Surrogacy is a murky exploitative business at best, where those unable or unwilling to conceive and give birth pay a woman to do it for them. Well, here's a brave new leap forward in the surrogacy world: why use live women when you can use dead women instead? Anna Slatz at Reduxx:
An entry from the Journal of Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics is prompting outrage from women on social media after theorizing that the bodies of vegetative or braindead female patients could be utilized as “whole body gestational” surrogates.
The article, originally published in November of 2022, is titled Whole Body Gestational Donation, and floats the concept of utilizing vegetative women’s entire bodies as surrogates for “prospective parents who wish to have children but cannot, or prefer not to, gestate.”
Written by Anna Smajdor, a Professor of Practical Philosophy at the University of Oslo, Norway, the article proposes that it may be viable to utilize the donated bodies of women for gestational purposes in the same manner as donated organs are used.
A lab with rows of brain-dead women gestating babies….could there be any moral issues here, I wonder?
“I suggest if we are happy to accept organ donation in general, the issues raised by whole-body gestational donation are differences of degree rather than substantive new concerns,” Smajdor writes in her abstract.
“As with many surrogacy arrangements, commissioning parents may prefer to create an embryo for implantation using their own gametes or those of donors. Thus, impregnation could be a surgical affair, preceded and followed by appropriate hormonal therapy to ensure maximal chance of success.”
Nah, it's fine. We just have to recalibrate our ethics in line with the advance of science. It's clearly the logical next step in surrogacy. And once the women's bodies have done their gestational job, just throw them away. Or – why not? – use them again and again for more babies.
Though there are, needless to say, the moaners:
I say this sincerely: I can imagine few things more horrifying, dystopian, and signifying of total societal moral collapse than harvesting the bodies of dead women and keeping them functionally "alive" as surrogates. Surrogacy must be eradicated. https://t.co/pzGJWuBOjJ
— Tom Farr (@uracontra_) January 31, 2023
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This is not Anna Smajdor’s first foray into medical ethics controversy.
In 2013, Smajdor came to international attention after she argued that “compassion” was not a necessary component of healthcare….
The year prior, she had proposed an “artificial wombs” theory which would see babies gestated in mechanical environments in order to advance “equality.”
Well yes, that would work.
Mick Hartley 
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