Hablando de maternidad, Bryan Caplan escribe una entrada interesante sobre las madres de alquiler bajo contratos de gestación (surrogacy contract). Una madre de alquiler es una mujer contratada para engendrar y dar a luz un niño que será criado por otros, los contratantes. El término "madre de alquiler" es en realidad problemático, pues la mujer que engendra al niño no es necesariamente la madre biológica ni va a ser, al finalizar el contrato, su madre legal. El bebé puede ser el hijo biológico de la mujer contratada o ser producto del óvulo fertilizado de otra mujer (implantado luego en el útero de la gestante).
La práctica es ilegal en España pero está permitida en Estados Unidos (en varios estados), tanto con carácter altruista como comercial.
Para Caplan, los contratos de gestación y la donación de óvulos son una muestra de división del trabajo en el mercado:
In response to these preferences and technological progress, the market splits apart three jobs joined together throughout history. The egg comes from a young woman with great genes, the womb from a woman who doesn't much mind being pregnant, and the mothering from a woman who wants a baby. From an economic point of view, it's Adam Smith's pin factory all over again. To some, it's repugnant. To me, it's not merely logical, but life-affirming.
Caplan enlaza un artículo de Elizabeth Scott, Surrogacy and the Politics of Commodification, que tiene pasajes como este:
Today 95% of surrogacy contracts involve IVF, and thus most surrogates are not the genetic mothers of the children they bear. Under several contemporary laws...courts typically give intended parents' claims more weight when the surrogate is not the child's genetic parent... [S]urrogates themselves see this distinction as important in defining their relationship with the children they will relinquish. As one gestational surrogate put it, "I would feel completely different if it were my child."
The move to gestational surrogacy has facilitated the change in the social meaning of surrogacy from a mother's selling of her baby to a transaction involving the provision of gestational services... Although some have challenged the baby-selling argument all along, on the ground that fathers can not buy their own children, this objection gained little traction as long as mothers were seen as selling their children. But the gestational surrogate lacks a biological connection with the child she is nurturing and bearing, and thus her identity as the child's mother is less powerful. The conclusion that the child is not in fact her child, but rather that she is providing contractual gestational services to the child's "actual" parents resonates with many people.
