#surrogacy: 'In 1983, in her book RIGHT-WING WOMEN, feminist theorist Andrea Dworkin described
a phenomenon she labeled the “reproductive brothel.” She believed that it was the next
expression of women’s reproductive capacities under male control. In the reproductive brothel...

Dworkin envisioned, the techniques and technologies used in animal husbandry are used on
women—without their will. Women are gathered together in confined areas and their
reproductive capacities sold to men as commodities. Under this system, women are fungible or...

interchangeable; they are simply nothing more than reproductive commodities. Like sexual
prostitution, in the reproductive brothel, “there is no humanity for women. . . . It uses the women
in it until they are used up. . . . The woman is easily reduced to what she sells.”

Dworkin also
recognized that the reproductive brothel would be a global development and understood in liberal
terms as facilitating women’s freedom and autonomy, just as prostitution is understood under
liberal theory. Dworkin states:

The arguments as to the social and moral appropriateness of this new kind of
sale simply reiterate the view of female will found in discussions of
prostitution: does the state have a right to interfere with this exercise of
individual female will (in selling use of the womb)?

if [sic.] a woman wants to
sell the use of her womb in an explicit commercial transaction, what right has
the state to deny her this proper exercise of femininity in the marketplace?
Again, the state has constructed the social, economic, and political situation in
which the

sale of some sexual or reproductive capacity is necessary to the
survival of women; and yet the selling is seen to be an act of individual will—
the only kind of assertion of individual will in women that is vigorously
defended as a matter of course by most of those who

pontificate on female
freedom.'