Towards the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood

Marie-Josèphe Devillers and Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram (Eds)

Surrogacy is not liberty. It is a crime. Women will not settle for junk liberty. We want real freedom – the substance, not just the appearance. We want real nourishment for our spirits. We want human dignity. We want it for all of us. We want it for women in Thailand and Bangladesh and Mexico as well as for the women who have not yet been born.
—Gena Corea

In this eloquent and blistering rejection of surrogacy, a range of international activists and experts in the field outline the fundamental human rights abuses that occur when surrogacy is legalised and reject neoliberal notions that the commodification of women’s bodies can ever be about the ‘choices’ women make.

Yoshie Yanagihara shows how feminist ideas have been twisted to extend men’s freedom and their rights to access surrogacy. Catherine Lynch rails against surrogacy as the creation of babies for the express purpose of removal from their mothers, outlining the tragic outcomes for adopted people. Phyllis Chesler argues that commercial surrogacy is matricidal, “slicing and dicing biological motherhood” into egg donor, ‘gestational’ mother and adoptive mother. Melissa Farley debunks the myth of ‘choice’ in surrogacy, arguing that in a male-dominated and racist system, the exploitative sale of women in surrogacy, like in prostitution, is inherently harmful —rich women do not make the choice to become surrogates or prostitutes.

Other contributors to this book, which is published in conjunction with the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood, are Gena Corea, Renate Klein, Gary Powell, Rita Banerji, Marie-Josèphe Devillers, Laura Isabel Gómez García, Alexandra Clément-Saby, Taina Bien-Aimé, Silvia Guerini, Laura Nuño Gómez and Eva Maria Bachinger.

Editors Marie-Josèphe Devillers and Ana-Luana Stoicea-Deram are long-term activists against surrogacy and live in France.

Harm cannot be regulated, because this would mean spreading and universalising it.
—Silvia Guerini

NOVEMBER 2021 | ISBN 9781925950427 | Paperback | 152 mm x 228 mm | 232 pp