Bioethical and legal challenges of surrogate motherhood in the Republic of Croatia

Sažetak

Surrogate motherhood represents an increasingly common method of human reproduction, which helps overcome successfully the obstacles of infertility. However, surrogate mother-hood, due to its imprecise legal regulation and complex nature, entails many controversies. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to determine the need and the necessity for such regulation in Croatia, taking in account the already existing methods of medically assisted reproduction. Given the adequate level of public awareness of acceptability of surrogate motherhood, we propose an appropriate legislative solution, based on a prior comparative analysis of the exist-ing legal regulation in different countries. Due to the fact that surrogate motherhood raises many, not only legal, but also medical and bioethical questions, it was impossible to avoid those aspects of the problem.