Imagine you’re in a vessel heading towards an unknown destination.

Without your consent, you have been sold to a couple who can legally force your mother to terminate your life at any point before you exit the vessel.

This dystopian scenario may sound like the long-extinct transatlantic slave trade. Unfortunately, it’s a depiction of modern American surrogacy, in which a couple may legally contract a woman to carry their baby to term. This grants them the right to the contents of her womb: a human child.

A Florida judge recently highlighted this disturbing parallel between surrogacy and slavery after a couple from France – who had hired a Florida surrogate – petitioned for parental rights over their surrogate’s child. Judge Marlon Weiss is now questioning the constitutionality of surrogacy, which he argues violates the 13th Amendment.

Judge Weiss has a point. The legality of surrogacy depends on the false premise that unborn children are not fully human. This lie has become the cornerstone of the multibillion-dollar US surrogacy industry, which thrives off the dehumanisation and commodification of human life.

In surrogacy, couples work to find the ideal candidate to carry their baby to term. In gestational surrogacy, a surrogate is implanted with an embryo – usually created via IVF, using the couple’s fertilised egg – that has no genetic connection to her. If a same-sex couple contracts a surrogate, they typically require a third party to donate the missing egg or sperm for the creation of the embryo that will be implanted in the surrogate.

Some estimates claim that this process can cost up to $180,000 or more. The surrogates themselves allegedly can make $60,000 or more from each delivery.

This system is morally problematic and rife with abuse.

From a moral standpoint, it’s dehumanising for the child, surrogate and biological parents to separate the procreative aspect of sex. This reduces the child’s conception to a lab experiment, and the surrogate’s body to an object of use. It denies biological parents the opportunity to create a human being naturally with love, and also prevents the biological mother from bonding with her child in utero. The moral problems of surrogacy for gay couples are even worse – denying the unborn child the right to a mother and a father, while involving third parties in the unethical creation and purchasing of human life.

There is also something morally repugnant and dystopian about purchasing a woman’s womb to perform an innately bonding biological function, only to separate her from the child created – in some cases, mere moments after she delivers.

Surrogacy advocates argue that the practice is consensual, and that surrogates are well compensated for the job.

However, surrogacy shares many similarities to the prostitution industry in its exploitation of women’s bodies for profit. Female prostitutes presumably consent before paid sexual encounters. Yet while surrogates may consent to this commodification of their bodies, the third party in this transaction – the unborn child – is unable to consent. Their participation is strikingly similar to human trafficking, with the surrogacy industry acting as pimp.

Just look at the case that Judge Weiss intervened in. A gay couple from France hired an American woman to carry their embryo to term. The child in their surrogate’s womb did not consent to this transaction, much less the fact that he or she will be sold and taken across international waters to satisfy the whims of their would-be parents.

And unlike in adoption – when altruistic couples lovingly open their homes to children whose parents are deceased or unable to provide for them – surrogacy exploits children from the outset by creating them in a lab, adding a price tag, and implanting them in a stranger to be sold upon delivery.

Not only that, but legal contracts for surrogacy explicitly stipulate that the birth mothers must surrender all rights to the child that they carry. This has had horrifying consequences in practice: if couples change their mind about having a baby, or are worried about complications with a specific baby, they can force a surrogate mother to abort the baby against her will. This forces surrogate mothers not only to kill the innocent child in their womb, but also subjects their bodies to the horrific pain and trauma of abortion. This has happened numerous times.

For babies lucky enough to survive the womb, more troubles await. There have been numerous instances where abusive parents have purchased children via surrogacy and then abused them in horrific ways. This is why some anti-surrogacy advocates have pushed for prospective parents to have background checks, to ensure that children aren’t being purchased by abusers for the express purpose of sexual exploitation. Shockingly, such bills have yet to pass.

Social media videos have documented another sobering aspect of surrogacy for children purchased by same-sex parents: the loss of a mother or father. In one disturbing video, two fathers mock their baby for crying as he says “mama”. In other instances, some parents who purchased babies via surrogacy admit that they struggled to bond with the children. The explanation for this – especially for women – makes sense. It’s harder to bond with a baby that you did not biologically carry yourself.

With surrogacy’s obvious moral and legal problems, it’s surprising that so many people across the world endorse this modern form of slavery.

Of course, surrogacy advocates can easily justify the industry by saying that surrogates are consenting adults who receive ample compensation.

What they will not admit is the personhood of the unborn children involved in surrogacy, whose humanity raises concerns about the practice altogether.

Enter Judge Weiss.

Judge Weiss’s articulation that unborn children are persons entitled to legal protections has induced panic among abortion and surrogacy advocates alike.

The Tampa Bay Times aptly summarises that, “His [Judge Weiss’s] ruling holds that if unborn children are entitled to personhood … those children cannot be subject to an ownership contract.”

Not only that, but as the Tampa Bay Times continues, “if a court were to deem that a fetus or embryo has the same constitutional rights as a newborn, that opens the door to arguments that a fetus’s life can’t be terminated.”

These statements underscore the truth that surrogacy depends on the dehumanisation of the unborn child. The infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford ruling employed similar logic to justify slavery, arguing that black people were “beings of an inferior order” who “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect”.

At the time, recognising the humanity of black Americans threatened the lucrative institution of slavery. Today, similar logic is dehumanising unborn children to justify surrogacy.

Judge Weiss is right to draw parallels, and demand that Florida intervene to recognise the humanity of the unborn and protect them from surrogacy’s abuses.