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Legal Change and Stigma in Surrogacy and Abortion

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

John A. Robertson
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Extract

The role of stigma in limiting reproductive rights has long hovered in the air. Paula Abrams has sorted through the concept and shown how it operates in two major areas of procreative liberty — having a child through surrogacy and avoiding childbirth by abortion. Her paper is especially useful for showing how legal change initially dilutes stigma but may reinstall it with post-legalization regulation.

Abrams argues that both abortion and surrogacy are stigmatized because they deviate from traditional gender roles and social expectations about pregnancy and maternity. Past restrictions have rested on a common legal and cultural paradigm of the good mother: a woman who conceives, carries her child to term, and then rears the child. Indeed, as she later argues, evidence of stigma surrounding a practice is “relevant to determining whether laws regulating abortion or surrogacy are based on impermissible stereotyping.”

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 43 , Issue 2 , Summer 2015 , pp. 192 - 195
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2015

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References

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In Genesis Abraham is the rearing father, and Sarah's maidservant Hagar is the genetic and gestational mother. If Sarah, Abraham's wife, rears Ishmael, then it is a case of traditional surrogacy. If Hagar rears him, it would not be a case of surrogacy at all.Google Scholar
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