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Who Will Safeguard Transnational Surrogates’ Interests? Lessons from the Israeli Case Study

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2019

Ruth Zafran  and
Daphna Hacker
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Abstract

This article seeks to establish the extent to which the voices and interests of transnational commercial surrogates—women who are paid by intended parents from another country for carrying a pregnancy—are accounted for by those with power to shape the policy around this complex area in the country of the intended parents. Through a first-of-its-kind qualitative study of the viewpoints of policy makers and government officials, taking Israel as a case study, the research maps the hierarchy of interests in Israel as the country of the intended parents, in which the rights and well-being of the transnational surrogates are largely neglected. The study finds that, even when awareness of the vulnerability of transnational surrogates is relatively evolved among officials, they admit that the motivation and ability of the country of the intended parents to supervise the protection of the surrogates—during a process that takes place in another country—are extremely limited. Equipped with the empirical findings, the article examines the actual and potential regulative arenas relevant to transnational surrogacy (also known as international surrogacy), and offers an alternative normative framework to correct the current regulative failure in providing much-needed legal protection for transnational surrogates.

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Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 44 , Issue 4 , November 2019 , pp. 1141 - 1173
Copyright
© 2019 American Bar Foundation 

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Footnotes

We thank the Mission Droit et Justice (the Ministry of Justice of the French Republic) for supporting the study reported in this article: Legal and Sociological Analysis of the French Context Considering Foreign Practices Related to Filiation of Children Conceived through Surrogacy Abroad (United Kingdom, Belgium, Israel) (http://www.gip-recherche-justice.fr/publication/analyse-juridique-et-sociologique-de-letat-des-questions-en-france-a-la-lumiere-des-pratiques-etrangeres-en-matiere-de-filiation-des-enfants-concus-hors-la-loi-belgique-grande-bretagne-israel/) and Dr. Karène Parizer-Krief for initiating the multinational research group we were part of. We also thank the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya and the Cegla Center for the Interdisciplinary Research of the Law at Tel Aviv University Law Faculty for their generous support; Amanda Dale for her editing; and Dasi Anderman-Shahar, Zohar Fort, Tal Ronen, Daniel Findler, and Eynat Meytahl for their research assistance. We also thank Ayelet Blecher-Prigat, Leslie P. Francis, Michele Goodwin, Lisa Ikemoto, Laura T. Kessler, Radhika Rao, and Amnon Reichman for their useful insights.

References

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