Ethical Discussion About Surrogacy

Surrogacy is a modern medical treatment, which is the process that a woman carries and delivers the baby for another person or another couple. Ethical problems of this medical technology have been discussed frequently in recent years. Some arguments support surrogacy, some against. Those arguments and ethical issues involved in will be discussed in this paper.

From the scientific point of view, there are two major types of surrogacy, which are traditional surrogacy and gestational surrogacy (Brinsden 484). Those two types of surrogacy use different techniques, but they both can achieve the goal of surrogacy.

In the technical process of traditional surrogacy, the woman who undergoes the surrogacy arrangement, which is called gestational surrogate, will go through the treatment of natural insemination or artificial insemination by using fresh or frozen sperms (Brinsden 485). The natural insemination refers to the insemination by sexual intercourse performed by the gestational surrogate and a sperm donor. By ejaculating within the reproductive track of the gestational surrogate during sexual intercourse, the egg from the gestational surrogate and the sperm from the sperm donor will naturally combine and form the zygote in the fallopian tube of this woman (Brinsden 487). The natural insemination is simple and cheap, and it does not require additional techniques to form the zygote, but it may be hard to be performed or accepted by people like lesbian couples, single women or infertile men. The artificial insemination refers to the direct introduction of semen from the sperm donor into the vagina or oviduct of the gestational surrogate to achieve a pregnancy. After tracking the menstrual cycle of the gestational surrogate, s...

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