Editor’s note, August 23, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in February.
This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.
I’m a woman in my 30s and I think I want to have a child, but I have a health condition that makes it harder (not impossible) to get pregnant than for most women. It would also make pregnancy more uncomfortable and physically disfiguring than it is for many pregnant people. It wouldn’t be permanently disabling, but the physical effects would be bad enough that I really don’t want to be pregnant.
I’m fortunate enough that I can probably afford to get a surrogate through a reputable agency. But surrogacy is frowned upon and often considered unethical. Long ago, I knew someone who said she loved the idea of being pregnant and providing gestation as a service to other people, so maybe in theory, it is possible for someone to freely choose to be a surrogate without being coerced by financial need? But even if it could be done ethically, there’s such a stigma around it and I fear being judged by friends and family. There seems to be a sense that there’s something wrong, unnatural, selfish, or unwomanly in wanting to have a biological child but not wanting your own body to be the vessel for it.
Plus, it’s not like I’m the only person in the world for whom pregnancy would suck. I think my experience probably would be worse than average, but pregnancy is just an unpleasant thing overall so I don’t think I can claim it would be so uniquely bad for me that I’m justified in wanting to pay to use someone else’s body. I’d love your help with this.
Dear Really Don’t Want To Be Pregnant,
There are some ethical questions about surrogacy that it’s genuinely worth asking, and some that I don’t want you to devote another second to — so let’s start there.
As you said, there’s a cultural stigma around not wanting to turn your body into a vessel for childbearing — it’s deemed “wrong” or “unwomanly.” But that idea is pure garbage. The idea that there’s some “proper” way to be a woman is a patriarchal construct; anyone who tells you you’re “unwomanly” for not wanting to gestate is reflecting sexist expectations that women’s bodies should be available for reproductive labor.
So to the extent that your fear of being judged is about that, please don’t give it another thought. But of course, there are real moral questions that surrogacy brings up.
I’ll tell you right off the bat that I do think surrogacy can be ethically justifiable in some situations. First, it helps that surrogacy is not one monolithic thing. There’s a big distinction between commercial surrogacy (where you pay someone to carry a baby) and altruistic surrogacy (the unpaid version, where the surrogate carries the baby as a literal labor of love). It’s not easy to find an altruistic surrogate — after all, pregnancy is dangerous business — but I agree with your intuition that if you’re lucky enough to know someone willing to volunteer for the role, opting for that is a good way to avoid most concerns about commodification or exploitation.
Key takeaways
Unethical surrogacy industries are booming in places like Georgia, Ukraine, and Cyprus. But there’s a moral difference between hiring a surrogate there versus in the US.
When someone can get pregnant but doesn’t want to for psychological reasons, their case is often deemed “elective.” But a mental health need can also be a medical need.
“Epistemic injustice” refers to a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower. People who say they know they have a mental health need that makes pregnancy too risky often aren’t taken seriously, but that’s starting to change.
Within commercial surrogacy, a second distinction has to do with where the surrogate lives. There’s a moral difference between hiring a surrogate in a developing country and hiring one in, say, the US. In countries like Georgia, for example, surrogacy agencies have been known to recruit at domestic violence shelters — some women see surrogacy as the only way to win financial freedom from an abusive spouse. Ukraine, Cyprus, and several others are also known to have ethically problematic surrogacy industries.
But American surrogates are typically not low-income; they’re usually middle-classwhite women with husbands and kids of their own, and they have other economic opportunities available to them. The better surrogacy agencies screen out poor women, who are at risk of coercion. That empirical context means there’s less (though not zero) potential for exploitation in the US, compared with international surrogacy.
Another reason I think surrogacy can be ethically justifiable is that for many, many people, the urge to have kids — including ones who are biologically related to them — feels like a need and not just a want.
Many opponents of surrogacy argue that nobody has a “right” to a biological child, so if you can’t or don’t want to be pregnant, too bad. And those opponents are right that nobody has an absolute right to have a baby — otherwise, the state would be obligated to ensure surrogates, egg donors, and sperm donors were made available regardless of their own willingness to participate! But people may still have a qualified right — the kind of right that we generally honor but that can be restricted to protect the interests of others.
