Cutting Motherhood in Two: Some Suspicions Concerning Surrogacy

Surrogate motherhood—at least if carefully structured to protect the interests of the women involved—seems defensible along standard liberal lines which place great stress on free agreements as moral bedrocks. But feminist theories have tended to be suspicious about the importance assigned to this notion by mainstream ethics, and in this paper, we develop implications of those suspicions for surrogacy. We argue that the practice is inconsistent with duties parents owe to children and that it compromises the freedom of surrogates to perform their share of those duties. Standard liberal perspectives tend to be insensitive to such considerations; we propose a view which takes more seriously the moral importance of the causal relationship between parents and children, and which therefore illuminates rather than obscures the stake that women and children have in surrogacy.     

COMMUNICATION EFFICIENCY OF MIDDLE- AND LOWER-SES DYADS

This study investigated the efficiency of communication between children from different social-class backgrounds. Eight same-sex pairs of fifth graders—half boys and half girls—were formed into dyadic groupings by combining lower- and middle-SES children into the four possible speaker-listener combinations. Task success depended on the efficiency of the verbal communication between the pair. The listener was allowed to give feedback in one condition and not allowed to speak in the other condition. Significant SES-combination effects in communication efficiency were typically not found. Unexpected sex main effects showed general superiority of the girls in both conditions. The results suggest that lower-SES children's relative ability to communicate is highly dependent on the nature of the task.