Whose Body? Islam, Surrogacy, and the Limits of Market Autonomy

It could be said that pregnancy is villainous to the average woman’s body, but especially so to the post-Ozempic, post-cosmeticized body. Early January 2026, American singer Meghan Trainor announced the arrival of her third child in an Instagram photo with a presumably uncovered chest, draped in a blanket and a baby nestled against her chest – an innocuous act for the chronically oversharing celebrity, until one gets to the caption: that the child was birthed by another woman entirely.

Trainor, like other wealthy women among the ranks of Priyanka Chopra and Chrissy Teigen, who choose (we should problematize this term here) the route of surrogacy, argue medical necessity and difficulty in carrying is why they pursued it. Commercial surrogacy, banned in over two dozen developed countries, is a highly boutique ethical dilemma.¹ Even in most of Western Europe, it is treated as incompatible with prevailing doctrines of non-commercialization of the human body in markets that otherwise tolerate aggressive capitalist logics.

Here, I am not concerned with defending the fiqh (jurisprudence) regarding surrogacy. Our scholars have already done the work of explaining the instinctual disapproval of it and the bases of its legal prohibition.² What is of particular interest here is that Shaykh Amin Kholwadia, for example, approaches surrogacy as primarily one of theology. He states that surrogacy fails a prior theological test before any legal analysis can even begin, namely, whether a couple seeking a child by alternative means falls within what Islam permits humans to pursue, and whether barrenness is among those phenomena that require submission rather than remedy.² Difficulty conceiving is not a disease akin to, say, cerebral palsy or a burn wound, such that treatments can be pursued at any cost, even in light of dispensations on the basis of necessity (darura). There is a point at which you’ve reached the limit of legitimate striving, and surrogacy lies squarely beyond that limit.

From one angle, this may seem harsh. Does this mean those struggling must accept their Divine decree after exhausting halal (permissible) means, now left with no other choice? Ultimately, yes. From another angle, this is incredibly liberating and merciful because it is truly a matter of the Will of God, for which no one human being can blame another for, or his or herself for.

The Secular Case: The Good and Its Limits

Pro-surrogacy arguments, especially those reliant on intersectional feminist thought, cite inaccessibility or ascribe anti-disability angles to opponents. As an additional point is the matter of LGBT rights. None of this is irrelevant in light of the above: biotechnology, for all it has and can do for us, cannot transgress singular moral principles.

This principle leads to a related and secondary point: to have a child is not a right. Children are not some award or government subsidy. A couple can pursue medical and social avenues to reproduce to the extent law allows, but this law should have a limit – and even within a consent-based framework, there are strong redlines. For example, of the most common objections to surrogacy (one shared across ideological lines, including by many radical feminists) is the comparison of gestational labor to the selling of human organs. Most jurisdictions that otherwise permit market exchange draw a firm line at organ markets, recognizing that consent extracted under conditions of economic desperation is not meaningfully free. The World Health Organization (WHO) and most bioethicists treat organ commodification as incompatible with human dignity because the structural conditions under which such “choices” are made render voluntariness a fiction. The philosophical awkwardness of this is well-noted (some do argue there is little reason to regard a possible legal market of organs as worse than other widely accepted practices, such as the buying and selling of blood plasma) yet the prohibition remains firm.³

The Islamic prohibition on organ selling goes a step further than consequentialism – that it tends toward exploitation, and it does – and is rooted in a more fundamental principle: the body is not the property of its occupant. It is an amanah (a trust). Allah (swt) has given us our bodies to steward, not to own and piece apart and put together in any which way. This is why the framing of bodily autonomy as sovereign self-ownership is foreign to the Islamic moral framework. One cannot sell what one does not own (and even what we own and can sell, are subject to the conditions of lawfulness God has placed on transaction itself). We have limited, functional form of ownership, in that the body has a purpose, to worship Allah and fulfill one’s role on earth, so any question is first filtered through the following: does this serve or violate the purpose for which I was entrusted with this body?

