Surrogacy

Mécary sorts the confusion into three broad families, and the sorting clarifies a lot. The first is outright prohibition. France is the textbook case: surrogacy agreements are null, and for years the children born abroad through them could not have their foreign birth certificates fully recognized at home. The logic rests on two French legal pillars — the body is not available for commerce, and a person's civil status is not something one can bargain away. Several European countries share this stance, treating the whole arrangement as incompatible with public order.

The second family permits surrogacy but strips out the money. This is altruistic surrogacy, allowed in places like the United Kingdom, where a woman may carry a child for others but cannot be paid beyond reasonable expenses, and where no contract is enforceable against her. The surrogate here is meant to be a volunteer, often a relative or friend, and the law bends to protect her right to change her mind. The ethical bet is that removing payment removes exploitation — that a gift is cleaner than a sale.

Behind the three regimes sit ethical arguments that, Mécary notes, tend to talk past one another. The case against surrogacy leans on dignity and exploitation. To permit payment for carrying a child, the argument runs, is to make the body a commodity and to invite the better-off to rent the wombs of the poorer — a traffic that no amount of regulation can fully launder. There is also the worry about the surrogate's bond with the child she carries, severed by contract before it can be felt, and the fear that women's labor is being disguised as a free choice when economic pressure is doing the choosing.

The case for surrogacy answers on the ground of autonomy. An adult woman, the argument goes, may decide what to do with her own body, including carrying a pregnancy for someone unable to. To forbid it is paternalism dressed as protection — it tells women they cannot be trusted with a decision we let them make in nearly every other domain. And prohibition, defenders point out, does not end the practice; it simply exports it to places with weaker safeguards, leaving the surrogate more exposed, not less.

Step back from the adults and the contracts, and one figure remains after every argument has been made: the child who is actually born. Whatever a country decided in principle, the baby arrives, and someone has to be their parent on paper. Here the inconsistency between regimes stops being a debate and becomes a problem with a face. Mécary's work circles back, again and again, to this — the child is the one party who signed nothing, chose nothing, and yet bears the consequences of every legal disagreement.

The French situation showed how sharp this can get. For years, a child born abroad through surrogacy might be legally parentless at home, their foreign birth certificate refused transcription because the practice that produced it was banned. The child existed but had no recognized filiation, no secure nationality, no straightforward claim to inheritance or the ordinary protections a legal parent provides. The adults had crossed a border; the child was left straddling it. It took rulings from the European Court of Human Rights, insisting that a child's right to a private life includes having their parentage recognized, to force a change — the state could punish the adults' choice, but it could not make the child stateless or parentless to do so.

The couple returning from Kyiv, the sister carrying for free, the agency drafting contracts in California — they belong to a single word and to utterly different realities. Mécary's survey leaves the map as fractured as she found it: prohibition, altruism, and commerce answering questions that do not line up, held apart by premises about the body, the gift, and the contract that no conference is likely to reconcile. The inconsistency is not a bug awaiting a fix. It is what happens when deeply held and genuinely incompatible values meet a practice that crosses every border.