Storks, Surrogates and the Substitution Problem

This project investigates a foundational problem in philosophy of parenthood and reproductive ethics: How do we acquire parental rights? What makes my child ‘mine’?  

The strong moral rights of biological parents to raise their own offspring are often taken for granted, but questions of parental rights become significantly more complicated when we consider adoption and assisted reproduction. When accounting for our divergent moral and legal treatment of adoption and assisted reproduction, scholars in this field have generally presupposed that these are clearly distinct practices. However, the starting point of this project is that this boundary is far more blurred than we might think.  

Reproductive medicine offers various ‘substitution’ options for those wishing to become parents. If a couple conceive a child using donor sperm, they are still considered the parents of that child, with all the associated rights and responsibilities. However, if we substitute all reproductive contributions (e.g. by using a sperm donor and a gestational surrogate, who also donates her eggs), we arrive at a situation in which there is no biological relationship between the prospective parents and child. In other words, they have the same biological relationship to their child as adoptive parents.

My question, then, is: how many ‘substitutions’ can be made simultaneously before a person is no longer being assisted in having a baby, but is adopting (or, in commercial arrangements, buying) somebody else’s baby?