WOMBS FOR RENT? COMMODIFICATION, DIGNITY, AND THE LIMITS OF CONTRACT IN COMMERCIAL SURROGACY
Commercial surrogacy raises the question of whether the gestational capacities of women, and the children born of those capacities, may legitimately be made objects of contract and sale. This paper examines the commodification thesis, which refers to the claim that commercial surrogacy reduces the surrogate's body and the resulting child to marketable commodities. The paper sets five competing positions in dialogue: the Marxist–feminist critique that surrogacy is capitalist exploitation of women's reproductive labour; the liberal-feminist concern that commercial pressure undermines genuine consent; the libertarian defence of surrogacy as a legitimate exercise of bodily autonomy and free exchange; the qualified liberal-feminist endorsement of regulated surrogacy as reproductive empowerment; and the communitarian objection, associated with Michael Sandel, that commercial surrogacy corrupts the moral meaning of gestation by subjecting it to market norms. The paper argues, rather, by using a Kantian conception of dignity, which posits that persons, and the processes constitutive of personhood, must never be treated merely as means, to offer a defensible ground for resisting full commodification, while still permitting a regulated, non-exploitative model of surrogacy that respects the autonomy of the surrogate. The Nigerian case, in which commercial surrogacy proceeds in a near-total regulatory vacuum, is presented as an illustration of what unchecked commodification looks like in practice. The paper concludes by proposing a dignity-constrained framework for evaluating surrogacy arrangements that neither romanticises gestational labour nor reduces it to a fungible service.
Keywords: commercial surrogacy, commodification, human dignity, Kantian ethics, reproductive autonomy, contract