Abstract

The article aims to overcome the dichotomies that traditionally characterize the public debate on surrogacy – such as birth power/commodification, coercion/consent and dignity/self-determination – by shedding light on the distributive conflicts that lie beneath the surrogacy transactions. In particular, the author analyzes the birth mother/surrogacy market relationship, and the alleged infringement of human dignity, with a focus on the shortage of alternatives offered by a patriarchal economy based on the production/reproduction divide. Eventually the article highlights jurists’ misuse of Nature as a normative principle and the legal construction of Motherhood as a powerful apparatus functional to the preservation of the traditional family