Tell-Tale Heart

By Beatrice Diane D. Bartolome, Editor-in-Chief

There is a particular violence in the way we speak about wombs when money is involved. The language grows sterile, managerial. The body becomes “gestational capacity,” the mother reduced to a service provider, and the child to an outcome. We call it empowerment and progress, but in the long shadow of capitalism, I find it difficult not to call it what it is: a market transaction carved into living flesh.

Surrogacy does not occur in a vacuum. It occurs in a world stratified by class, race, nationality, and debt. The intended parents are disproportionately wealthier; the surrogate is disproportionately poorer. The transaction is framed as mutual benefit, yet financial power looms over it. Consent under material desperation is not the same as consent under genuine freedom. To pretend otherwise is to ignore the coercive architecture of capitalism itself.

When high-profile queer couples such as Vice Ganda and Ion Perez choose surrogacy, their decision can easily become a spectacle of aspiration for the queer community, one that is both dazzling and deeply troubling. Queer politics has long been about expanding notions of family and care, but it has also been about solidarity with the most vulnerable—those whose bodies, identities, and labor are exploited or marginalized.

Yet, their decision, framed by the media as a triumph of love and visibility, obscures the ethical and economic complexities of the practice, presenting a commodified form of parenthood as aspirational while leaving unaddressed the millions of children in need of homes and the women whose reproductive labor is rendered transactional. The queer community deserves frameworks for kinship rooted in justice, not only in visibility or luxury.

If there are millions of children already alive and waiting in orphanages and the quiet bureaucratic limbo of social welfare, why is our moral imagination so quick to bypass them? Adoption is imperfect; it is often slow, under funded, and mired in its own injustices. But it addresses an existing human need. It responds to children who exist and need homes now. Surrogacy‌ manufactures new needs while old needs remain unanswered.

The longing for a genetically related child is understandable, but it is not sacred. It is shaped by a pronatalist culture that elevates bloodline over found family. It is not “a child” that is wanted, but a child that resembles me. Biology becomes entitlement.

Defenders insist that surrogacy is simply a matter of choice. A woman consents; she signs; she is compensated. But consent, in a world stratified by class, is never a sterile abstraction. It is shaped by rent due, by medical bills, by siblings’ tuition, by the quiet arithmetic of survival. 

When a woman agrees to carry a pregnancy primarily because the alternative is eviction or hunger, the language of “empowerment” falls apart. Financial power does not merely influence consent—it holds it by the throat until it resembles acquiescence. A contract signed under economic precarity may be legal, but legality does not transfigure coercion into liberation.

Choice feminism, in its most uncritical form, teaches us to sanctify any decision made by a woman as inherently emancipatory. Yet feminism worthy of the name must interrogate structures, not merely celebrate individual acts. A woman who commissions a surrogate is not automatically subverting patriarchy simply because she, too, is female.

Participation in a market that transforms gestation into a contracted service does not become radical by virtue of the buyer’s gender. She may frame it as empowerment, as self-determination, as reclaiming access to motherhood on her own terms.

Yet empowerment that relies on another woman’s economic precarity is a fragile victory. To mistake consumer choice for feminist praxis is to collapse politics into purchasing power—and to confuse access to the market with liberation through it.

Surrogacy also recasts pregnancy as divisible labor: gestation as a service distinct from motherhood, detachable and transferable. This disaggregation may be legally convenient, but it ignores the embodied reality of pregnancy—the hormonal storms, medical risks, and psychological bonds that can form irrespective of contractual intent.

The surrogate’s body becomes a temporary site of production, monitored and regulated to ensure product delivery. Dietary restrictions, behavioral clauses, mandatory medical interventions; all justified in the name of the commissioning parents’ future child. In this arrangement, whose body is sovereign?

We do not permit the sale of kidneys even if someone “chooses” it. We recognize that extreme need can distort autonomy, so why is gestation—no less intimate or risky—so easily converted into a commodity?

There is also the global dimension. In many cross-border arrangements, wealthier clients from the Global North or from urban elites seek surrogates in economically marginalized communities.

The asymmetry is stark. The intended parents select; the surrogate is selected. One party exits with a newborn; the other with a lump sum that may alleviate hardship.

But surrogacy rarely dismantles the structures that produced that hardship in the first place. Reproductive inequality becomes transnational, stitched into passports and wired transfers.

To critique surrogacy is not to condemn the women who enter these arrangements. It is to question the system that renders their wombs rentable.

It is to resist a world in which everything—care, intimacy, fertility—can be itemized and sold. It is to insist that solidarity requires more than applauding “choice”; it demands transforming the material conditions that constrict it.

Some argue that surrogacy expands family-making for those historically denied of it. The ache for a child is real; the injustice of exclusion is real. But not every longing generates an entitlement.

The inability to gestate or genetically reproduce, however painful, does not create a moral right to another person’s womb. Our political commitments must be measured not only by whose desires we affirm, but by whose vulnerabilities we refuse to exploit.

None of this is an indictment of queer families either. Our families are real, resilient, and already forged in chosen kinship. We have long built homes out of friendship, community, and defiance. To insist that surrogacy is not the path to liberation is not to deny queer people the right to parent. It is to ask whether replicating a market model of reproduction truly advances our politics—or whether it quietly entrenches the very logics of commodification we claim to oppose.

If we truly believe that every child deserves a loving home, then our first task is not to engineer a new life, but to shelter the lives already here. And if we claim to value women’s autonomy, we must ask whether autonomy can meaningfully exist in a marketplace that feeds on inequality.

In the end, surrogacy asks us to believe that enough money can make everything ethical. That if the contract is clear and the fee is paid, the moral ledger balances itself. But beneath the rhetoric of miracles lies a simpler truth: when reproduction becomes a service to be purchased, inequality becomes the midwife.

(Illustration by Chynna Mae Santos)