Now, the choice-feminist rebuttal to the organ analogy typically runs as follows: if there is such a thing as inherently immoral labor at such danger to oneself, then why not condemn other similarly dangerous labor? If we permit people to perform dangerous physical labor (mining, construction, military service) for compensation, on what principled basis do we prohibit the rental of a womb? The argument has surface plausibility (and on a side note, dangerous labor should be scrutinized, its conditions improved etc.). But it conflates the incidental use of a body in labor with the commodification of the body’s parts and functions as such. A construction worker uses his limbs to pour concrete. The body is the instrument through which a product is made, and the concrete is the product. In surrogacy, the womb itself, its biological function, its capacity for gestation, is what is contracted. American philosopher Dr. Elizabeth Anderson goes further, too. She argues that commercial surrogacy constitutes an unconscionable commodification of children themselves, since it converts what should be governed by parental norms of trust into something governed by property-like market norms.⁴ Carrying and birthing a child is not analogous to the physical labor of construction workers, in the way pregnancy is life-sustaining and a child is not a building.

The law assumes that consent has preconditions, and that certain market arrangements corrupt those preconditions. We do not permit people to sell themselves into indentured servitude, for example. U.S. federal law and different states even criminalize usurious lending (meaning, charging unreasonably high interest rates) because formally voluntary agreements can be structurally coercive.

But what about altruistic surrogacy, where the exploitation argument does not apply and consent is, ostensibly, freely given?

“I want people to know that surrogacy is just another beautiful way to build a family. It’s not something to whisper about or judge. It’s rooted in trust, science, love, and teamwork,” [Meghan] Trainor said. “Every family’s journey looks different, and all of them are extremely valid.”

Regardless of whether her specific case was done in a commercial or altruistic context, the words choice and valid do heavy ideological lifting. This brings me to what the radical feminist critique gets partly right. The surrogacy market, as documented extensively in jurisdictions where it is unregulated, overwhelmingly recruits women in poverty. The supply of “willing” participants is generated by material desperation. Autonomy is not and cannot be the sole basis on which claims to moral value are made, even from a secular perspective.

Dr. Barbara Rothman states, emphasis mine, “The debate on the legalization of commercial surrogacy can’t be settled on the  wishes  of  each  and  every  one  of  us  nor  on  the  alleged  individual  liberty  of  the surrogates, which is not only false, but irrelevant. In a globalized context of feminization of  poverty  and  rearmament  of  patriarchal  neoliberalism, the ethical  requirements  that would guarantee the imperative autonomy of free will are not applicable.”

Where the Islamic position diverges however, is the epistemic framework itself. The secular position must defend the inalienability of reproductive capacities on philosophical or political grounds that have remained contestable to today. The Islamic position derives its prohibition from a ontological claim about ownership that precedes that: the body was never the person’s to alienate in the first place. It is not about what any individual woman consents to or what she is permitted to do. Rather, it is a claim about what the body is.

Note that this is not paternalistic in the way critics may allege. It does not say women cannot be trusted to make decisions that may affect their well-being. The point is, no woman nor man is higher than God in the final analysis. No single creation can do as they please with it without restraint. Certain parts must be clothed, certain food and drink is encouraged, certain food and drink must be avoided, it must orient itself toward the qibla in prayer. This can be another battlefield for modernity or a liberation within which submitting to God’s decree elevates.

A few final notes. Muslims should care about this debate for multiple reasons that don’t boil down to disgust at Western excess or abstract thought experiments. The biotechnological and reproductive revolution is not a Western problem being watched from home. It has arrived in Muslim communities and Muslim families. Iran is an illustrative case: initially, both Shia and Sunni scholars were aligned in prohibiting third-party biological or genetic involvement in reproduction, including surrogacy. A fatwa by Ayatollah Khamenei in the late 1990s however permitted surrogacy and since then Iran has since become one of the only Muslim-majority countries in the world where commercial and altruistic surrogacy is legal.⁵ The absence of clear laws on commercial surrogacy has fueled a costly black market,⁶ economic struggles in low-income groups force some women into surrogacy, often involving mothers over 35, increasing pregnancy risks. Muslims have to get the foundational question right before the legal one, which is Shaykh Amin’s point, and precisely what much contemporary Muslim engagement with these questions fails to do. When the theological ground has already been ceded, the legal reasoning that follows is downstream of assumptions it borrowed from the secular bioethical framework it was supposed to resist. We must care about the flourishing of the child and the family.

