Relational surrogacies excluded from the French bioethics model: a euro-american perspective in the light of Marcel Mauss and Louis Dumont

Abstract

In the French context of prohibition of surrogacy by a legislative framework established in 1994, couples are using surrogacy abroad to create their family. Why does surrogacy not find room in the landscape of donor-conceived families in France? Based on a survey among French intended parents using surrogacy in the USA and Belgium, and a 2-year ethnography on medical practice in a fertility centre in Belgium, this study shows that surrogacy is, in fact, a particular type of gift: the gift of gestational capacity. The preconceptional journey in Belgium or in the USA is a relational process that allows complementary places and statuses to be acquired. This process will transform applicants into intended parents (recipients), and candidates into surrogates (donors). The relationships created by the gift have the particularity of being woven around responsibility towards the fetus. It is the hierarchy of encompassing and encompassed responsibilities in relation to the fetus that organizes the relationships and actions of each protagonist: parents, grandparents, surrogate, surrogate’s partner and children, etc. The article thus shows that surrogacy, because it is a gift of a particular type, has no place in the French bioethics model, which is, in fact, built entirely on the notion of ‘donation without a donor’ in a therapeutic and medicalized view of reproductive donations.