Goodspeed Lecture: 'Is Surrogacy a Bad Idea for Women? Assessing the Goods and Ills of the Practice'

The Goodspeed Lecture Series welcomes Grace Kao, presenting “Is Surrogacy a Bad Idea for Women? Assessing the Goods and Ills of the Practice.”

Join Kao, author of My Body, Their Baby: A Progressive Christian Vision for Surrogacy (Stanford UP, 2023) as she offers a scholarly assessment of surrogacy grounded in human rights, feminist and progressive Christian principles, qualitative studies on families expanded by surrogacy, and her own firsthand experiences carrying and delivering a child for her friends. She will ultimately argue that surrogacy can not be only a morally justifiable way of bringing a child into a world when arranged and conducted under certain parameters, but also a thing of beauty expressive of reproductive solidarity and generosity. 

Kao is professor of Ethics, the inaugural Sano Chair in Pacific and Asian American Theology, and a founding co-director of the Center for Sexuality, Gender and Religion at Claremont School of Theology. In addition to her latest publication, she is the author or co-editor of three other books: Encountering the Sacred: Feminist Reflections on Women’s Lives (2018), Asian American Christian Ethics (2015), and Grounding Human Rights in a Pluralist World (2011). For the past two decades, Kao has been writing, teaching, and speaking about assorted topics in feminism, progressive Christianity, human rights and animal relations, Asian America, and religion in politics in the U.S. to diverse audiences.