Crystal Kelley

In this paper, I will argue that intended parents, not gestational carriers, should have the right to decide whether the carrier continues to gestate a fetus or not in cases where the fetus has a severe, life-threatening physical or mental deficit (Cohen 2013). The gestational carrier, such as Crystal Kelley, gestates a fetus for a couple or potential parent and has no genetic tie to the child, unlike a surrogate (Byrn and Snyder 2005). In Crystal Kelley’s case, the intended couple wanted to abort the fetus because it had severe health defects such as holoprosencephaly and heterotaxy, in which the brain is not divided into two hemispheres and the internal organs are displaced (Cohen 2013). However, Ms. Kelley was unwilling to abort the fetus

Gestational carriers offer the service of carrying and conceiving the child. Ms. Kelley does not have rights to the fetus she is gestating since the intended couple is paying her to “carry to term whatever child results from [the]…procedure, not that she must carry” a particular fetus (Cohen 2013; Hanna 2010). The intended couple paid Ms. Kelley $22,000, which was offered as a “monthly surrogate fee” (Cohen 2013). This commercial agreement then follows the practice that “rights over the products go to the person who has rights or proprietary claims over the labor, not the person who performs the labor” (Hanna 2010). Since the intended couple paid the gestational carrier for her act of carrying a fetus, the couple has rights to any fetus she gestates (Hanna 2010). Her services can be, in a simpler form, paralleled to that of a day care or babysitting service. The child would be temporarily placed in someone else’s care, in a different environment, and later returned to the child’s

Mill argues that each individual can exert his freedom so long as it does not harm anyone else (Mill 1863). What a person does in his life is his business, and I can express disdain or aversion to his actions. If neither of us infringe on one another’s liberty, we cannot act in a way that would limit or remove each other’s liberty (Mill 1863). Contrarily, for self-defense, society and/or the victimized individual can impede on the perpetrator’s liberty if the perpetrator has impinged on someone else’s right to liberty (Mill 1863). Harm to someone’s liberty, whether done actively or inactively, therefore should be legally condemnable (Mill 1863). Nevertheless, children or primitive societies do not get to exercise personal liberty because they are not capable of higher reasoning (Mill 1863). Hence, those of us capable of rationalization and learning have an obligation to care for them as long as we exercise utility in the process (Mill