Towards the end of last century, surrogacy—growing a baby in a woman’s body, for love or money, who is then handed over like a loaf of bread to foreigners, the so-called commissioning parents—had come to be widely seen as wrong, and, in its commercial form, abhorrent.
Recently it has started to become acceptable again. Today it is so normalised that not just celebrities like Elton John, Paris Hilton, Nicole Kidman, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian but ‘ordinary people’ appear to believe it is okay to obtain a baby via surrogacy, among them an increasing number of gay male couples and even single men. How has this reversal occurred?
The public rejection of surrogacy in the 1990s followed two high-profile US surrogacies that went horribly wrong in the 1980s. The first was Elizabeth Kane’s. After initially enthusiastically endorsing her surrogacy, Kane recanted when her own daughter asked if she would give her away too, if she was naughty. She became a vocal critic of surrogacy, and soon joined a group of international feminists and Jeremy Rifkin in the National Coalition Against Surrogacy, pushing back against surrogacy throughout the United States in the 1990s.
The second surrogacy, following Kane’s, was the sad story of Baby M—the child born to Mary Beth Whitehead, who refused to give her daughter to William and Elizabeth Stern (see Phyllis Chesler’s 1988 book on this topic, Sacred Bond). In the court case that ensued, the judge awarded the girl to the wealthy baby-buyers because they, he argued, could offer her a good education, unlike Whitehead who was poor and a high school drop-out with a husband who was a garbage truck driver.
At the time of Elizabeth Kane’s and Mary Beth Whitehead’s resistance to surrogacy, public opinion, including in the media, was squarely on their side. Surrogacy was seen as amoral and something that had to be stopped.
The renewed interest in surrogacy started in the early 2000s, when India began to gain prominence as a country where surrogacy was cheap and surrogate mothers docile, and no one asked questions. Increasing numbers of wealthy Westerners began travelling to India to fulfil their wish for biological children (in reality often only 50 per cent from the genetic contribution of the sperm donor if a so-called egg donor had to be used). But soon the Internet was rife with stories about the exploitation of birth mothers and about disabled babies being left behind because the baby buyers refused to accept them. India banned all non-altruistic commercial surrogacy in 2015 (enacted in 2021). Today, only Indian citizens with a known family infertility are legally allowed to use altruistic surrogacy. China also prohibits surrogacy, but many Chinese people now travel to the United States to buy themselves a baby there.
Although some other Global South nations also cracked down on surrogacy—e. g. Cambodia, Thailand and Nepal—Western celebrity and elite demand for surrogacy began to rise again. And other poor countries were more than ready to take India’s place, among them Mexico, Nigeria and Kenya, where many Indian clinics had moved to. There was also Ukraine. The war with Russia which began in 2014 left many Ukrainian women destitute, and it was either surrogacy or prostitution that promised survival. Some clinics became very prominent, among them BioTexCom in Kyiv. Soon, horror stories similar to the ones in India began to surface. The economically largest countries in Europe—France, Germany and Italy as well as Switzerland, Sweden and Spain—have so far managed to prohibit all surrogacies. Other countries allow so-called altruistic surrogacy, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, Greece, Israel, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. In most of the United States and in Israel, full commercial surrogacy is legal and flourishing.
How to find a surrogate or an egg donor is a huge topic in WhatsApp groups and on Facebook, Instagram and X. On these platforms, surrogacy agencies and IVF clinics promote their wares with elaborate websites that show images of beautiful women, not unlike prostitution or porn sites. It is capitalism writ large. Quite often, individuals or couples themselves advertise their wish for a surrogate mother or egg donor. Much of this advertising is unregulated and even illegal, and it presents many dangers for women who answer mail from these baby-buyers who hope for a cheap arrangement without the involvement of expensive lawyers. Dangers from the surrogacy or egg donation ‘journey’—a favourite word—are never mentioned. And yet, harrowing stories can be regularly read on these platforms. In a first-hand account from 2016, a surrogate mother tells how she sued her baby buyer because he told her to abort one of the triplets she was carrying because he only wanted twins.
So, steadily, surrogacy has become acceptable once more, even or especially among people who might otherwise define themselves as ‘Left’ or ‘progressive’. While this is of course deeply disappointing, it is not surprising. Unfortunately, ‘the Left’, broadly speaking—there are always exceptions—has gradually drifted to the liberal/libertarian view that surrogacy should be a woman’s ‘choice’, in the same way that pornography and prostitution, which they prefer to call ‘sex work’, are also seen as women’s ‘choices’. An alternative viewpoint comes from Swedish Marxist scholar and feminist, Kajsa Ekis Ekman, who declared in 2013 that all surrogacy was ‘reproductive prostitution’ and that it constituted violence against women, a view that is widely shared amongst radical feminists.
