Should a Woman Be Allowed to Hire a Surrogate Because She Fears Pregnancy Will Hurt Her Career?

About three years after they got married, in 2007, wedding photographer Mari Smith* and her husband began batting around the question of when to have kids. “We gotta get started on this,” he’d say.

“I know,” she’d reply. “Just not now.”

A few months shy of Smith’s thirty-seventh birthday, “now” seemed like the worst time ever. After plodding through the recession, her business had finally picked up. She’d come a long way from the early days when she’d made as little as $15,000 a year and had to do family portraits on the side. Now clients booked her months in advance for million-dollar weddings and flew her as far as Thailand and Mexico. Although she and her accountant husband earned a combined income in the low six figures, Smith craved financial stability and was working 60 hours a week to build her brand.

How was she supposed to fit a pregnancy into that schedule? What if she had Kate Middleton’s severe morning sickness? Or a complication such as gestational diabetes or high blood pressure, which were more likely in women...