Features of a Booming Reproductive Practice: The Medical Process, the Market, the Antecedents, and the Risks

Abstract

AbstractSurrogacy is a social practice aimed at the procreation of human beings through the use of biomedical technologies. It includes the willingness of a woman to carry out a pregnancy and give birth to a child, with whom she has no genetic link, which will be immediately entrusted at birth to the people who wanted and commissioned it, known as the intended parents. A multi-million transnational market has flourished around this kind of arrangement, with the national legal frameworks being very different from each other and constantly changing. The surrogate’s revenue varies considerably from country to country, as does the price that the aspiring parents pay. This chapter aims to introduce readers to the topic by providing the main coordinates of the phenomenon: how the medical-procreative procedure takes place, what the commercial transaction consists of; the history of this market, the similarity of surrogacy with other procreative practices, and the difference with other assisted procreation practices; the variety of regulatory frameworks, the flexibility of the market according to the logic of globalization; the health risks and the inevitability for the child of the fracture with the “environment” in which he began his psychophysical development.