It is tempting to treat surrogacy first as a human-rights or ethics problem: the claim that it amounts to trafficking plus organ removal, a process that turns a person into a commodity. That is a real line of inquiry. The trouble is that it quickly expands into broader questions—is selling one's labor also selling the body? Which things should be tradable at all?—until the definition of the problem loses its edges and no conclusion is possible. The discussion can still be useful, but it is not where I would stop.
The gender question is the hard one
For me, surrogacy returns us to gender. In other human-rights questions, the subject is the same: a person. Any distinctions rest on less visible factors. Everyone may face the risk of trafficking or organ removal, even though different scenarios produce different gender biases: boys are more often trafficked to childless families, while girls are more often trafficked into mountain villages as child brides. There is no absolute gender characteristic in that. Selling one's labor at work is also something anyone may face.
Surrogacy is different because it singles out a function only women have: gestation and birth. Once reproduction is in view, people sometimes reason from autonomy. If a woman has the right to abortion, why not the right to choose to carry a child for someone else? The comparison sounds neat, but it misses the direction of the right. At a macro level, abortion is a degendered right: it emphasizes the person, not the woman. Banning abortion imposes on women the status of 'mother'—a status that lowers their social position while raising the moral demands placed on them—and pushes them further from being ordinary people. Surrogacy runs the other way: it emphasizes 'woman' and not 'person'. Encouraging surrogacy and blocking abortion push women in the same direction, even if one looks like liberation and the other like coercion. The language of 'choice' blurs that fact.
Reproduction has already placed a heavy social burden on women. Any move that stresses reproduction—positively through surrogacy, or negatively through abortion restrictions, or through IUDs that make contraception a woman's responsibility—only deepens inequality between men and women.
The obvious objection is sex work. Sex workers are not exclusively women, but historically buyers have mainly been men and providers mainly women. That, too, seems to emphasize women rather than people. Why, then, is there a growing call to normalize the sex industry? At that level, I agree that sex work and surrogacy can be compared. But the harm to the person does not come close to the harm of surrogacy. Even granting the most charitable case for a voluntary sex worker—they may at least experience sexual pleasure—childbearing for women is all cost and no benefit. Trading sex and trading a uterus are not equivalent.
If men could become pregnant and give birth, then we could go back to the broad human-rights conversation. Until then, gender cannot be avoided.
The demand is real; the industry is not
None of this makes the demand disappear. Real discussions cannot be conducted as if only saints deserve a hearing; human nature is human nature. But one thing should be resisted in every form—capital lobbying or a spontaneous black market: the industrialization of surrogacy.
At the individual level, if surrogacy is to answer the wish of some infertile couples or same-sex couples for a child, and if those parents are willing to take on the responsibility of raising one, then 'if we must face surrogacy' I would propose a rule: one-to-one, once. The two sides must have some degree of familiarity, and a woman who is willing can provide surrogacy only once in her life. This is not a clean solution; it demands a great deal of social administration.
Surrogacy is complex and multi-sided. These are my provisional thoughts from where I stand now; I may change them.