The pro-surrogacy position is presented by ‘progressives’ such as ‘family abolitionist’ Sophie Lewis, who claims that ‘full’ surrogacy ‘decentres’ the role of women as mothers and hence must be celebrated as contributing to the abolition of the nuclear family. However, one could argue precisely the reverse: that the increasing number of gay couples who demand the ‘right’ to a child engage in the heterosexualisation of homosexuality, which cements the nuclear family (albeit one with two fathers and no mother) in place.
Let’s be clear. The implicit purpose of surrogacy is to create motherless babies. The body of a woman is used as if it were an empty vessel into which a foreign embryo is implanted. Nine months later, when a baby has been grown from its mother’s blood and bones, the child is lifted out of her womb and given to strange people—in the case of commercial surrogacy, the baby-buyers. This ‘product’ of surrogacy—the child—never consented to be a ‘take-away baby’.
There can be no question that surrogacy profoundly violates the rights of the child. Article 2 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child prohibits any discrimination against children, and Article 35 stipulates that ‘State Parties shall take all appropriate national, bilateral and multilateral measures to prevent the abduction of, the sale of, or traffic in children for any purpose or in any form’ [my emphasis].
Surrogacy also contravenes Article 1 of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the sale of children, which obligates governments to criminalise the sale of children.
In commercial surrogacy, children are clearly both sold and trafficked.
Surrogacy is a multifaceted practice of exploitation that violates a number of UN conventions and other international treaties. For instance, it can be likened to slavery, which Article 1 of the United Nations Slavery Convention defines as ‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’.
This describes a ‘surrogate mother’ during her pregnancy when the baby buyers control her every move from her sex life to her choice of food.
It is also crucial to consider the specific wrongs to the child. Consider the case of Olivia Maurel, a French woman who only found out through a DNA test when she was thirty years old that she had been lied to and had a birth mother and other relatives living in the United States. Olivia has become an influential spokeswoman for all surrogacy abolitionists worldwide and particularly for the Declaration of Casablanca. In her powerful speech to the Parliament of Croatia on 3 March 2024, she pointed out how she instinctively knew something was wrong in her life, which led to drug and alcohol addictions and even suicide attempts. She is adamant that with every surrogacy contract and payment that changes hands, we are asking the child-to-be to make huge sacrifices to fulfil the adults’ selfish desire to have their own biological child—and that surrogacy purposefully asks women to abandon their own children.
This aspect is particularly pertinent in Australia, where apologies were made to the Stolen Generations by former Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd in 2008 and to unmarried mothers whose children were taken from the 1950s to 1970s by Julia Gillard in 2013. As Gillard said in her moving speech:
Too often did they not see their baby’s face. They could not soothe their babies’ first cries, never felt their babies’ warmth or smelt their baby’s skin. … We deplore the shameful practices that denied you, the mothers, your fundamental rights and responsibilities to love and care for your children. … We resolve as a nation, to do all in our power to make sure, these practices are never repeated.
Powerful words—and yet all Australian states and territories today continue to allow so-called altruistic surrogacy in which babies are taken away from their mothers. This is in direct contradiction of Gillard’s promise ‘to do all in our power to make sure, these practices are never repeated’.
New markets: War and surrogacy
Surrogacy thrives on disaster and catastrophe. On 20 August 2019, Australian journalist Samantha Hawley’s exposé of the dirty surrogacy business in Ukraine aired on Foreign Correspondent on ABC television as ‘Damaged Babies and Broken Hearts’. Hawley was the courageous journalist who had broken the news about Baby Gammy, who was left behind with his mother in Thailand in 2014 because he had Down syndrome, while his Australian baby buyers only took his able-bodied twin sister home (the father was later revealed to be a convicted paedophile). In 2015, Hawley had also tried to find a boy born of surrogacy in India who was left behind by his Indian-Australian parents, who only brought his sister home to Sydney.
In Ukraine, Hawley reported how she found three-year-old Bridget, who was severely disabled but improving with treatment in the Children’s Sonechko Home. Bridget, also called ‘Brizzy’ by her doting nurse, Marina Boyko, who had looked after her since her birth, was there because her commissioning parents, who lived in California, abandoned her after she was born prematurely and very ill, supposedly with brain damage. In fact, they sent a legal letter asking the hospital to switch off Bridget’s life support, as they deemed her to be ‘in a vegetative state’ and incurable: ‘We will not take her to America’.
