Selling bodies, selling souls: The false freedom of prostitution and surrogacy

It’s hard to see much moral difference between flogging organs and providing “sex services”

Today there are three forms of alienation of the unconditional right to one’s own body: prostitution, commercial surrogacy, and organ donation. Strictly speaking, there’s a fourth – hiring oneself out for hard manual labor – but let’s skip economic theory for now. Three will suffice for this discussion.

Prostitution. Womb trafficking. Organ sales. Paid organ donation is banned almost everywhere because the world agrees no one should be driven to sell themselves piece by piece. But commercial surrogacy? Still legal in South Africa, some US states, Kazakhstan, Georgia, Ukraine – and, shamefully, Russia. The rich can legally buy the health of the poor. 

Think about it: poor women driven to sell their wombs, their health, their tears. Pregnancy wrecks the body – it can lead to varicose veins, diabetes, organ failure, heart problems, and other life-threatening complications. Carrying someone else’s baby only compounds the risks. 

Defenders of paid surrogacy chant two familiar slogans: “Her body, her choice” and “Helping women who can’t conceive.” But let’s look at the places allowing only unpaid surrogacy, like Finland or some American states. The waiting lists for free surrogates stretch for years. No one volunteers unless there’s cash involved.

If a woman gives birth for money, is it really “her choice,” or is she forced by poverty? If we accept selling the body this way, what’s next? Organ markets? Imagine campaigns saying, “Support kidney donors’ rights!” or “Let people profit from their lungs!”

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Legal organ sales would unleash horrors. No one could prove donors volunteered. Families would be kidnapped, lives held hostage. Transplant agents would stalk clinics, hunting matches in medical records. The rich would survive. The poor would be harvested.

We ban organ sales because no one should be driven to that point. Any state allowing it would be declaring the right to push its citizens into desperate poverty.

Let’s look at the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, which was observed on Tuesday.

See the trap here? It’s not about fighting prostitution – the ultimate forced sale – but about making prostitution more “comfortable.” Red umbrella marches demand better “working conditions.”

Who runs the “sex work rights” movement? Men. It’s male-run groups lobby for the “protection,” pensions, paid leave. They are fighting for one thing: the right to buy people.

Read Alexander Kuprin’s novel ‘Yama: The Pit’, first published in the 1910s. Husbands trick wives into brothels. Girls are trapped by “marriage.” Legal whorehouses meant endless supplies of ruined women.

Prostitution, surrogacy, and organ sales are the same. Legalize the buyer, and you legalize pushing someone into selling themselves.

The Swedish model against ‘the sex industry’ – criminalizing the buyer, not the seller – is the only system that works. No legal loopholes. No illusions of “choice.”

The rest is just trafficking in disguise.

Twenty years ago, the European Parliament adopted a resolution demanding criminal penalties for clients of prostitutes. But many human rights organizations opposed extending the Swedish model across Europe.

Amnesty International, for example, strongly opposes criminalizing clients and banning prostitution, claiming to defend “sex workers’ rights.” Even within the UN, an entire department initially fought against criminalizing sex work, only adopting a “neutral” stance after a massive outcry from 1,400 public figures. 

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Which Western politician will flee their sinking ship next?

Do you know what this department is called? The Department for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment.

Selling ourselves – empowering ourselves. Imagine that.

The lie of “choice” in exploitation

Proponents of legal prostitution like to argue that sex work is a personal decision, a job like any other. They say criminalizing it denies women agency. But is agency real when poverty is the driving force? It’s like arguing that someone “chooses” to sell a kidney when they’re starving.

Legalization hides coercion. Once prostitution is legal, no one checks whether a woman is in a brothel by choice or force. Traffickers thrive under legal protection. The “sex work industry” becomes just that: a business profiting from human suffering.

Countries such as Sweden have proven that punishing buyers while protecting sellers works. It’s not perfect, but trafficking rates plummet, and women trapped in prostitution receive support instead of punishment. Legalization offers none of that.

In the end, we must decide: Is the right to profit from someone else’s body more important than the right not to be driven into selling it? The answer should be obvious.

Historical lessons ignored

History has repeatedly shown what happens when buying and selling people becomes normalized. In Tsarist Russia, brothels operated legally because society accepted that desperate girls could be brought there against their will.

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Let’s circle back to Kuprin. In Yama: The Pit, girls were tricked into marriage and sold to brothels by their so-called husbands. Even if they cried out, the system treated them as willing participants. The marriage mark in the church records branded them as “fallen” – used goods with nowhere else to go. 

The same happens today under the guise of legality. If prostitution is permitted by the state, who investigates whether a woman came willingly or was forced?

Legalization only makes trafficking easier. The more legal the industry, the less society questions how the women got there. 

A dangerous precedent

We don’t allow organ sales, not because organs aren’t valuable but because buying them devalues human dignity. If we apply this reasoning to surrogacy and prostitution, the same truth emerges: when you allow the purchase of human services linked to the body, you inherently condone forcing people into those transactions.

The only real solution is the Swedish model. Criminalize the buyers. Shut down the market. Anything else is just legalized slavery dressed up in the language of “choice” and “empowerment.”

The rest is denial – and a refusal to learn from history.

This article was first published by the online newspaper Gazeta.ru and was translated and edited by the RT team