Legislative restrictions on the sale of organs, gametes and surrogacy services are often seen as having no basis other than mere prejudice or taboo. This paper argues instead that they can be read as instances of a broader decommodification of healthcare provision established in Britain with the creation of the NHS in 1948. Restrictions on the marketisation of medicine were justified by Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the NHS, and by Richard Titmuss, one of its chief academic defenders, in distinctly utopian terms. On this vision, the NHS would function as a utopian enclave prefiguring an idealised non-capitalist future. This commonsense of post-war medicine was fatally destabilised by fiscal crisis and social critique in the 1970s. Influential comme
This paper is a critical analysis of the regulation of surrogate motherhood in Greece; I will discuss the way that a consensus reached in the legislative committee among liberal and conservative jurists on the matter of compensation of surrogate mothers was undermined by intra-party populism in the Greek parliament which banned it to avoid commodification; inevitably the law fell into disuse leading to a new law which allowed government-defined compensation, not the one agreed by the parties; the regulation of surrogate motherhood in Greece is a typical example of the deleterious effects of the combination of legal formalism and legal moralism in contemporary Greece.
As of 2008, surrogacy is legal and openly practised in various places; Japan, however, has no regulations or laws regarding surrogacy. This paper reports the situation of surrogacy in Japan and in five other regions (the USA, the UK, Taiwan, Korea and France) to clarify the pros and cons of prohibiting surrogacy, along with the problems and issues relating to surrogacy compensation.
Truth is often stranger than fiction, and nowhere is this more evident than when examining the real stories related to international commercial surrogacy that have occurred in the last few years. This Article utilizes these recent cases to analyze this industry using a bioethical lens. Bioethicists use stories effectively to demonstrate how theory and normative ideals apply to real world situations. By detailing examples of some of the unique scenarios that have arisen in far-flung cities of India, the United States, and the Ukraine, this Article highlights some of the bioethical dilemmas such stories raise. This Article examines these stories using the classic theoretical bioethics framework to demonstrate the need for clarification of state or national regulation and international guidelines related to international surrogacy.