In December 2015, the congress of Tabasco, Mexico voted to revise the state’s laws on surrogacy. The new regulations permit only Mexican heterosexual couples with medical proof of infertility to contract a surrogate mother. Furthermore, intended parents must now be approved by the state in a process similar to adoption. The new law has been heralded in numerous media outlets as an important move against the exploitative surrogacy industry, while gay rights activists have argued that it is discriminatory and therefore unconstitutional. In this paper, I examine the debate around surrogacy in Mexico using ethnographic data from fieldwork in Mexico including interviews with key industry actors, legislators, and activists.Through an analysis of NGO and government-produced content as well as in-depth interviews with key figures in the Mexican surrogacy industry, I demonstrate that the discourse of human rights is ubiquitous. Each side of the debate considers one party (surrogate mothers, intended parents, or children born via surrogacy) as the primary group at risk of having their rights violated by surrogacy. The debate, thus, centers on defining whose human rights are most important to protect and how that is best accomplished. My study illustrates the limits of rights-based approaches to regulating reproductive tourism and navigating the competing interests involved. Furthermore, I find that defining surrogacy as either a human right or a violation of human rights often forecloses productive debate; surrogacy becomes either a right or a wrong as opposed to a complex process that can both affirm and degrade life.

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