise remains problematic, because it splits the bodily-personal unity of motherhood, even when no money changes hands.
Surrogacy can also be understood as technology in the broader sense: a systematic procedure that subjects the beginning of personal life to the conditions of a contract, thereby violating the personalist norm.
Ontological relations:
- has subclass: Altruistic Surrogacy
- has subclass: Gestational Surrogacy
- has subclass: Commercial Surrogacy
- is subclass of: Practical Oblivion of the Person
- violates: Personalist Norm
- fragments: Motherhood
- is subclass of: Instrumentalization
- is subclass of: Intrinsically Evil Act
- has subclass: Traditional Surrogacy
- manifests: Direct Violence
- manifests: Structural Violence
Surrogacy within the Triangle of Violence
According to Johan Galtung’s triangle of violence, surrogacy can be located at all three corners. Direct violence: The contract intervenes in the body of the woman — clauses are documented that oblige surrogates to caesarean sections and selective abortions — and the stipulated removal of the newborn immediately after birth ruptures the bodily bond between mother and child that has grown during pregnancy. Structural violence: No perpetrator is needed where the global poverty gradient does the coercing — the “voluntary” consent is given under existential hardship, the surrogate faces agencies, clinics, and legal teams alone, and the child is the only party to the contract that was never asked. The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls describes the practice as a system of violence, exploitation and abuse and demands its worldwide abolition (Alsalem 2025). Cultural violence: The language of the market — “service,” “gestational carrier,” “guarantee package” — legitimizes both and renders the instrumentalization invisible; the person is linguistically recoded into an object before being practically treated as an object.
Altruistic Surrogacy
Altruistic surrogacy is surrogacy without remuneration, often within the family or among friends. The motive of compassion can mitigate subjective culpability. Yet the objective objections remain: the fragmentation of motherhood, the contractual surrender of the child, and the instrumentalization of the bodiliness of the woman who carries the child. The altruistic motivation does not alter the object of the action (fontes moralitatis) and therefore does not render it morally good (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 200 ff.).
The ontology classifies altruistic surrogacy as a subclass of surrogacy and marks it as mutually exclusive with commercial surrogacy — these are different forms of the same intrinsically evil act.
Ontological classification:
- superordinate concept: Surrogacy
- mutually exclusive with: Commercial Surrogacy
Gestational Surrogacy
A form of surrogacy in which the surrogate carries the child without being genetically related to it. The egg cell comes from the intended mother or a donor. Gestational motherhood is thereby separated from genetic motherhood — a fragmentation that contradicts the personal unity of the parent-child relationship.
Commercial Surrogacy
Commercial surrogacy is surrogacy for remuneration. In addition to the fundamental objections against every form of surrogacy, the explicit commercialization of the human body and of the child is added here. The surrogate becomes a paid service provider. The child becomes an ordered commodity. Especially in countries of great poverty, this leads to the exploitation of economically disadvantaged women — an intensification of instrumentalization.
The ontology infers: commercial surrogacy turns the violation of the personalist norm into a business model. It is mutually exclusive with altruistic surrogacy, since the commercial motive qualitatively alters the action. In the outcome of the moral evaluation, however, the result is negative in both cases.
In the triangle of violence, commercial surrogacy intensifies structural violence — the poverty gradient replaces physical coercion — and additionally manifests cultural violence: the euphemistic language of the market legitimizes the violation and renders it invisible.
Ontological classification:
- superordinate concept: Surrogacy
- mutually exclusive with: Altruistic Surrogacy
- manifests: Cultural Violence
Surrogacy Contract
The surrogacy contract is a contractual agreement by which a woman undertakes to carry a child and, after birth, to hand it over to the commissioning parties (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 298 ff.).
From the standpoint of the ontology of the person, this contract constitutes a grave form of instrumentalization. The child becomes the object of a contract — it is, as it were, ordered, handed over, and received like a thing. This fundamentally contradicts the dignity of the person, for the person is not an object that may be disposed of by contract.
The surrogate is likewise instrumentalized. Her bodily motherhood — a profoundly personal reality — is reduced to a contractual service. The personalist norm forbids ever using a person merely as a means. The surrogacy contract violates this norm in a twofold respect.
Traditional Surrogacy
Traditional surrogacy is that form of surrogacy in which the surrogate is at the same time the genetic mother of the child — her own egg cell is used. Here the fragmentation of motherhood is especially grave: the woman who is at once genetic and gestational mother contractually surrenders her own child.
The ontology marks traditional surrogacy as mutually exclusive with gestational surrogacy, in which the surrogate has no genetic relation to the child. In both cases the personal unity of motherhood is fragmented by a contract — a violation of the personalist norm.