When it comes to people who are physically unable to create a biological child — when they have what doctors call a “medical indication” — I think the qualified right to have a kid means that surrogacy can be ethical, provided it meets certain criteria like informed consent.
But your situation is trickier because it’s not impossible for you to get pregnant — it’s more that, for certain reasons, you don’t want to. Typically, your case would be referred to as “elective surrogacy.” Some professionals will refuse to arrange surrogacy if they deem it elective rather than medically indicated.
And yet, doctors are increasingly recognizing that the line between “medically indicated” and “elective” is not so tidy.
While elective surrogacy is often associated with vanity — it brings to mind a celebrity who doesn’t want to be pregnant because she doesn’t want to “mess up” her figure — it’s not like everyone in the elective camp is there for cosmetic reasons.
What about someone who could get pregnant but is deathly afraid of giving birth because she had a traumatic experience — like, say, her best friend dying in childbirth? Or what about someone who’s trans and who physically could carry a pregnancy, but who knows it would cause such gender dysphoria that there’s a risk of serious psychological harm? Shouldn’t a mental health need be considered a type of medical need?
These are not hypothetical experiences — real people have testified to them — but they often haven’t been taken seriously as medical needs. I suspect that these people have endured what the contemporary philosopher Miranda Fricker calls “epistemic injustice.”
Epistemic injustice refers to “a wrong done to someone specifically in their capacity as a knower.” When society denies someone the credibility to assess their own life experience, or discounts an important part of that experience because of a gap in our collective interpretive resources, that can be an example of epistemic injustice. I think people who fall in between medical categories are too often at risk of being wronged in this way, and I don’t want to see that happen to you.
So I want to acknowledge that I don’t know what health condition you’re referring to when you say you have a condition that would “make pregnancy more uncomfortable and physically disfiguring than it is for many pregnant people.” Since I don’t know the details, I’d encourage you to ask yourself: How much more uncomfortable? How much more disfiguring? And how heavy and lasting a toll would that discomfort or disfigurement take on your overall well-being?
Only you can really try to answer that last question, because the same effects can land differently for different people, depending on how well-resourced we are financially, socially, psychologically, and even spiritually.
Once you’ve thought about how big and enduring the risk of harm is to you, try asking yourself this: Is the risk to you so much greater than the risk to a woman of average health that you feel comfortable transferring the risk of pregnancy and childbirth onto her?
Some people will tell you that question is irrelevant. They will say that the only value that matters here is autonomy — yours and the potential surrogate’s — and if you and she both consent to a surrogacy contract, and she is not coerced into it by financial desperation, then that’s that!
But there may be another important value at stake here: justice.
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As far as I can tell, your case is in a gray area — surrogacy is neither obviously “medically indicated” nor obviously “elective” based on the information you shared. If you ask yourself, “Do I think there’s a significant risk that carrying a child would significantly harm me?” and you answer “Yes!” — then some doctors would say surrogacy is medically indicated. But if the answer you feel bubbling up is, “Well…no, not really,” then you may be closer to the “elective” side of the spectrum. And then I think it becomes reasonable to inquire whether it feels fair to ask another woman to take on the considerable risks of pregnancy and childbirth.
You wrote of pregnancy, “I don’t think I can claim it would be so uniquely bad for me that I’m justified in wanting to pay to use someone else’s body.” That suggests that you currently see yourself as more in the elective camp. I urge you to give yourself the space to really interrogate that with an equal measure of honesty and self-compassion. If honesty compels you to say you don’t feel justified in putting someone else’s body in harm’s way in a situation where she otherwise wouldn’t be, then maybe you’ve got your answer.
But if you’re discounting the risk of psychological harm to yourself because you don’t think that “counts” as real need, please know that mental health is just as medically legitimate as physical health. And if you talk to a medical professional about the option of surrogacy, please talk to more than one so you’re less at risk of getting boxed into a category that doesn’t capture you right.
At the end of the day, perhaps none of us can be a perfect interpreter even of ourselves. But you get to be the interpreter-in-chief — with both the power and responsibility that implies.
Bonus: What I’m reading
This horrifying New York Times Magazine story about the global fertility industry captures why I do think it’s unethical to work with a surrogacy agency in a country like Georgia. These surrogates are not in a position to give informed consent.
