Exploitation, Commodification and Harm: The Ethics of Commercial Surrogacy (Video Talk)

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I recently participated in a conference on the reform of surrogacy laws in Ireland. The conference was organised by my colleague Dr. Brian Tobin. I spoke about the ethics of commercial surrogacy vis-a-vis altruistic forms. You can watch the talk at the link above. There is some annoying 'fuzz' in the audio, but I think it still possible to watch it and get something out of it. Check out the other videos from the conference too.

Brief Description: It seems to be the case that many countries legalise altruistic forms of surrogacy but refuse to legalise commercial forms. The Irish government have explicitly said they favour this approach. The goal of my talk was to query whether altruistic forms of surrogacy should always be presumed to be superior to commercial forms. To this end, I assessed the merits of commercial surrogacy in light of three key ethical concepts: (i) harm; (ii) exploitation; and (iii) commodification.