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Here's a question that I have about that handmaid's tale maternity photo shoot that you linked. Is this gay couple going to include that woman in the child's life as the child's mother? If not, is this weird picture going to be something that the child gets to look at in their lonely moments wondering who the woman was who gave birth to them, and what it would have been like to have her as a mother? Did this couple think any of these things at all themselves?
My biggest problem with surrogacy, as I stated in another comment, is that the child is left being forced to embrace parents who paid their biological mother and gestating mother to go away forever so that they could assume a full parental role.
It seems like that child is sort of compelled from birth to ignore the psychological and emotional implications of having two male parents who paid their mom to go away because they wanted to feel normal. That's why it's not the same as adoption, because the new family that you're supposed to embrace did not contractually obligate your biological parents to give you up.
The surrogate came up with and posted the photo shoot idea (and also isn't the genetic mother?). Her name is public (at least through TikTok) and self-describes as a 'surrogacy advocate', and other photos from the set naming her are in fairly mainstream media. According to this piece, "The Dlugosz family [two men and the kid] still plans Capital Region visits. Zwicker [the surrogate] expects the relationship to wane over time. For her, that’s OK."
Zwicker seems to very strongly object to being identified as the child's mother, and probably not solely for the legal or genetic reasons, but neither does it look like the fathers paying her to go away the second the c-section was over. It's hard for me to read if it's to prevent herself from getting too attached, or because she just doesn't feel it's the same as with her first child and doesn't want to get in the way of the people who are, and she might not be entirely sure herself. Surrogacy clinics claim to do significant prematch screening, and there's a lot of media discussion (and, uh, horror stories with legal snafus) enough that I'd expect any prospective surrogate-seekers to have at least considered it.
More generally, attitudes vary. I'd personally consider it healthier if there's some longer-term relationship, historically this has been favored, and there's some evolving norms around 'surrogate aunts' or similar more euphemistic references. But there are parents (sometimes feeling that they'd be treated as non-parents, sometimes worried about legal trouble if a surrogate mother has regrets) or surrogates (since there can sometimes be financial or legal issues that way!) who prefer a more immediate or direct break afterward.
((And, in practice, as many surrogacies look to involve infertile het (or XY/XX trans-gender-weird) couples as gay ones. Zwicker's photoshoot here was her second surrogacy, with her first going to Zwicker's cousin and that cousin's husband.))
To me it looks like the woman acting as s surrogate here gets a lot of social support and validation from being a surrogate. However, so do many prostitutes, and so would people paid to donate a lobe of their liver or a kidney. I think it should be the same thing. You can have sex for free, you can donate an organ, and you should be able to donate the act of surrogacy, but you shouldn't be able to do any of these things as a paid service because that's bad for society. And yes, for me that does include pornography where the actors are paid to have sex with each other on camera. Commercial pornography is causing a lot of problems. Labor laws (no pun intended) exist to prevent the rich from exploiting the working class beyond what is tolerable or humane, and requires society to create non-exploitive forms of work to continue functioning.
Many jurisdictions place surrogacy in a similar space to prostitution and organ donation, where ostensibly paying for it is illegal. In practice, this largely just converts into a gray market, so just as 'escorts' or 'companions' (who are only being paid for their company, and if sex happens, whoops), 'unpaid surrogates' that are compensated for lodging or lost work opportunity usually sneak through. Zwicker's first surrogacy (for a cousin) was somewhat unusually in being completely unpaid, but it was also unpleasant enough juggling that and her own child she wouldn't have done it for family again.
I'm not convinced that's a better model, or that a hard ban would be (prohibiting adoption where there's sign of collaboration beforehand? clawing back funds? I'm not sure how you'd make that work, but let's assume something's possible, since this is a lot more seeable-as-a-state than prostitution). I could see that sort of policy having some impact on the marginal cases, where someone just on the border of affording to buy or being willing to sell doesn't go through with it, but the marginal cases aren't the ones that bring comparisons to axotl tanks or broodmothers.
But I'm... uh, probably going to have some pretty fundamental values differences. And even experience differences: I recognize how a lot of the bigger commercial vendors range from 'merely' scuzzy drug-addict-optimizers or abusing the bounds of informed consent to overtly ignoring rape or trafficking, but it's not clear how much of that is the commercial porn and how much is California and eastern Europe being the core of modern commercial pornography, and on the other extreme 'commercial pornography' in the furry fandom has a widely different set of problems mostly tied to artists needing better wrist support.
I probably don't have a good model of what you consider the "bad for society" bit here.
To give you a quick hit, bad for society is when your therapist can mention surrogacy as a legal way out of your poverty.
Yes, and the correlated bit where your social worker could mention it right before an SSDI/welfare interview. But I don't see this as something specific to the formal recognition; both therapists and social workers shouldn't encourage outright illegal conduct (uh, shouldn't), but both groups are organizationally and foundationally designed around Not Quite Illegal things. They're not always good at it, but they're usually not that bad, either.
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Another example of where it could go bad: where you can be denied welfare because you were offered a job as a surrogate and refused it.
Actually is that a thing? As far as I can tell you cannot currently become a gestational surrogate if you are receiving welfare, so I think it's not. But seeing evidence of that happening at any sort of significant scale would be one of the few things which would turn my opinion against surrogacy as an option.
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My concern is more so a push toward commodified bodies. Seeing the poor as simply a collection of body parts and processes to be purchased at the whim of the better off who can afford to buy access if not the body part in question. Or perhaps as technology improves the creation of axotl tanks from human females who are chemically lobotomized and used simply for breeding purposes.
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