Regulating surrogacy across Western Europe: A usual case of (gendered) morality politics?

The regulation of surrogacy across Western Europe displays the overwhelming prevalence of a restrictive status quo, with only a few states having moved towards greater permissiveness. However, we know little about the determinants of such regulation from a comparative perspective. This article fills this gap, by mapping the variation in the regulation of surrogacy across Western Europe and determining whether the explanations offered by the morality politics literature to the attendant variation in the regulation of abortion, prostitution and assisted reproductive technologies also explain it, or, rather, surrogacy policy has its own determinants. It concludes that, while the factors that explain the variation in the permissiveness of the regulation of abortion, prostitution and assisted reproduction technologies across Western Europe also apply to surrogacy, their specific combination in the latter is unlike in any of the former. Hence, surrogacy policy has its own determinants, which require further research. In doing so, the article adds to the emerging comparative analysis of surrogacy policies across Western Europe from a morality politics perspective, which is unprecedented, and, in turn, to the literature on morality politics, by confronting it to an issue that questions several of its established conclusions.