When the war between Russia and Ukraine escalated in February 2022 and bombs fell on Kyiv, worried baby buyers desperately tried to locate their ‘property’ and either rushed to Ukraine or wailed from afar. It was beyond belief and decency that their concerns were mostly for the babies rather than the mothers who had given birth to them, unless the birth had not yet happened. While the international media was initially full of photos of dozens of cribs lined up in hotels with babies waiting for the baby buyers to collect them, gradually interest waned. To this day, and regardless of war and destruction, Ukraine continues to be a main player in the international surrogacy trade, which Global Markets Insights expects to reach ‘US $129 billion by 2032, with a compound annual growth rate of almost 25 per cent in the next decade’.
The myth of safe surrogacy
Then there are the heartbreaking stories of surrogate mothers who have died during their pregnancies or while giving birth. Nobody tracks their numbers: they will be in the hundreds or even thousands by now. Listen to Jaida’s story about losing her mother on the Venus Rising Podcast. While every pregnancy has its dangers, a large Canadian study published in Annals of Internal Medicine in September 2024 confirmed that pregnancies in which a ‘foreign’ embryo is implanted into surrogates—called ‘gestational carriers’ in the paper—present a heightened risk of severe complications, including hypertension and pre-eclampsia during pregnancy, as well as postpartum haemorrhage.
The health of egg ‘donors’ is also put at risk. Unlike sperm donation, which is a simple affair, a woman ‘donating’ eggs needs to undergo dangerous stimulation of her ovaries with fertility drugs that can lead to ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome, which can be life-threatening and/or imperil her own fertility. Repeated ovary stimulations can also result in cancer: see ‘Maggie’s Story’ in Broken Bonds: Surrogate Mothers Speak Out.
These are the stories women interested in becoming surrogates or egg ‘donors’ are not told.
Terms of trade: Australia and international surrogacy
In Australia, altruistic surrogacy is allowed in all six states and two territories, but not many Australian women are prepared to risk their health—maybe even their lives—and a big heartbreak at the end by becoming surrogate mothers or egg donors. There are roughly 130–150 children born from surrogacy in Australia each year.
While altruistic surrogacy numbers in Australia are small, with commercial surrogacy illegal, a growing number of Australians are trying their luck with international surrogacies: 213 such births were reported for 2021–22, with the United States, Georgia and Canada the preferred destinations (in 2023, Georgia announced that commercial surrogacies would become illegal on 1 January 2024). Ukraine remains a favourite destination.
Lending a helping hand to Australians game enough to risk breaking the law in Queensland, the ACT and NSW, where undertaking an international surrogacy constitutes a criminal act punishable with a $100,000 fine and/or jail for two years, is Sam Everingham, the founder of non-profit groups Surrogacy Australia and Growing Families, ably supported by Stephen Page, a prominent surrogacy lawyer from Brisbane. These two men represent the public face of pro-surrogacy support in Australia, and both have used surrogacy themselves.
Sam and his husband paid for two commercial surrogates in 2010 in India when this was still legal. Because too many embryos were implanted, both women had to undergo ‘foetal reduction’, in which a saline solution is inserted into the heart(s) of the surplus embryo(s). A gruelling procedure. But Sam and his husband now have two girls. They had tried a year earlier with one surrogate inseminated with their sperm, who carried twins but suffered a premature birth, with both babies eventually dying. Stephen and his husband had a domestic surrogacy that resulted in a daughter in 2021. This surrogacy too did not go smoothly: the first IVF attempt ended in a miscarriage, and next, the woman suffered an ectopic pregnancy, which can be life-threatening. And then the baby almost died during the birth.
Everingham, in particular, has strong views about laws in Australia. For more than ten years, first Surrogacy Australia and then Growing Families have held seminars in all Australian states, including NSW and Queensland, skirting around the laws that ban international surrogacy by inviting surrogacy practitioners from the United States, Ukraine, Mexico, Ireland and other overseas countries. The audiences consist of couples, both hetero- and homosexual, who are eager to embark on surrogacy with the help of trusted Sam and his organisation. In addition to the international IVF providers, there are women on panels who talk glowingly about having been surrogates or egg donors. And there are beaming surrogacy parents, babies in tow. By paying an extra fee, potential customers can enter a special Closed Forum with a beautiful Tree of Life where they presumably exchange details. The ‘Third Families Through Surrogacy Conference’ I attended in Melbourne in 2014 (see my 2017 book Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation) exuded a giddy atmosphere of excitement and joy: you too can become a parent; your baby journey begins now. No criticism was allowed, with a woman who mentioned some problems in India being shut down and accused of lying. A friend who joined me in the two-day endurance test described it as ‘swimming through asbestos’. We both needed a strong drink afterwards.
