The ethical morass of sexual surrogacy for the disabled
France has banned the hiring of sexual helpers, ruling that "the sexuality of the disabled cannot be considered a right." The Atlantic's James Hamblin isn't so sure.
France's National Ethics Committee effectively banned sexual surrogacy in March, as Stefania Rousselle just documented in a video for The New York Times (watch above). What exactly is sexual surrogacy?
It "involves paying a professional who engages in intimate contact (broadly defined, though certainly not always intercourse) with a patient," says James Hamblin at The Atlantic. Since the 1970s, surrogacy has been used to help "people with extreme anxiety about sex to gradually work past it," but it's now increasingly used to fulfill the needs or desires of seriously disabled people. That raises a lot of ethical issues, says Hamblin, but it's not at all clear that, as the French ethics board ruled, sexual surrogacy is "unethical use of the human body for commercial purposes." Here's an excerpt:
Read the entire article at The Atlantic.
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