An article this week in The Guardian’s G2 takes Olympic diver Tom Daley to task over his use of a surrogate mother. Specifically, he seems unaware that there is an ethical dimension to surrogacy.

It’s not clear how much consideration Daley and Black have given the issue [of surrogacy]. In an interview on the Attitude Heroes podcast, Black noted that, while planning for a child, the pair had been surprised to find that commercial surrogacy – which is legal in certain American states – was illegal in the UK. It had been “a bit of a shock”, he said, that the UK, which is more progressive than the US, hadn’t made commercial surrogacy legal. I didn’t get any sense from Black on the podcast that they had suffered great angst over employing a surrogate. He didn’t acknowledge the ethical dimensions of surrogacy. Personally, I find that a bit of a shock.

This is why we make the films we make: so that people will pause to first of all recognize that practices like egg ‘donation,’ sperm ‘donation,’ and, yes, surrogacy raise important ethical issues. And second, so that people will give due consideration to those ethical issues, which we believe should convince people not to participate in them.

If you haven’t seen our films, there’s no time like the present, as they say! All available online:
Compassion and Choice DENIED: available free of charge on Facebook and YouTube
Maggie’s Story — available on Amazon, free with Prime
Breeders: A Subclass of Women? — available on Amazon, free with Prime
Anonymous Father’s Day — available on Amazon, free with Prime
Eggsploitation — available on Amazon, iTunes, and Google Play
Lines That Divide —  available on Vimeo

Photo by Hanson Lu on Unsplash