A friend from Spain studying law explained why not only is surrogacy illegal in Spain, but why it is an actual crime to even have a child from surrogacy — doesn’t matter in which country you had that surrogacy.

The point here is that the surrogate mother, as you have pointed out, develops an emotional bond to the unborn child, and then is contractually compelled to give away that child. If you allow surrogacy, you are basically putting contract law above intuitive, inborn feelings of family relations. It is cruel. Really cruel. Unbelievable cruel. Taking a child away from it’s mother cruel, literally. There’s a reason that’s often used as a baseline for measuring cruelty. According to that friend, the surrogate mothers usually are completely devastated and need extensive psychotherapy (which they usually don’t have access to).

Furthermore, you’re basically doing the most sexist possible thing: Reducing a whole woman to her reproductive capacity. Not sure how much that latter point matters to you, but it certainly matters to me.

Like, yeah, maybe you could make the argument that surrogacy could be possible for a mother who doesn’t develop that emotional connection, but that seems such an outlier case so unlikely that it’s more likely that a desperate woman is lying about being able to do that than her actually not making that emotional connection. Moving the point of when the decision is made which family the baby will belong to after birth runs into the same problem. There’s a reason that voluntary slavery is illegal: Desperate people would do it (and have historically done it), and that didn’t make it right.

I may have gotten some details wrong.