Lastly, we would do well to engage seriously with other thinkers who have arrived, by different roads, at similar conclusions as persons who wish to see a better society, and a better society for the vulnerable. There is a growing body of empirical work documenting surrogacy markets, the psychological consequences for surrogates and children, the legal statelessness of children born across jurisdictions, research that spans the gamut of bioethics, feminist legal theory, international human rights law, and qualitative social science. It has found institutional expression in abolitionist coalitions, UN rapporteur reports,⁷ the ongoing Hague Conference negotiations towards an international legal framework,⁸ and lobbying efforts uniting feminists, conservative legal scholars,⁹ disability rights advocates concerned about eugenics, and religious communities.

We should, of course, be clear about the broader intellectual culture from which many of these critiques arise, one that has historically treated Islamic ethics as either irrelevant or as a subset of patriarchal backwardness to be overcome, rather than as a tradition with its own rigorous, internally coherent answers to precisely the questions that the biotechnological and sexual and reproductive revolution has now wrought onto everyone. Additionally, on the extreme, radical feminism arrives at skepticism of surrogacy by antagonism of marriage and normative family structures generally.¹⁰ There is no ideological kinship with a creed that would find the Islamic celebration of marriage and parenthood as naïve or complicit, or that a woman wanting biological children as internalizing her own oppression. But, as far as there are allies for a specific goal, and their arguments illustrative, intellectual honesty requires we say so.

The good news also is that we are not starting from scratch. Islamic bioethics is a growing and serious field, and the scholarly work on reproductive technology and the limits of medical intervention within an Islamic framework is more substantial than the wider public conversation and even our community gives it credit for.¹¹ What remains is the will to enter these debates without reducing ourselves to a minority voice seeking concessions, and as a civilization with its own account of what the body is, what a child is, and what it means to receive, or not receive, parenthood with submission and dignity, as a better model for everyone.

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Works Cited:

1. Horsey K. The future of surrogacy: a review of current global trends and national landscapes. Reproductive BioMedicine Online, 2023; 48. [↩]
2. Kholwadia, M. A. (2010, October 1). The Islamic ruling on surrogate motherhood. IlmGate. https://www.ilmgate.org/the-islamic-ruling-on-surrogate-motherhood/. [↩] [↩]
3. Kahn J, L. Delmonico FThe Consequences of Public Policy to Buy and Sell Organs for TransplantationAmerican Journal of Transplantation, 4, 178-180. [↩]
4. Anderson ES. Is women’s labor a commodity? Philos Public Aff. 1990 Winter;19(1):71-92. PMID: 11651966. [↩]
5. Clarke Morgan (2006) Shiite Perspectives on Kinship and New Reproductive Technologies. ISIM Review 17:26–27. [↩]
6. Iran International. (2025, January 15). Eggs, sperm and wombs for sale on Iran’s reproductive black market. Iran International. https://www.iranintl.com/en/202501159389. [↩]
7. Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls. (2025). Surrogacy (A/80/158). United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-violence-against-women/surrogacy. [↩]
8. Hague Conference on Private International Law. (n.d.). Parentage / surrogacy project. HCCH. https://www.hcch.net/en/projects/legislative-projects/parentage-surrogacy. [↩]
9. Mesa, J. (2025, November 16). The unlikely alliance forming to end surrogacy. Newsweek. https://www.newsweek.com/the-unlikely-alliance-forming-to-end-surrogacy-11024582. [↩]
10. See, for example, Shulamith Firestone, where in The Dialectic of Sex (1970) she argued that biological reproduction itself is the root of women’s oppression, that pregnancy is barbaric, and that the liberation of women requires the abolition of the biological family entirely through artificial reproduction/artificial wombs. She would oppose surrogacy because all reproduction under current conditions is coercive. [↩]
11. See, for example, https://medicineandislam.org/. [↩]