“Is Cognitive Dissonance Actually a Thing?” asked Shayla Love in the New Yorker recently. I now feel cognitive dissonance about all the times I thought I was feeling cognitive dissonance!
Don’t miss “I’m Kenyan. I Don’t Write Like ChatGPT. ChatGPT Writes Like Me.” This essay by Marcus Olang’, explaining why his writing is often mistaken for AI slop, is both surprising and maddening. Turns out it’s really hard to not write in the Queen’s English when an entire colonial legacy has drilled that style into you from birth.
A memorial for former Cambridge professor Jason Arday was set up by students and staff outside the Senate House on August 17, 2026 in Cambridge, England. | Nordin Catic/Getty Images
In March 2023, Jason Arday, a rising star in British academia, became a professor of sociology of education at the University of Cambridge. At 37, he was the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship in the university’s history.
Arday’s personal story also attracted widespread attention. He claimed that autism left him unable to speak until he was 11 and unable to read or write until he was 18. Nonetheless, Arday eventually received a PhD from Liverpool John Moores University and continued to rise through the ranks of British higher education.
Soon after starting his position at Cambridge, Arday was accused of plagiarizing portions of his 2015 doctoral thesis. And that was just the beginning. The British press began to comb through his personal story and discovered there were more questionable claims.
This all reached a fever pitch earlier this month, when Arday announced that he would be resigning his position, writing that the intense scrutiny and personal attacks had taken a profound toll on him and his family. Nine days later, Arday was found dead in his home.
To understand what to make of a story of alleged academic plagiarism turned media frenzy turned tragedy, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Atlantic staff writer Tyler Austin Harper, whose recent essay, “The Truths That Failed Jason Arday,” examines what we can learn from Arday’s story.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
You wrote that everyone following this story would do well to engage in some reflection. I don’t think everyone following this story necessarily feels like they should be engaging in some reflection. So I wanted to ask you why you wanted to convey that thought.
I would say blame is not a finite resource and I think there’s plenty of it to go around in this case in particular. I think blame that belongs to conservatives and that belongs to Republicans and that belongs to various kinds of institutions. And that of course belongs to Jason Arday, the man.
I think this is a person who is clearly a serial fabulist, and I think one could fairly say a con artist, who was able to, through an increasingly implausible array of stories about his background — that he was mute until age 11, that he was illiterate till age 18, that he ran 600 miles in six days, a feat which is just 50 miles shy of a world record — flatter the vanities of people at Cambridge University who were very desperate to get a magical minority in the door. And they were so hell bent on their desire to engage in diversity politics that they overlooked what should have been very obvious flaws.
I think it’s also true simultaneously though, that you cannot just blame Arday or liberal institutions for this, and particularly for how this ended. This was, it’s worth noting, an academic scandal that — on the order of academic scandals — is not one that perhaps should be international news, but that’s very much what it became, in no small part because the British press turbocharged it.
If you look at any major British outlet, there were many, many, many, many articles written, each one chronicling every minute of this entire affair. And I think it’s worth noting that it’s hard to imagine that this degree of scrutiny would be applied to an academic scandal if Jason Arday had been white. It’s also hard to imagine that Jason Arday would’ve been hired if he was white. I think people would’ve asked more questions about his implausible claims if they weren’t so predisposed to just try to get him in the door.
What compelled Jason Arday to make up so much of his backstory?
It’s hard to know what’s inside his mind, but one imagines that he correctly understood that a certain kind of elite liberal would be very willing to overlook quite a lot and that [they] would be willing to swallow a whole lot of implausibilities to get him in the door. And I think he understood how the system works.
One of my frustrations with the way discourse of this story has unfolded, particularly after his tragic death, is he is being treated as somebody with no agency. And I think Arday, if you look at what he did, was clearly relatively savvy. He understood that there was a market, that he was being branded as the youngest Black professor in the 800-year history of Cambridge. And he fabricated a story that told people what they wanted to hear.
