The opinion of the medical community on the legal issues of surrogate maternity

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Abstract

Introduction. Surrogacy is a method of infertility treatment involving the conclusion of an agreement between potential parents, a surrogate mother and a medical institution. Until now, lawyers have not been able to develop a unified approach to forming the regulatory framework for surrogacy. Whether healthcare providers have developed a standard view of this problem is not clear.

The purpose is to summarise the medical community representatives’ views on the surrogacy program’s managing issues and their participants’ rights and obligations.

Material and methods. The Internet survey was conducted among medical workers of various specialisations from different regions of Russia and among future specialists (students of medical universities and interns). 7504 questionnaire was analysed. The questions concerned the indications for surrogate motherhood, the sources of its funding, the citizenship of the participants in surrogacy and their contractual obligations, the rights of the surrogate mother and the ordering parents.

Results. medical specialists assign a pivotal role to the surrogacy program’s legal aspects, despite being implemented using high-tech medical technologies. They give priority rights to a newborn child to the ordering parents. During pregnancy and childbirth, decisions regarding lifestyle, hospitalisation, and delivery methods should be made only in conjunction with specialists from the medical institution that signed the contract. As the level of professional responsibility of medical specialists grows, the share of answers about the inadmissibility of state funding of surrogacy, the implementation of surrogacy programs for foreign citizens and single men and women as genetic donors increases, and the share of answers about the admissibility of altruistic surrogacy decrease.

Conclusion. Having decided on the legal issues of managing medical care in surrogacy programs, representatives of the medical community do not consider this type of high-tech medical care a common way to solve the problem of infertility, considering it as an exclusive method of medical care for married couples with infertility of women.

About the authors

Violetta V. Borovkova

Federal Research Institute for Health Organization and Informatics

Author for correspondence.
Email: noemail@neicon.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0001-7335-0771
Russian Federation

Aleksandr V. Zubko

Federal Research Institute for Health Organization and Informatics; Institute for Demographic Research — Branch of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Email: zubko@mednet.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0001-8958-1400

MD, PhD, Leading researcher of the Department of public health and demography the Federal Research Institute for Health Organization and Informatics, Moscow, 127254, Russian Federation.

e-mail: zubko@mednet.ru

Russian Federation

Tamara P. Sabgayda

Federal Research Institute for Health Organization and Informatics; Institute for Demographic Research — Branch of the Federal Center of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Email: noemail@neicon.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-5670-6315
Russian Federation

Konstantin E. Khomanov

LCC “Medical information solutions”

Email: noemail@neicon.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0003-0952-0929
Russian Federation

Gleb S. Krasnov

Samara State Medical University

Email: noemail@neicon.ru
ORCID iD: 0000-0002-7622-5850
Russian Federation

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Copyright (c) 2022 Borovkova V.V., Zubko A.V., Sabgayda T.P., Khomanov K.E., Krasnov G.S.

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