Ethics of Surrogacy During COVID-19 Pandemic
By Cathy Sakimura and Emily Galpern,
Men Having Babies
| 05. 12. 2021
The COVID pandemic has placed new hurdles to having a child through surrogacy, complicating international surrogacy in particular by restricting travel, delaying birth certificates and visas, and introducing specific considerations about safety and well-being. In addition, the pandemic has created new challenges to engaging in international surrogacy ethically due to changes in how healthcare is administered, limiting face-to-face interactions, and of course, increasing the health risks for everyone involved – women and other people acting as surrogates and egg donors, genetic intended parents undergoing medical procedures, and babies born through surrogacy. These challenges continue even as the landscape of the pandemic changes, given variation between countries in vaccination access.
What does it mean to approach international surrogacy ethically? An ethical approach strives to minimize the effects of gender, economic, global, and racial inequities that impact the bargaining power of people acting as surrogate or egg donors. The vast majority of people acting as surrogates and egg donors are women, and addressing the impact of gender inequality and the control and regulation of women’s bodies are core aspects of an ethical...
Related Articles
By Ian Sample, The Guardian | 03.08.2024
Scientists are a step closer to making IVF eggs from patients’ skin cells after adapting the procedure that created Dolly the sheep, the first cloned mammal, more than two decades ago.
The work raises the prospect of older women being...
By Gerry Smith, Bloomberg | 03.12.2024
When Celenise Mahmood first learned about two new gene therapies that could cure sickle cell disease, she felt a wave of relief.
Her 9-year-old son, Navid, has the inherited blood disorder. By age 5, he’d had over 30 life-saving blood...
By Liz Baker, Debbie Elliott, and Susanna Capelouto, NPR | 03.06.2024
The Alabama State Legislature passed a bill Wednesday night granting civil and criminal immunity for in vitro fertilization service providers and receivers.
Republican Governor Kay Ivey signed the bill into law within an hour of it passing the Alabama...
By Daniel Gilbert, The Washington Post | 03.07.2024
Vitaly Kushnir’s fertility clinic offers to screen an embryo to predict a baby’s sex, but the service can lead to ethically murky territory, like when a couple wanted it so their first child could be a boy.
But the couple...