Considerazioni bioetiche sulla riproduzione assistita e sulla maternità surrogata: una critica della prospettiva conservatrice

To its merit, Alessio Musio’s book gathers the main objections set forth by more conservative bioethical thinking towards assisted reproduction, and reframes them in a new perspective. The Author’s polemic objective is apparently surrogate motherhood (or gestation for others); but for Musio, surrogate motherhood is actually but the final stage in an almost irreversible process which, as assisted reproduction asserts itself, reduces the child born to a product. We shall demonstrate through a series of arguments that it is wrong to equate having a child via medically assisted reproduction techniques with mass-producing objects. Medically assisted reproduction techniques change our conception of birth not because they reduce generation into the production of goods, but because they place us in a state of looking after the wellbeing of those we put into the world from their conception. In the light of the technological revolution, it is no longer morally acceptable to keep opposing new generating methods in the name of an alleged ‘authenticity’ of ‘natural’ conception.1n