Surrogacy

[billy]

There is the argument that free enterprise is desirable, and voluntary contracts are legal.
So we end up with situations where there is human sperm for sale, and wombs for rent.

There is also the argument that when a child grows up, that adult is entitled to know who their real parents are.

Surrogacy makes for some real tricky legal and emotional situations later on.

only some volantary acts are legally binding as far as the law stands.
in the case of surrogacey, many mums in the uk have been given custody of the child when it was born because they kept the child. i'm not sure you can hold someone to a contarct if it states they will give you thier child when it's born.

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a copy and past from wiki that shows not all states class such a contract as legal, though further down it said 8 states do.

Having another woman bear a child for a couple to raise, usually with the male half of the couple as the genetic father, is referred to in antiquity. Babylonian law and custom allowed this practice and infertile woman could use the practice to avoid the divorce which would likely otherwise be inevitable.[2]

Attorney Noel Keane and Warren Ringold of Dearborn, Michigan advocated for the passage of laws that protected the idea of surrogate motherhood. Bill Handel, who is a partner in a Los Angeles Surrogacy firm, also attempted to have such laws passed in California, but his attempts were struck down in the State Congress. Presently, the idea of surrogate motherhood has gained some societal acceptance and laws protecting the contractual arrangements exist in eight states.[3]

In the United States, the issue of surrogacy was widely publicized in the case of Baby M, in which the surrogate and biological mother of Melissa Stern ("Baby M"), born in 1986, refused to cede custody of Melissa to the couple with whom she had made the surrogacy agreement. The courts of New Jersey found that Mary Beth Whitehead was the child's legal mother and declared contracts for surrogate motherhood illegal and invalid. However, the court found it in the best interests of the infant to award custody of Melissa to her biological father William Stern and his wife Elizabeth Stern, rather than to the surrogate mother Mary Beth Whitehead.