"The surrogate mother’s rights over the fetus she is carrying are greatly curtailed and she loses all rights to the baby she delivers."

Wrote Gloria Steinem, quoted by Kathryn Jean Lopez in "Gloria Steinem, a Voice Against Commercial Surrogacy" (National Review).

In 2019, when Andrew Cuomo sought to legalize commercial surrogacy, Steinem wrote:

A state that medicalizes and rents out female bodies — with third party profit as a motive and little or no regulation of risk to the women egg donors and surrogate wombs — jeopardizes a woman’s fundamental right to health and freedom and puts profit ahead of the long-term welfare of the fetus.

The use of the word "medicalizes" made me wonder what Steinem thought about hormone and surgical treatments for gender dysphoria.

Grok pointed me to her 1977 essay, "If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit, Change the Foot," where she expressed dismay that some people "surgically mutilate their own bodies" when what we need to change our ideas about sex roles. She called for inquiry into "the social reasons for transsexuality as well as its big, star-spangled, commercial exploitation." Later — see "Looking Back on Gloria Steinem’s Turn Toward Transgender Rights" (them) — she took the position that transgender people "are living out real, authentic lives" and deserve the freedom to make their own health care decisions.

Can't surrogacy be part of a real, authentic life? Isn't deciding to become pregnant and to go forward to childbirth a health care decision? Is medicalizing the body wrong in a way that should be forbidden? Or is it just something you might want to dissuade people from doing? Live the natural life. It's better. But if you want to do something medical, that's your business. Or is Steinem's real concern — both with surrogacy and with transgender treatments — that someone is making money?

I truly don't know. I find her writing incoherent: "A state that medicalizes and rents out female bodies...."? The state is in the position of allowing free citizens to choose to buy and sell medical things that can be done to the body. I guess the idea is you can't trust individuals to protect themselves in the market. It is not good for the state merely to allow these medicalizations of the body. It must have a system of protection in place. If that was Steinem's idea, she didn't stick to it.

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You can read "If the Shoe Doesn’t Fit, Change the Foot" in Steinem's collection of essays, "Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions" (commission earned). Interestingly, it has lost its vividly argumentative title. The new title is neutral: "Transsexualism."

ADDED: I bought the essay collection, and I'm reading "Transsexualism." It's only 4 pages long. She wonders why all the famous "transsexuals" are male-to-female and never female-to-male. She writes:

When I probed further, I discovered that male-to-female transsexuals were not only used as a handy testimony to the desirability of the traditional female role, but they were also the only sort of sex change many interviewers could accept or imagine. For a man to give up his superior role and become a woman was easy—frightening, but no challenge. For a woman to rise out of her inferiority and achieve manhood was unthinkable, impossible—just too big a job. Men were not about to accept a former female as an equal, but they expected women to accept and even be honored by a former man.

She goes on to question the idea that a person could have "the sensation of having a female brain in a male body, or vice versa." She writes:

[T]ranssexuals are paying an extreme tribute to the power of sex roles. In order to set their real human personalities free, they surgically mutilate their own bodies: anything to win from this biased society—where minor differences of hormones and genitals are supposed to dictate total lives and personalities—the right to be who they individually are as human beings.... 

Instead of accepting the idea of “a female mind in a male body” by mutilating their physical selves, they might have challenged the very idea that there is such a thing as a female or male mind.... 

Instead of serving more lifesaving but often less lucrative needs for their surgical and hormone-therapy skills, some physicians are aiding individuals who are desperately trying to conform to an unjust society.... 

[T]he main question is whether some individuals are being forced into self-mutilation by the biases around them, and whether their self-mutilation is then used and publicized to prove that those biases are true.... 

Even while we protect the right of an informed individual to make that decision, and to be identified as he or she wishes, we have to make clear that this is not a long-term feminist goal.... 

Better to turn anger outward toward changing the world than inward toward mutilating our bodies into conformity.... 

If the shoe doesn’t fit, must we change the foot?