For example, the 1984 British government committee report suggested that "it is inconsistent with human dignity that a woman should use her uterus for financial profit and treat it as an incubator for someone else's child," in part because this threatens to undermine the traditional belief in an inviolable mother-child bond.

Opponents who criticize commercial surrogacy from this perspective frequently attempt to differentiate between commercial surrogacy and "altruistic" surrogacy, in which a surrogate carries a child without a fee, but this distinction is merely nominal, because the lack of an explicit payment structure does not make the decision to become a surrogate any less transactional, and furthermore, the potential for exploitation exists in either case.

Before considering how the law actually treats surrogacy, then, it is becoming clear that a general prohibition on commercial surrogacy represents a kind of undue restriction on the personal and financial autonomy of women, because...
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