A Legal-Political Framework for Feminist Bioethics: The Case of International Gestational Surrogacy

Abstract

The article examines the ethics and politics of international gestational surrogacy contracts through a three-dimensional framework that combines political accounts of framework precariousness, accounts of norm incompatibility in contracting scenarios, and feminist accounts of domination. This framework, which can be applied to a host of contemporary bioethical controversies, articulates the ways in which individuals' medical experiences are shaped and determined by social structures (e.g., the law) that lie beyond their field of control, thus pushing feminist bioethics toward closer collaboration with legal and political theory.