Surrogate Parenting

Your editorial “Surrogate Parenting: the Bioethical Issue” (Aug. 20) superbly addressed one of the most complex ethical issues facing society.

While medical science has produced the technology of surrogacy, society has not yet reached any moral consensus on the issue. During the past year the American Jewish Congress established a Bioethical Issues Task Force to discuss these very issues. After a great deal of discussion by a broad base of Jewish scholars, rabbis, physicians and ethicists, we concluded that surrogacy arrangements present substantial dangers to societal interests and are questionable under Jewish tradition because they weaken the family, denigrate women and could result in the exploitation of the poor by the rich.

When society encourages the practice of conceiving and nurturing children to be given away or “sold” and condones the separation of the decision to create a child from the decision to parent it, it threatens the dignity of the individual--both the child who is “sold” and the woman who “sells” it.

For these reasons, and more than this space allows, AJ Congress believes that society should discourage surrogate agreements by making such contracts unenforceable in the courts and by prohibiting fees to surrogates and barring surrogate brokers from operating in California. However, we do not believe that surrogacy arrangements should be prohibited or made criminal when they are undisputed, require no judicial intervention and do not involve the payment of a fee other than for expenses to the birth mother.

CAROL PLOTKIN

Associate Director, AJ Congress

Los Angeles