This thesis explores surrogate motherhood using Christian ethics within a relational framework. A surrogate mother is a woman who has a child for a commissioning couple who are usually infertile. Chapter one explores how surrogacy is presented in three secular and three Church reports by focusing upon the surrogate, the commissioning couple and the child. The key theological and ethical objections to surrogacy are briefly explored: that it undermines motherhood, involves baby selling, coercion, exploitation and commodification. Chapter two analyses motherhood according to three secular feminists and three theologians. The secular feminists are criticised for not recognising the complexity of motherhood. By contrast, motherhood in Christianity is presented as multidimensional. Chapter three analyses whether paid surrogacy commodifies, exploits and coerces the participants. Theologically the chapter explores human beings as created in the image of God and as having dignity, which can mean that payment does not always have to lead to commodification, exploitation or coercion. Chapter four explores whether paid surrogacy involves baby selling. Theologically the chapter explores the concepts of the self and other in Augustine and Aquinas. It also explores agape in Anders Nygren and Gene Outka, arguing that self-interest and altruism can co-exist with care for the self and the other in a relational framework without detriment. Comparisons are made with blood donation to suggest that paid and unpaid surrogacy can operate together without paid surrogacy being regarded as baby selling or the purchase of parenthood. Finally, chapter five outlines three models towards surrogacy: a contract model, an adoption model and my relational approach, influenced by Louis Janssens’ personalism. My relationalism aims for a more sophisticated ontology of the relationship between the self and the other and calls for various solutions in a surrogacy custody dispute.

Surrogacy is an arrangement whereby a woman conceives in order to give birth to child or children for another individual or couple to raise. This thesis explores how commercial gestational surrogacy is culturally framed and socially organised in Russia and investigates the roles of the key actors. In particular it explores the experiences of surrogacy workers, including those who migrate or commute long distances within and to Russia for surrogacy work and the significance of their origin, citizenship, ethnicity and religion in shaping their experience. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in St Petersburg between August 2014 and May 2015 and involved semi-structured interviews, (participant) observations, informal conversations and ethnographic fieldnotes with 33 surrogacy workers, 7 client parents, 15 agency staff and 11 medical staff in medical and surrogacy agency facilities. Data were analysed using inductive ethnographic principles. A reflexive account, which includes a consideration of the utility of making one’s own emotional responses a research tool, is also included. Drawing on and expanding on Colen’s (1995) conceptual framework of stratified reproduction and Crenshaw’s (1989) analytical framework of intersectionality, this research shows that surrogacy in Russia is culturally framed and therefore socially organised as an economic exchange, which gives rise to and reinforces different forms of intersecting reproductive stratifications. These stratifications include biological, social, geographic, geo-political and ethnic dimensions. Of particular novelty is the extension of Colen’s framework to address geographic and geo political stratifications. This was based on the finding that some women (temporarily) migrate or commute (over long distances) to work as gestational carriers. The thesis also demonstrates how an economic framing of surrogacy induced surrogacy workers to understand surrogacy gestation as work, which influenced their relationships with client parents. Given the rapid global increase in the use of surrogacy and its increasingly internationalised nature, this research into the social organisation of commercial gestational surrogacy in Russia is timely and has implications for users, medical practitioners and regulators, as well as researchers concerned with (cross-border) surrogacy and reproductive justice.