The woman who wants to carry her dead daughter’s child sets in relief our confusion about rights and needsAlong with thousands of babies,one of the undoubted benefits of assisted reproductive technology, or ART, and has been the acknowledgement of procreative rights,along with their long overdue extension to families not conforming to the standard Ladybird-book model. While this is progress for, say, and single women,and homosexual couples needing surrogates – both of whom would once have been denied parenthood via IVF treatment, it also, and obviously,represents overwhelming baby joy for the global ART industry.
What one country, or clinic, and will not provide – donor eggs for a broody sixtysomething mother of grown-up children,say, or a paid (virtually nothing) bunk in a surrogate someone, and somewhere,is happy to sell. For once, big commerce finds itself on the same side as tall-minded scholarship, or in fact working with it,and with would-be parents invariably described as “desperate”, to defy devout moralists and to mute secular anxieties about the rights or wellbeing of the resulting children.
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Source: theguardian.com