Ethical Conflicts of Surrogacy: A review of Literature

Abstract

The ethical conflicts that have arisen in the last decade regarding the topic of surrogacy have led different stakeholders to conduct research to avoid maternal-perinatal complications. This review explores the topic of surrogate motherhood and its associated ethical conflicts, as well as its implications for health professionals. For this review, a search was conducted on data bases such as PubMed, Scopus, Scielo, Google Scholar and Bireme, to identify studies on ethical conflicts related to surrogacy. The time frame was from January 2013 to January 2023. Through a qualitative synthesis the articles were grouped into three thematic areas: First, ethical conflicts of subrogated motherhood in the social and legal sphere; second, ethical conflicts of subrogated motherhood in the individual sphere (physical and mental conflicts for mother and child and women filiation and oppression); and third, the practice of health professionals. Commercial surrogate motherhood attempts against human dignity and the superior interests of children by placing pregnant women and newborns as commercial objects. More than certainties, health professionals are left with challenges and opportunities.

Keywords

• surrogacy
• bioethics
• health sciences