Is commercial surrogacy legitimate work?

Is surrogacy a form of legitimate work? Or does the nature of pregnancy and parenthood render surrogacy illegitimate? In this essay, I argue that the best strategy in defence of commercial surrogacy – which I call the ‘surrogacy-as-legitimate-work’ strategy – relies on two implicit assumptions and that once we make them explicit, we are forced to see that commercial surrogacy inevitably leads to a conflict of core moral rights. As I hope to show, if commercial surrogacy is a type of work, it is work that cannot simultaneously protect the right of the surrogate to opt out and the right of the intending parent to exercise ultimate authority over the foetus.