Debra Satz's Criticism Of Paid Surrogate Motherhood

Objectively speaking, women and men face starkly different realities. Women have for a long time been seen as subordinate to men in many respects, and women’s supposed lesser status has subjected them to an unwarranted slew of problems and dilemmas, all rooted in this arbitrarily established inequality. Debra Satz and Elizabeth Anderson write on two sets of moral dilemmas—prostitution and paid surrogate motherhood, respectively—that are specific to womanhood. Satz and Anderson both believe that the practices they describe are wrong, with Anderson coming out forthright in favor of the abolition of paid surrogate motherhood and with Satz warily mentioning that she supports decriminalization. I disagree with Anderson on the account that her criticism of paid surrogate motherhood is paternalistic in a way that Satz’s argument about prostitution is not. I sympathize with Satz on the basis that prostitution, as a practice looked at through the lens of societal circumstances today, contributes to systems of gender inequality, an argument that I believe cannot be extended to the case

Davis’s reasoning being the legality of dwarf-tossing is conditional on the fact that the dwarfs who engage in dwarf-tossing consent to and enjoy the event. In the case of prostitution, many women are coerced into the practice via trafficking, for example, and even if a woman initially autonomously chooses to be a prostitute, there may come a point at which she desires to stop but is unable to. As Satz outlines in her Bill of Rights for Women, women must always consent to sex, and when she sells sex, she must be able to refuse to give it. Therefore, prostitution ought to be heavily regulated to control for circumstances in which the women are coerced and do not consent to being