Abstract

Surrogacy is prohibited by law in Germany. The chapter aims to provide a better understanding of the ethical objections that feed Germany’s restrictive stance. To this end, it does not only describe ethical objections being explicitly or implicitly raised in the academic discourse from the late 1980s until today but also examines their soundness by highlighting their underlying premises and confronting them with insights from international analyses. Given that concerns about children’s right to get to know their origin and surrogate mother’s instrumentalisation remain as most cogent objections from this analysis, some conditions for surrogacy that would have to be in place in order to mitigate these concerns are outlined.