Bioethical Issues concerning Reproductive Technologies: Gestational Surrogacy and Human Rights
The purpose of my research is to analyse the human rights and ethical principles involved and questioned when using assisted reproductive technologies in surrogacy arrangements. I intend to build a theoretical structure for the practice itself, focusing then on the technologies adopted and the bioethical issues that stem from them.
The first part of my my research is devoted to the study of the state of art, analysing the remarks linked to the practice’s rationale and the debates around surrogacy. This section also offers an overview of the cluster of human and reproductive rights which are involved in the practice, studying the position of surrogates, intended parents, and children born through the practice, providing a particularistic analysis of them.
It is often remarked that reproductive technologies, through cross-border reproductive care, create an “outsource” of reproductive labour. This is easily highlighted looking at the heterogeneous regulation across states regarding surrogacy. Within this system, arrangements between parents and surrogates from different countries provide adequate protection neither for the child nor to the gestational carrier. The attempt to register the status of the child born through surrogacy in the state where the practice is prohibited often ends with no legal parent recognition and with the declaration of the state of adoptability. In this context, many concerns regarding surrogacy are still to be faced, since thus far the method of dispute resolution has been a case-law approach, which not always ensures certainty of law and inevitably lengthens the duration of the process of recognizing the child’s status.
