Is surrogacy the sale of reproductive labor? A baby? A service? A gift? Increasingly, critics describe some arrangements as the purchase of American citizenship itself. My new essay on surrogacy, repugnance management, and national security: buff.ly/Y63f5es

Surrogacy has always destabilized categories: mother and worker, gift and market, family and contract. Florida and Texas add new ones: parent and foreign national, child and citizen, fertility market and national-security threat. buff.ly/Y63f5es

Last winter, stories of Chinese billionaires commissioning large numbers of children through U.S. surrogates appeared in the business pages. Seven months later, the same imagery is appearing in statutes and legislative hearings. buff.ly/Y63f5es

Repugnant transactions are vessels into which society pours its latest anxieties. Surrogacy is an unusually capacious vessel. Long feared as baby selling & commodification, it now carries birthright citizenship, Chinese influence, and national security too. buff.ly/Y63f5es

Where voluntary supply can’t meet demand, replacement donation becomes the default — and payment, formally banned, resurfaces where you’d expect it to: families who can’t find a willing relative pay a stranger to pose as one. buff.ly/8KGhjQI

In the US, a crisp $50 bill is on the wrong side of the paid/volunteer line. But a $50 e-gift card that is nontransferable and not redeemable for cash? Congratulations: the donor remains officially unpaid, moved only by civic virtue and a merchant-of-choice redemption code. buff.ly/8KGhjQI

🇩🇪 GERMANY Here donors can receive cash—€20, €25, up to €60 for a third donation in a year. It's not "payment" but an Aufwandsentschädigung—an "expense allowance." Same money, a different legal category, and donation stays "voluntary and unpaid." 🩸

🇰🇷 SOUTH KOREA Donate, get a limited-edition K-pop photo card. In Jan 2026 the Korean Red Cross teamed with boy band ENHYPEN: 7 unreleased photo cards + themed chocolate. Recent drives added streaming subscriptions. Legally, still "without compensation." 🩸

🇺🇸 UNITED STATES The American Red Cross's 2026 NFL promo: donate and you could win a trip to Super Bowl LX—flights, hotel, pregame access, a $1,000 gift card. Legally, it's a "sweepstakes"—no donation required to enter.

The online sperm trade raises an old question in a new form: not market or no market, but which market — with which safeguards, and the costs falling where. The shadow market isn't the opposite of the regulated fertility system; it's one of its products. buff.ly/B4pgWTX

Why seek out a black-market sperm donor at all? Licensed treatment is costly and supply is tight — in the UK, most Black, Asian, and mixed-ethnicity donor sperm has to be imported. The informal market offers speed, lower cost, and a known donor. My new post on why it thrives: buff.ly/B4pgWTX

A genuine paradox of sperm law, US and UK alike: it's warier of a cup than of unprotected sex. The legally safest route turns out to be the medically riskiest — and the most prolific donors drift toward exactly the practice most likely to harm the people relying on them. buff.ly/B4pgWTX

Question 3 is about a private market for kidneys, for which there is less support (though probably considerably more than a similar question to legal academics would garner)

Question 2 is about the End Kidney Deaths Act, for which there is broad support among economists surveyed

Question 1 is about kidney exchange and the ability of matching markets to save lives

Kidney donors undergo testing, surgery, pain, risk, disruption to work and family life, & long-term uncertainty. Yet we treat donor support as permissible only when it can be framed as the removal of a “disincentive,” rather than as affirmative recognition of what donation requires buff.ly/tbJfCjP

Kidney transplantation is already a highly structured medical, legal, and administrative system. Donor benefits should be evaluated the same way: by design, safeguards, allocation rules, follow-up, and evidence—not by labels. buff.ly/tbJfCjP

“Reimbursement” is not a neutral category. Travel, hotels, and lost wages matter, but so do pain, surgical risk, recovery time, anxiety, family disruption, and unpaid caregiving burdens. What would it mean to make kidney donors whole? buff.ly/tbJfCjP

After a Hopkins Business of Health Initiative debate on the End Kidney Deaths Act, I wrote about why the issue is not simply altruism versus markets. There is a broad design space between doing nothing and creating a kidney market. buff.ly/TxsjxRz

This is today at noon. Free and open to public, though registration is required. hbhi.jhu.edu/events/organ...

Organ donation awareness efforts found on the Hong Kong subway today

From yesterday’s Blood Feud class w/ @peterjaworski.bsky.social. Two very different views of the plasma trade, both true. Donors are in general lower income & drug companies earn profits. The medicines help patients & $$ helps donors. An added plus: it substitutes for high interest payday loans

Have to adjust to this new reality of UVA playing some actually interesting basketball. Go Hoos!

Folks, make sure to subscribe to The Taboo Trades podcast for the type of racy content that has been banned from X & Meta. And you thought it was just a bunch of boring academics talking about their papers 🤦‍♀️

Substack notes is usually quite useless. Then every once in a while there’s something like this 🤣

And that’s a wrap! Our final #RepugnantTransactions meeting of the semester, complete w/ gifts & a guest visit from UCLAs Gabriel Rossman. Gosh I love these @uvalaw.bsky.social students!! One of many “Holy cow I get paid to do this?!?” moments