Not only was he Black coming from rough circumstances, but he was disabled, he was severely autistic, he had this miraculous recovery, also all sorts of medical ailments. He survived a brain tumor, testicular cancer, epilepsy, et cetera. He clearly knew how the game was played. He knew that he could leverage these various identity claims in service of advancement, which is what happened.
The story was not nearly as big in the United States as it was in the UK, understandably. But a lot of people want to place blame for Arday’s death on the British press. American Ibram X. Kendi said [Arday] was “lynched by the media.” Do you think that’s going too far?
I think that’s going way too far. First of all, there are few things I find more grotesque, at least in terms of everyday discourse, than treating lynching as a metaphor, which is something I think you see quite a lot. I think anyone who has seen a hanging tree knows that throwing the term around — “lynching” — for mere journalistic scrutiny is vile beyond measure.
Was the British press scrutiny far too intense? Yes. Do I think it was racist in the sense that I have a hard time imagining there would be this much scrutiny on a white academic who did the same thing? Yes, I think you can absolutely say that. To me, there is a question about, “Okay, what is the line between appropriate journalistic scrutiny and obsession?”
But I also think it’s worth noting, to be fair to the British press, that they’re responding to the way in which he was marketed to them nationally. He was marketed by Cambridge as the youngest Black professor in the 800-year history of this very venerable institution. To some extent, when you brand someone that way, when you film BBC specials with a closeup on his Black hands nestled in the white ones of the head of the Faculty of Education, I think some degree of scrutiny is warranted.
I think it was excessive. But at the same time, Jason Arday was a public figure. I think that is fair to say. His memoir is poised to make a splash. And he took this position that made him a minor academic celebrity. And again, I think it’s very fair to ask whether the degree of attention on what is ultimately an academic scandal in which no one was hurt was far too much. But the idea that we would place the blame on the media rather than on Simon and Schuster, who clearly overlooked obvious inconsistencies in his story, and on Cambridge — I find that absurd.
I think we need to blame the people who put him on the mountaintop rather than the people who ripped him down, even as I think some of those people putting attention on him were unscrupulous.
In your piece at the Atlantic, I thought you bravely related your own experience to that of Jason Arday. Did that come naturally to you or did you have to hold your breath?
Look, I am a Black guy who has been the beneficiary of various kinds of DEI and affirmative action initiatives. And I certainly have encountered a certain kind of white liberal who is very eager to metaphorically grasp my Black hands in their white ones and stare lovingly into my eyes like the Cambridge Faculty of Education person did. So I had some degree of sympathy with him.
I find those kinds of encounters revolting. But I also can understand from Arday’s point of view, coming from a relatively disadvantaged background, he’s the children of immigrants. Then you have all of these people paying attention to you, showering you in accolades — and I think fetishizing you, but it probably didn’t seem that way to him. And you tell a small lie, and maybe that small lie then becomes a bigger lie and then a bigger lie and a bigger lie and a bigger lie.
What he did was wrong, but I can imagine the kind of incentive structure he saw laid out before him. And it’s not hard to see that he made a decision that could in some sense be understood as yes, self-serving, but also giving people what they wanted.
Do you think we’ll learn anything from it?
No. I think people have retreated into their camps. I think progressives are blaming the media for doing what I’ve seen thrown around as a digital lynching. I think conservatives are blaming academic institutions or Jason Arday or just gleefully basking in the glow of having torn this guy down a peg. I haven’t seen a single lesson really learned.
I’ve seen a lot of blame being apportioned. I don’t think there’s much reflection about whether or not these policies are good or bad — the kind of policies or the kinds of extremist versions of affirmative action that go well beyond the spirit of what most people understand as affirmative action.
Whether those kinds of initiatives are good, whether the press scrutiny was fair. I don’t see a lot of self-reflection. I see a lot of blame. And even as I’m wanting to say that there’s lots of people to blame, I also think we should be a little more self-critical.
My first impulse on learning of the Jason Arday affair was to find it somewhat amusing, I will be honest. Here was this guy who managed to tell all of these obvious lies and these very, very smart people believed them hook, line, and sinker. It was objectively funny, but it became unfunny very quickly. And so I think, like I said in the piece, we could all stand to do some reflection about how we ended up in this situation, how Jason Arday ended up in this situation. But will that reflection happen? I highly doubt it.
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