SUMMER REPLAY: Why shouldn't surrogates just charge what the market will bear?

We live in a capitalist society. Work in high demand gets higher pay. Why should surrogacy be different? Some unfinished thoughts.

This item was originally published in HeyReprotech on 9 May 2023. My thoughts are still unfinished.

3 minute read

The older I get, the more troubled I am by capitalism — about how it values goods, services, resources, and people.

But despite my philosophical objections, I go about my daily life in a mostly-capitalist context. I tacitly accept that most things have a price and that often those prices don't make sense — like an early childhood educator earning less than a parking lot attendant.

In Canada, we have a law that says it is legal to have a person carry a child for you but not legal to pay that person to do it.

The reason we have this law, I believe, is that the people who made the law did not approve of surrogacy; they wanted to deter people. I think they thought that, without the incentive of payment, only a sister or cousin or best friend would ever step up. In their minds, this was the least-awful version of surrogacy.

It turns out that their prediction was not entirely correct. It's rare, but it does happen that a person offers to carry a child for a complete stranger for absolutely nothing in return. I’ve interviewed people who have done that.

Another intent of the law was to prevent poor women from being lured into surrogacy by the promise of money. I don't like the idea of people being lured into things against their best interests, but I do find it odd which things we worry about.

We use money to entice people into the military, for instance, and into mining and firefighting and construction. Like surrogacy, these jobs ask a person to take on physical and even psychological risk, but there's no debate over whether they should be remunerated.

We also don't seem opposed to poor people being lured by money into undesirable work. Consider delivery people, cashiers, or people who answer phones in call centres. Many of these workers would never do this labour if not for the "lure" of the money. So the concern over surrogacy is not fundamentally a concern over poverty.

Notably, even in jurisdictions where payment for surrogacy is legal and accepted, such as in certain US states, there's often the feeling that the amount paid "shouldn't be" too high. It would be somehow obscene.

So what is it about surrogacy? What is so troubling about people being paid to do it?

At the heart of it seems to be the feeling that gestating a child is a special kind of activity, one that is somehow above monetization.

Maybe. But in what way is it special? It can't be merely about "creating life." Doctors doing IVF are involved in that, too, and no one suggests they should do what they do without pay. Ditto embryologists and lab technicians — they get paid without controversy.

In our capitalist world, there aren't in fact many activities that we deem too special to monetize, or monetize fully. But the ones that we struggle with the most seem always to be associated with being female. Is that in some way part of the answer — that work provided by a female body feels too special for money? Just a thought.

Here's the question that keeps rattling around in my head. What if we treated gestation like every other competency in the marketplace? What if we simply let the market decide?

What would happen? What would the market bear?

Would higher compensation give a surrogate more status? Would it give her more bargaining power? Would it bring her more respect?

What if we applied the same logic to surrogates that we apply to CEOs? "No one else had just the right qualities." "She had the right experience." "This job involves enormous trust." "We were hiring her to manage extremely valuable assets."

I'm not saying it should be this way. I'm just saying that, given the world we live in, I can't entirely make a case for why it shouldn't.