Reproductive Rights and Surrogate Motherhood: Legislative, Doctrinal and Bioethical Principles

Abstract

The sphere of reproductive rights is still beyond the scope of a thorough legal analysis, and it is not given due attention in the legal literature. This may be due to the fact that the concept of reproductive rights is new to Ukrainian law and has not yet found its proper place in the general system of law. There is a lack of scientific development in the issue of protection of the rights of the child to birth, trafficking in human beings for the purpose of exploiting surrogate mothers or children born as a result of surrogate motherhood, etc. The purpose of the study is to analyze the legislative, doctrinal and moral aspects of reproductive rights and to identify effective legal measures to improve the legal regulation of surrogate motherhood in Ukraine and the proper legal protection of the child before and after birth. Experimenting with human gene material as a conception in vitro turns children into a commodity. There is an artificial situation in which wealthy men will hire women to provide contracting services to their offspring. It is difficult to disagree that in surrogate motherhood, as in any business, personal financial gain dominates. So, from this point of view, surrogacy is a kind of market and business. The conception of the child is not a right, but an opportunity that is not given to all, but surrogate motherhood turns the child into an "object of economic agreement and contract, a kind of ordering of goods." The child cannot be considered as an object of property. It is unacceptable to consider the practice of surrogacy as ethical. In addition, forced commercial surrogate motherhood falls within the definition of trafficking in human beings. The issue of reproductive technology must be addressed in such a way that the child born as a result of surrogate motherhood does not fall prey to further exploitation. The author concluded that in many countries with a licensing or altruistic regime, many aspects of the use of assisted reproductive technologies and surrogate motherhood remain unregulated. There is no clear understanding of all the principles and standards governing the use of assisted reproductive technologies and surrogacy agreements. In general, the legislation lacks sufficient standards and provisions to protect the rights of parties to surrogacy agreements. The most controversial issues are the rights of the surrogate mother, the expectant parents and the children born as a result of the surrogate motherhood. At the present stage, legal adaptation of society to the development of medicine in the field of reproductive technologies has not yet taken place in Ukraine. Cases such as the birth of several children by surrogate mothers, births of a child with developmental disabilities, birth of a dead child or miscarriage, the need for an artificial interruption of pregnancy according to the medical opinion of doctors, the termination of marriage by genetic parents, the death of one or both parents. Keywords: reproductive rights, surrogacy motherhood, legal regulation, legal protection, embryo, child rights, family, surrogacy agreement.