The Regulation of Exploitation

Feminist scholarship on exploitation in assisted reproduction focuses primarily on structural inequalities in society and, particularly, within the medical system. This approach most often determines that these technologies are universally oppressive toward women. This discourse, while valuable, overlooks the interaction between universal structural forces and local conditions that, together, shape exploitation within fertility medicine. This project provides an analysis of the local conditions that shape exploitation in surrogacy arrangements in Israel and the United States. The comparison focuses on the selection and compensation of surrogates to analyze the impact of local forces that define certain practices and regulations as exploitative. By providing a context-specific account, this project identifies the need to address exploitation through an analysis of the local experience of exploitation that occurs within an oppressive universalistic system. Thus, it introduces a framework that can be used to analyze the interaction between universal and local forces that lead to exploitation in surrogacy arrangements.