The debate about surrogacy has flared up again after an attention-grabbing feature in Carina Bergfeldt’s talk show on SVT. In the program, the party fixer Micael Bindefeld and his husband Nicklas Sigurdsson talked about how a few years ago they had their son via a surrogate mother in the United States, which led to harsh criticism.
One who has voiced her displeasure is Clara Berglund, who reported the episode to the Review Board and accused SVT of being biased and “normalizing trade in women’s bodies”.
In Monday’s Aktuellt, she met Benjamin Dousa, CEO of the think tank Timbro, in a debate. Dousa, who was previously a moderate politician, believes that surrogacy should be allowed in Sweden.
Above all, he is in favor of altruistic surrogacy, which means that there is no money involved.
– It could be a sibling, a close friend, a relative who does it. I think that is a reasonable first step, he says.
Opposes altruistic surrogacy
But Clara Berglund, and Sweden’s women’s organizations, oppose that idea.
– We do this because it leads to increased commercial trade, and you can see that in the countries that have allowed it purely altruistically, she says.
She points out that it is a billion-dollar industry where many women suffer. However, Dousa claims that the issue is fundamentally about the woman’s right to her own body.
– You have the right to donate your kidney, why shouldn’t you have the right to stand up as a surrogate mother?
An argument that does not bite Clara Berglund.
– It’s about women giving up the right to their own bodies, about well-off people in Sweden, for example, buying a poor woman’s right to an abortion, she says.
Hear the debate between Benjamin Dousa and Clara Berglund in the video player above.