Global surrogacy: Exploitation to empowerment

Commercial surrogacy has gone global in the last decade, and India has become the international centre for reproductive tourism, boasting numerous high-quality and low-fee clinics. The growth of the surrogacy industry in India raises serious concerns of global gender justice, in particular whether the option is inordinately enticing for women who lack other remunerable options and whether the conditions are adequate and the compensation fair. In this paper I argue that the moral harm of global commercial surrogacy lies in the exploitative nature of transactions involving unequally vulnerable parties. More specifically, I argue that the practice exploits Indian surrogates on the basis of an inter-contractual failure of both justice and consent. I go on to consider an important objection to my use of exploitation as the relevant conceptual tool of analysis. The ethnographic challenge holds that the exploitation lens Occidentalizes surrogacy by conceptualizing the practice in universalizing terms, thereby eclipsing the particularities of the global surrogate's lived experience. I respond by showing that in fact the exploitation and the ethnographic models are not so at odds as they might seem. Provided we are careful in our use of the former to nuance our analysis by appeal to narrative evidence supplied by the latter, we are thereby best situated to identify and address the moral difficulties generated by commercial surrogacy under conditions of global injustice

Assisted Reproduction and Distributive Justice

The Canadian province of Quebec recently amended its Health Insurance Act to cover the costs of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). The province of Ontario recently de-insured IVF. Both provinces cited cost-effectiveness as their grounds, but the question as to whether a public health insurance system ought to cover IVF raises the deeper question of how we should understand reproduction at the social level, and whether its costs should be a matter of individual or collective responsibility. In this article I examine three strategies for justifying collective provisions in a liberal society and assess whether public reproductive assistance can be defended on any of these accounts. I begin by considering, and rejecting, rights-based and needs-based approaches. I go on to argue that instead we ought to address assisted reproduction from the perspective of the contractarian insurance-based model for public health coverage, according to which we select items for inclusion based on their unpredictability in nature and cost. I argue that infertility qualifies as an unpredictable incident against which rational agents would choose to insure under ideal conditions and that assisted reproduction is thereby a matter of collective responsibility, but only in cases of medical necessity or inability to pay. The policy I endorse by appeal to this approach is a means-tested system of coverage resembling neither Ontario nor Quebec's, and I conclude that it constitutes a promising alternative worthy of serious consideration by bioethicists, political philosophers, and policy-makers alike

Contested Markets and Commodification Studies

International audienceThis volume aims to define a field of interdisciplinary research we deem commodification studies, which asks why some things can be alienated by gift but not by sale. Markets for organs, sex, or emissions, for example, are said to be contested, noxious, or repugnant. But what makes them distinct from other markets, such that their prohibition or regulation might be required? In this introduction, we specify the central question of commodification studies, and then offer a theoretical overview of its origins. From there we make our case for having organized a volume on commodification studies according to the types of goods and markets that are most widely contested (political goods, physical goods, and environmental goods) and present in brief the arguments of our contributors. We conclude by identifying challenges for future research

Why Cash Violates Neutrality

Egalitarian liberal political philosophers have been at pains to show that there is a nonnegligible “place” for liberty within the framework of an egalitarian theory of justice. Thus, many have insisted that, when redistribution is required in order to achieve greater equality, assets should be transferred in the most abstract form possible, ideally through a system of cash transfers. In this article we argue that this strategy has the potential to generate significant violations of neutrality. The problem arises from the fact that individuals with certain rates of time preference often want to use social institutions as self-binding mechanisms and as a result may exhibit a preference for in-kind benefits or other institutional arrangements that are frequently misclassified as paternalistic. We argue that egalitarians who rely on cash transfers as a way of accommodating the demands of liberty do so at the expense of neutrality

The Routledge Handbook of Commodification

International audienceSome goods are freely traded as commodities without question or controversy. For other goods, their commodification – their being made available in exchange for money, or their being subject to market valuation and exchange – is hotly contested. “Contested” commodities range from labour and land, to votes, healthcare, and education, to human organs, gametes, and intimate services, to parks and emissions. But in the context of a market economy, what distinguishes these goods as non-commodifiable, or what defines them as contestable commodities? And why should their status as such justify restricting the market choices of rationally consenting parties to otherwise voluntary exchanges?This volume draws together wide-ranging, interdisciplinary research on the legitimate scope of markets and the kinds of goods that should be exempt therefrom. In bringing diverse answers to this question together for the first time, it finally identifies commodification studies as a unique field of scholarly research in its own right. In so doing, it fosters interdisciplinary dialogue, advances scholarship, and enhances education in this controversial, important, and growing field of research. Contemporary theorists who examine this question do so from across the disciplinary spectrum and ground their answers in diverse scholarly literature and divergent methodological approaches. Their arguments will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy, economics, law, political science, sociology, policy, feminist theory, and ecology, among others.The contributors to this volume take diverse and divergent positions on the benefits of markets in general and on the possible harms of specific contested markets in particular. While some favour free markets and others regulation or prohibition, and while some engage in more normative and others in more empirical analysis, the contributors all advance nuanced and thoughtful arguments that engage deeply with the complex set of moral and empirical questions at the heart of commodification studies. This volume collects their new and provocative work together for the first time