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From: morphy@cobalt.cco.caltech.EDU (Jones Maxime Murphy)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Can we sell our bodies and our rights?
Message-ID: <9010261655.AA05142@cobalt.cco.caltech.edu>
Date: 26 Oct 90 18:27:13 GMT
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In the Caribbean, during the period of African slavery, 400 years or
so, there was also white slavery. In my country, for instance, there
were Irish and Scottish white slaves, known as indentured servants.
These were people who had signed away their freedom for a price.

By modern standards, such a contract would be unenforceable. We now
view a person as having attached firmly to themselves certain
inalienible rights that cannot be sold or bought. We now view our
forebears' approach to the question of human rights as primitive and
untenable.

I feel that the same approach to maternal rights must be taken. The
idea that a woman can be treated purely as gestational equipment has a
long and dishonourable history. I simply do not agree that surrogacy
contracts should be enforceable. We already have laws which render
void the offering of children for adoption for financial gain. We
should immediately extend such laws to surrogacy to prevent the kinds
of chaos we are seeing now.

I believe that that to some extent is the rationale for proscriptions
against prostitution, although those proscriptions also have a basis
in prudery as well.

Should women be unable to rent their vaginas in one context, but be
free to do so in another (barring Caesarian surrogacy, of course)? I
think not.

Comments?

Jones