Ontological classification:
- superordinate concept: Surrogacy
- mutually exclusive with: Gestational Surrogacy
Ethical assessment from the personhood ontology
The line of justification begins with ontological dignity: it is the inalienable, objective worth of the person and the sufficient ground of the Personalist Norm — the person is to be affirmed and loved for her own sake. This norm is violated by instrumentalization and by oblivion of the person. Surrogacy touches two persons, and both forms of violation occur.
The gestating woman. Her body becomes a means to an alien end. The finding lies not in the pregnancy nor in the handover as such, but in the contractual pre-negation of a bodily-personal relation: the closeness to the child developed over nine months is not merely made difficult after the fact but agreed in advance as non-existent. What is stipulated is not an action but the failure of a personal response.
The child. It becomes the object of a contract — ordered, handed over, paid for. On this ontology commodity is disjoint from person: what can be the subject matter of an obligation to deliver is by that very fact not a person. The Personalist Norm requires affirmation for one’s own sake; an affirmation that follows from a contractual obligation is structurally a different thing.
The fragmentation of parenthood. Genetic, gestational, and social motherhood come apart. This is not a mere complication of attribution but the dissolution of a unity in which the child finds itself.
By the fontes moralitatis the object of the action determines its moral species. The object here is bringing about a pregnancy under the previously agreed condition of relinquishment. Surrogacy is therefore an intrinsically evil act — irrespective of whether it is remunerated and whether those involved act benevolently.
The selection clauses. One finding belongs here because it substantiates the contract thesis. Because the pregnant woman is not the future mother, every decision that remains implicit in an ordinary pregnancy here becomes negotiable in advance between third parties. Hillary Berk’s content analysis of thirty US surrogacy contracts (2020) shows that exactly three categories are regularly set down in writing: abnormalities and defects, sex selection, and unwanted multiples; Rachel Rebouché (2020) adds that terms such as “anomaly” or “defect” mostly remain undefined. Surrogacy is thus the only form of pregnancy in which the decision about continuation or termination upon a diagnosed anomaly becomes the object of a contract concluded in advance between third parties. In this ontology’s terms that is oblivion of the person in explicit form: the child’s acceptance is tied to characteristics, in advance and in writing — the selection logic of eugenic selection appears here in contractual form.
Two qualifications belong with this. Conceptually it is not necessary: an altruistic surrogacy using the intended parents’ own gametes and involving no selection is coherently conceivable. And by Berk’s own analysis 83 per cent of the contracts examined reserve the surrogate’s right to carry the pregnancy to term; coercive enforcement of such clauses is excluded in the United States, and most contracts conversely require acceptance of the child regardless of detected anomalies.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
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Kant, Immanuel (1785): Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Academy Edition vol. IV, p. 429 (the formula of humanity as an end in itself: never to use the person merely as a means).
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Aquinas, Thomas: Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 18, a. 1–4 (fontes moralitatis: the object, circumstances, and end of the action).
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Catechism of the Catholic Church (1997), no. 2376 (surrogacy as a violation of the dignity of the child and of marriage).
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Galtung, Johan (1969): “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research”. In: Journal of Peace Research 6 (3), pp. 167–191; idem (1990): “Cultural Violence”. In: Journal of Peace Research 27 (3), pp. 291–305 (triangle of violence: direct, structural, cultural violence).
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Alsalem, Reem (2025): The different manifestations of violence against women and girls in the context of surrogacy. Report of the UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls to the 80th UN General Assembly, UN Doc. A/80/158 (surrogacy as violence against women and children; call for a worldwide ban).
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Berk, Hillary L. (2020): “Savvy Surrogates and Rock Star Parents: Compensation Provisions, Contracting Practices, and the Value of Womb Work”. In: Law & Social Inquiry 45 (2), pp. 398–431 (content analysis of 30 US surrogacy contracts).
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Rebouche, Rachel (2020): “Contracting Pregnancy”. In: Iowa Law Review 105, pp. 1591 ff. (prenatal-testing and termination clauses; duty to accept the child despite anomaly as the default).
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Levine, Aaron D. (2010): “Self-Regulation, Compensation, and the Ethical Recruitment of Oocyte Donors”. In: Hastings Center Report 40 (2) (trait-based pricing of oocytes).
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Schurr, Carolin (2017): “From biopolitics to bioeconomies: The ART of (re-)producing white futures in Mexico’s surrogacy market”. In: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 35 (2), pp. 241–262.
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Wilkinson, Stephen (2010): Choosing Tomorrow’s Children: The Ethics of Selective Reproduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press (counter-position: separability of the selection question from the surrogacy question).
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Farnell & Anor and Chanbua [2016] FCWA 17, Family Court of Western Australia (finding that in the “Baby Gammy” case no termination was demanded and the child was not abandoned).