Surrogate motherhood and public policy. (Bioethics).

THE CURRENT DEBATES about cloning, stem cell research and embryo experimentation demonstrate the difficulties that modern liberal societies, such as Australia, are experiencing in formulating coherent public policy on bioethical issues.

On the one hand, modern liberal societies can be idealised as committed to moral pluralism. As portrayed by a long line of political theorists, a liberal society may allow the state to exercise extensive powers for the purposes of social co-ordination and to ameliorate the harshness of economic outcomes that would arise under a system of unbridled capitalist competition. But those powers are meant to extend, rather than reduce, the practical autonomy of individual citizens.

Where individuals' personal lives and life plans are at stake, including their ability to express themselves freely, have consenting sexual relationships, and make reproductive decisions, the state permits freedom of choice unless a compelling reason can be found to do otherwise. In these spheres, the aim is not to coerce us to be perfectly moral, but merely to enforce the most important social or moral norms required for people to obtain the benefits of social living.

Within such a society, approval is commonly expressed for John Stuart Mill's view that "experiments in living" should not be merely tolerated, but actually welcomed and celebrated.

On the other hand, the ideal of a pluralist society and limited state intervention in people's personal lives is frequently challenged, either explicitly or tacitly, by a variety of activists on both the Right and the Left. Some social conservatives, often from religious backgrounds, have campaigned to impose their moral dogmas on society as a whole, not just to exhort particular standards of behaviour to those who share their religious or cultural viewpoint. At the same time, some feminists have sought to impose a particular social vision, even though their own views are highly controversial and contestable.

In a field such as bioethics, where important personal choices are at stake, the public policy challenge is to provide a rational and liberal justification for any legislation or other government action. The justification must be one that is acceptable in a liberal society committed to supporting pluralism, rather than to finding any extensive moral consensus. This challenge calls for an analysis of the possible undesirable consequences of simply allowing the maximum of personal freedom. Those consequences must then be balanced against the need to protect individuals, as they make personal choices that are crucial to their own life plans and identities. In some cases, there may be a need to consider fundamental social or moral norms that are accepted by almost everyone, such as that children must be cared for. At no point, however, should we take a policy approach of banning certain conduct merely because it is unpopular or strange, or even because it might have some bad consequences that we would tolerate in other contexts as part of the price of freedom.

A reconsideration of the issue of surrogate motherhood shows how these tensions play out, and how rational policies on bioethical issues might be developed: policies for a society that values freedom of choice.