Challenged on the ABC-TV’s 7.30 program about his seminars in Queensland and New South Wales on 21 August 2019, Mr Everingham said in reply that ‘we don’t believe these laws are right’. The same edition of 7.30 quoted Australian Securities and Investments Commission figures which showed that Growing Families—a charity—had accrued revenue of $2 million during the last five years. This is legal as long as the profits are re-invested into the ‘business’ of the charity. Interestingly, however, on 12 June 2024, the Australian Charity and Not for Profits Commission revoked Growing Families’ charity status.
In August 2023, Mr Everingham admitted to directing Australians to an IVF clinic in Crete—the Mediterranean Fertility Institute—for a fee. A scandal had broken when it was revealed that women were being trafficked to Crete from Georgia and Romania; they illegally became surrogates and on top of that received only a fraction of the money that the baby buyers paid (in Greece, commercial surrogacy has been illegal since 2002). As many as sixty Australian couples were involved in the Greek scandal. When the Institute was shut down and clinic staff arrested, these couples desperately tried to locate ‘their’ children and/or find out where the still-pregnant women had been taken.
In an ABC report from 14 September 2023 on the Greek saga, Stephen Page said that he had been working with Greek clinics for Australian clients for thirty years, including the Mediterranean Fertility Institute, and had found them trustworthy. Sam Everingham revealed that Growing Families’ cryo-shipping arm had also previously coordinated shipments of genetic material to the clinic. If this genetic material came from NSW, Queensland or the ACT, Growing Families would be in breach of their state/territory laws on surrogacy.
Outrageously, in this same ABC report both men blamed Australian surrogacy laws for this dire situation in Greece. Under the headline ‘Calls for Surrogacy Reform in Australia’, we were treated to the following demands for change:
Among the barriers, Mr Everingham highlights the inability to adequately compensate surrogates, complications with putting intended parents on birth certificates, an inability to advertise for surrogates, and a lack of Medicare support for surrogacy: ‘We need to have the structures where there can be support organisations who can play a role as an agency to support those arrangements, who can advertise for surrogates and who can support them appropriately with counselling and not be obstructed by laws that are just not fit-for-purpose,’ he said.
Here, Everingham is describing precisely the roles that his ‘charity’, Growing Families, already fulfils. Stephen Page estimates that for every child born through surrogacy in Australia each year, four are born to Australian intended parents overseas. He said that Australia’s current patchwork of surrogacy laws is pushing people into potentially risky situations.
But how much support is there among the general public for access to commercial surrogacy in Australia? Beyond a hard-core group of surrogacy lawyers who would profit from a large local commercial surrogacy industry and some academics and gay male groups, as well as Growing Families, there is little public appetite to change the current situation. On 4 May 2016, The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Social Policy and Legal Affairs published a comprehensive investigative report on surrogacy in Australia. Their report ‘Surrogacy Matters’ categorically ruled out introducing commercial surrogacy anywhere in Australia.
Notwithstanding this clear-cut decision, however, some so-called progressive groups and networks have not given up hope that one day commercial surrogacy might become legal here. And in 2023, New South Wales MP Alex Greenwich proposed an amendment to surrogacy in his ‘Equality Bill’, which would have repealed the current law that makes it a criminal act punishable by fines and/or jail for people from NSW to go overseas for commercial surrogacy. But his first proposal lapsed, and thus, in spite of support from the gay male community, all he achieved in 2024 was a minor change to parentage rights.
Global resistance
As the normalisation of surrogacy grows around the world, so does global resistance. Stop Surrogacy Now in the United States and CIAMS (the Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood) in France have thousands of members, and are ably assisted by Stoppt Leihmutterschaft (Austria), Stop Surrogacy and Surrogacy Concern (in the United Kingdom), Radicailin (Ireland), Stop Vientres de Alquiler (Spain), FINRRAGE (Australia), and ABSA (Abolish Surrogacy Australia) and so on, and most recently by the Declaration of Casablanca. Consisting of thousands of members of civil society and a strong contingent of feminists, through these groups we are tightly networked and coordinate our resistance.
In our shared actions towards abolishing surrogacy internationally, we insist that no one has a right to a child, whether they be heterosexual or homosexual, in a couple or single. There are many ways of having important bonds with children in our lives, but abusing and exploiting women as surrogates and egg providers, and creating motherless children must not be one of them. We demonstrate against groups such as ‘Men Having Babies’, who run regular baby fairs to promote surrogacy even in countries such as Germany where all surrogacy is illegal. As their website says, ‘The organization’s Gay Parenting Assistance Program annually provides hundreds of couples with over a million dollars’ worth of cash grants, discounts and free services from over seventy providers’.
