Re: Outsourcing Motherhood - Is it allowed in Islam ?
The thing is can the surrogate mother relinquish her claim to motherhood without ever re-visiting it. Another question would be legally who would awarded the status of mother for the child. For the biological mother this could be also deemed as adoption. The answer lies in determining whether in Islam the real mother is the one who carries the child in the womb or the one whose eggs give birth to the child. I think unless there is a concensus on this question, the gestational surrogacy issue should not be taken further. Who in your opinion should be the status of the real mother of the child. From the Quran I consider the birth related to the sperm and eggs not the womb/uterus (it is said many places in the Quran that Allah SWT created us from a despised drop of semen or Nutfah). Uterus is the environment which develops the child IMO.
Suckling makes the women mother of infant and the children become surrogate brothers and sisters. The rulings are very clear about this. This is the only kind of surrogacy Islam talks about and tells us that the claim to the child still belongs to biological mother not the surrogate mother. So we can take our cue from this ruling about the gestational surrogacy. If we keep this kind of surrogacy out of picture in that case we can use science to establish the claim on the baby by biological mother . Science says that genetic makeup of the baby comes from biological mother and father not from the gestational surrogate mother. Islam determines the parenthood from the DNA and genetics. Why I say that ? Because the logic behind 'iddat' is to establish the parenthood of a baby in case a women became pregnant before talaq or death of her husband. What is the point here the point here is that Islam knew about genetics 1400 years ago and this is a way to establish the genetic makeup of a newly conceived baby before divorce or death of a husband. There were no DNA test in those days but Islam was cognizant of DNA.