Moral Dilemmas of Surrogate Motherhood

Abstract In the sphere of new modalities of creating offspring, one of the most controversial issues is related to surrogacy because it opens the space to unforeseeable ethical, legal, sociological and psychological world of dilemmas. Surrogacy is the process whereby a woman carries and gives birth to a baby for a couple who cannot conceive naturally and it has become increasingly popular worldwide. This reproductive method relativized the biological fact of birth and denied the central moment in identifying motherhood, expressed in the ancient Roman proverb that the mother of a child is the woman who gave birth to it. Surrogate motherhood changes the notion of motherhood as it separates the natural functions of a woman as a mother, or it separates the genetic from the gestational motherhood. In such a situation, the biological riddle is: Who is the real mother of the child: the one who gives the genetic material or the one who gives birth to it? The answer to this question opens many moral and ethical dilemmas in complex relationships: the surrogate mother, the couple-clients and the child. As the successful medical practice of giving birth to another undeniably exists in different countries of the world, the further fate of this method of reproduction will significantly depend on ethical justifications.