CIAMS’s members also strongly refute the ongoing Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) Parentage/Surrogacy Project Working Group, which under the misleading guise of supporting children’s rights is working on a Surrogacy Convention that would force HCCH member countries to accept children born of surrogacy anywhere as citizens, even if this contravened their own surrogacy laws. If surrogacy were abolished today, there would have to be provisions for a year to support surrogacy-born children in gaining legal rights, but after that time, there would be no new babies born. Problem solved.
In 2022, The European Network of Migrant Women conducted a study looking at the impact of surrogacy on migrant women. The results show clearly that it is poor women who are exploited. They are often recruited in one country (e.g. Romania) and impregnated with a foreign embryo, then are moved to another country (e.g. Cyprus) to give birth. Borders are crossed, often illegally, and birth mothers and their children are trafficked.
It remains to be seen whether the enormous monetary, cultural and capitalist forces behind the surrogacy industry will win out, or the overwhelming majority of ordinary people who do not agree with this unethical practice. The whole surrogacy business is so problematic on so many fronts that it I find it hard to understand why anyone with a social justice conscience could support it, whether they are on the political Left or Right. Even what one might call ‘close’ altruistic surrogacy—that between family members, as permitted in India—is far more problematic than its supporters would admit. Take the case of ‘Odette’ (a court-imposed pseudonym) featured in Broken Bonds: Odette was an altruistic surrogate for her beloved cousin, who had become infertile due to chemotherapy, but the surrogacy turned into a devastating experience for Odette as her cousin treated her abysmally throughout the whole pregnancy and, after her son was born, withdrew him completely from her, denying her access and even demanding child support. Given the intensity of family relations, such cases can happen among even the most well-intended participants.
And we must understand that the struggle between pro- and anti-surrogacy forces takes place against the background of other heated debates, such as the insistence of transgender activists (often supported by so-called progressives and leftish groups) that people can change sex (which is a biological impossibility). Many who adhere to such delusions go one step further and see the future as one in which we become transhuman. In an ideology in which technology overtakes human flesh, reproduction would not be left to women—whether surrogates or ‘ordinary’ mothers. Babies grown in artificial wombs, eugenically checked for any defects, would render the whole idea of attachment between babies and mothers obsolete. Surrogacy, superficially less alienating, is in fact an expression of the current obsession with dissolving embodiment including motherhood.
As an eternal optimist with my feet grounded in the reality of female existence as well as female resistance to such life-endangering ideologies, I take courage from the Italian government’s decision on 16 October 2024 to criminalise all instances of surrogacy, whether altruistic surrogacy at home or commercial surrogacy abroad, with jail terms of up to two years and up to €1 million in fines. I hope many more countries will follow Italy’s example. We need to remember that no one has a ‘right’ to a child, whether in a couple or single, heterosexual or homosexual, and whether by ‘altruistic’ or ‘commercial’ surrogacy. The medical and psychological risks inherent in all surrogacies for the mothers, egg providers and babies are never acceptable. A world in which surrogate motherhood is abolished is possible.
Comments
How sad to see Arena Quarterly‘s descent into becoming an increasingly culturally conservative mouthpiece. Publishing anti-trans articles, for instance https://arena.org.au/lesbian-erasure/ and now the casual anti-trans jibes in this ‘analysis’:
‘And we must understand that the struggle between pro- and anti-surrogacy forces takes place against the background of other heated debates, such as the insistence of transgender activists (often supported by so-called progressives and leftish groups) that people can change sex (which is a biological impossibility).’
Apparently I’m a ‘so-called progressive’ for supporting my trans comrades. Does this count as analysis?
Broadly a very good article, challenging the idea of anyone having the ‘right’ to a child is in my view certainly worthwhile, but this inclusion of anti-trans, TERF rhetoric is extremely disappointing from the author and the editors of Arena.
To discount critical thinking with a phrase suggesting ‘biological impossibility’ is a real shame. To move from criticism of homosexual men who understandably yet unthinkingly engage in surrogacy for the harm they cause by that act to attacking trans people and allies by ascribing an indirect link to anti-human trans-humanism is simply disgusting.
A true progressive, left-wing, etc. – whatever you like to call it – politics does not have space for dismissal veiled as unevidenced ‘analysis’.
Brilliant article! As a person who was taken from my mother at birth for the purposes of forming somebody’s family, I can testify to the short-term suffering and life-long devastation that I experience as a ‘takeaway baby’. All surrogacy violates Article 9 of the UNCRC, and most of its other articles too; it is cruel to mothers and sickeningly cruel to babies. Thank you from the bottom of my heart, Renate 💕