Nordic Model Now! is proud to have signed up as a supporter of the Stop Surrogacy Now campaign.

Although our main focus is campaigning for the Nordic Model approach to prostitution, we have always considered surrogacy to be closely related to prostitution. In both, the woman’s very body and being are instrumentalised for someone else’s benefit, while a whole feeding chain of third parties benefit economically from the arrangement.

In prostitution, she becomes a sex toy for a succession of nameless men and is bound to flatter each one and pretend she’s loving it. In surrogacy, she becomes a production line whose product is a real-life baby, and again there are many pressures on her to pretend it’s something other than what it really is – that she has been reduced to a function for someone else’s benefit, and the baby has been reduced to a commodity.

Human rights are founded on the inherent dignity of each and every human being. Instrumentalising and commodifying a human being is a fundamental and egregious violation of this and has an impact on every single one of us and on the kind of society we live in – because if you can violate one person’s human rights, it’s easier to violate someone else’s.

That it is so hard for many people to see the human rights violations intrinsic to prostitution and surrogacy is a clear indication that women have not yet been granted full human rights in practice and in culture. We are still seen as second class.