Surrogacy and feminism

[TheBossofMe]

Just picking up on a point that Sakura raised a little while ago on another thread about surrogacy. Is it anti-feminist? Will confess to having seriously made surrogacy arrangements with a friend (her egg, my womb, baby for each of us) in the past (not needed by either of us in the end). Did my desire to have a child blind me to the oppressive nature of surrogacy, ie reducing women to a talking womb?

EAP, I am obviously not comparing safety levels in that analogy.

I am using the match girl example to demonstrate how people make incredibly awful choices of their own free will because they have very imited choices. If women were prepared to choose to be a match girl because they needed the money, then women with limited choices due to poverty could certainly be pushed into surrogacy with its lesser risks.

KittyTN, children who are adopted are very rarely newborn babies, so the idea that the child is a commodity provided by a mother seems odd. The child may have been in foster care or a children's home or looked after by another family member for years.

But I do agree that the stereotypical tv scenario of older middle class couples paying for babies from poor young mothers does have some similarities to surrogacy, and it must happen in reality in the US. In some ways I find it even more disturbing than surrogacy, because it is lot of socially constructed morals and economic situations that are encouraging that teenager to be in a position where she feels she cannot raise her own child.